2,917 research outputs found

    Internet of Things: A Model for Cybersecurity Standards and the Categorisation of Devices

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    The networking of physical devices, including their infrastructure and data, is known as the Internet of Things. The number of networked devices is con- stantly increasing over the last years and is expected to continue to rise in the future. This also results in an increasing number of attacks on these devices which are considered potentially insecure. The reasons for the lack of cyber- security are diverse and lead, for example, to botnets and similar problems. Mandatory standards and guidelines can help to ensure cybersecurity re- gardless of a fast pace of development and a low price of the devices. In some areas, the development of these guidelines is already well advanced, ideally across countries as a European standard. However, problems with standardiza- tion are the different definitions of device categories and thus, the assignment of a device to a standard. Even in academia, definitions and categories for Internet of Things devices are ambiguous or completely lacking. This makes it difficult to find relevant publications. Therefore, a model of the Internet of Things was researched to solve these problems and define clear categories. The model divides the Internet of Things into categories, supplements the definitions with characteristics and distinguishes the different device types. The architectures and associated components are also considered. The model can be applied to all devices and available cybersecurity standards which is shown by mapping them to the model. The real-world applications are diverse and illustrated as different use cases. As digitalization evolves rapidly, the researched model is designed to adapt flexibly to new developments

    Cooperating broadcast and cellular conditional access system for digital television

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    This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The lack of interoperability between Pay‐TV service providers and a horizontally integrated business transaction model have compromised the competition in the Pay‐TV market. In addition, the lack of interactivity with customers has resulted in high churn rate and improper security measures have contributed into considerable business loss. These issues are the main cause of high operational costs and subscription fees in the Pay‐TV systems. This paper presents a novel end‐to‐end system architecture for Pay‐TV systems cooperating mobile and broadcasting technologies. It provides a cost‐effective, scalable, dynamic and secure access control mechanism supporting converged services and new business opportunities in Pay‐TV systems. It enhances interactivity, security and potentially reduces customer attrition and operational cost. In this platform, service providers can effectively interact with their customers, personalise their services and adopt appropriate security measures. It breaks up the rigid relationship between a viewer and set‐top box as imposed by traditional conditional access systems, thus, a viewer can fully enjoy his entitlements via an arbitrary set‐top box. Having thoroughly considered state‐of‐the‐art technologies currently being used across the world, the thesis highlights novel use cases and presents the full design and implementation aspects of the system. The design section is enriched by providing possible security structures supported thereby. A business collaboration structure is proposed, followed by a reference model for implementing the system. Finally, the security architectures are analysed to propose the best architecture on the basis of security, complexity and set‐top box production cost criteria

    Intelligent Model of Home Furnishing and Transportation Based on Improved RFID Web Fuzzy Clustering

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    This paper uses the fuzzy clustering method based on clustering path division, according to user access path. In the cluster, according to the access time and Agent classification of user, this method is then according to the user to all pages in order to visit division. The hardware of intelligent home furnishing controller by the advanced ARM9 embedded system, mobile phone module and RFID module. Intelligent transportation system through the sharing of traffic information, can realize the coordinated traffic signal control, effective traffic prediction and grooming. The paper presents intelligent model of home furnishing and transportation based on improved RFID web fuzzy clustering. Experiments show that RFID and fuzzy clustering can improve reliability of intelligent traffic and home furnishing and effectiveness

    Investigation of an intelligent personalised service recommendation system in an IMS based cellular mobile network

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    Success or failure of future information and communication services in general and mobile communications in particular is greatly dependent on the level of personalisations they can offer. While the provision of anytime, anywhere, anyhow services has been the focus of wireless telecommunications in recent years, personalisation however has gained more and more attention as the unique selling point of mobile devices. Smart phones should be intelligent enough to match user’s unique needs and preferences to provide a truly personalised service tailored for the individual user. In the first part of this thesis, the importance and role of personalisation in future mobile networks is studied. This is followed, by an agent based futuristic user scenario that addresses the provision of rich data services independent of location. Scenario analysis identifies the requirements and challenges to be solved for the realisation of a personalised service. An architecture based on IP Multimedia Subsystem is proposed for mobility and to provide service continuity whilst roaming between two different access standards. Another aspect of personalisation, which is user preference modelling, is investigated in the context of service selection in a multi 3rd party service provider environment. A model is proposed for the automatic acquisition of user preferences to assist in service selection decision-making. User preferences are modelled based on a two-level Bayesian Metanetwork. Personal agents incorporating the proposed model provide answers to preference related queries such as cost, QoS and service provider reputation. This allows users to have their preferences considered automatically

    A Taxonomy of Internet Appliances

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    The world is evolving from one in which almost all access to the Internet comes from personal computers (PCs) to one in which so-called Internet appliances (IAs) will make up a greater share of end-user equipment. Today's PC is a general-purpose, highly configurable and extensible device ? an "intelligent end-node" of the sort the Internet's designers had in mind. As such, it allows users much freedom of choice (such as which service provider to use, which Web sites to visit, and which new software to download) in exchange for dealing with associated complexity. An IA is a device connected to the Internet, but beyond that there is little consensus on functionality and target markets. There is, however, general agreement that it reduces the level of complexity seen by the user. A variety of approaches to reducing complexity are being pursued. These fall on a spectrum from totally fixing the function of devices, to automating the configuration of more general purpose systems. In the middle are devices whose functions appear more or less fixed to the user, but which retain some limited capability for upgrade through their Internet connection

    Intelligent Control of Home Appliances via Network

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    Network and service monitoring in heterogeneous home networks

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    Home networks are becoming dynamic and technologically heterogeneous. They consist of an increasing number of devices which offer several functionalities and can be used for many different services. In the home, these devices are interconnected using a mixture of networking technologies (for example, Ethernet, Wifi, coaxial cable, or power-line). However, interconnecting these devices is often not easy. The increasing heterogeneity has led to significant device- and service-management complexity. In addition, home networks provide a critical "last meters" access to the public telecom and Internet infrastructure and have a dramatic impact on to the end-to-end reliability and performance of services from these networks. This challenges service providers not only to maintain a satisfactory quality of service level in such heterogeneous home networks, but also to remotely monitor and troubleshoot them. The present thesis work contributes research and several solutions in the field of network and service monitoring in home networks, mainly in three areas: (1) providing automatic device- and service-discovery and configuration, (2) remote management, and (3) providing quality of service (QoS). With regard to the first area, current service discovery technology is designed to relieve the increasing human role in network and service administration. However, the relevant Service Discovery Protocols (SDPs) are lacking crucial features namely: (1) they are not platform- and network-independent, and (2) they do not provide sufficient mechanisms for (device) resource reservation. Consequently, devices implementing different SDPs cannot communicate with each other and share their functionalities and resources in a managed way, especially when they use different network technologies. As a solution to the first problem, we propose a new proxy server architecture that enables IP-based devices and services to be discovered on non-IP based network and vice versa. We implemented the proxy architecture using UPnP respectively Bluetooth SDP as IP- and non-IP-based SDPs. The proxy allows Bluetooth devices and UPnP control points to discover, access, and utilize services located on the other network. Validation experiments with the proxy prototype showed that seamless inter-working can be achieved keeping all proxy functionalities on a single device, thus not requiring modification of currently existing UPnP and Bluetooth end devices. Although the proxy itself taxes the end-to-end performance of the service, it is shown to be still acceptable for an end user. For mitigating resource conflicts in SDPs, we propose a generic resource reservation scheme with properties derived from common SDP operation. Performance studies with a prototype showed that this reservation scheme significantly improves the scalability and sustainability of service access in SDPs, at a minor computational cost. With regard to the second area, it is known that the end-to-end quality of Internet services depends crucially on the performance of the home network. Consequently, service providers require the ability to monitor and configure devices in the home network, behind the home gateway (HG). However, they can only put limited requirements to these off-the-shelf devices, as the consumer electronics market is largely outside their span of control. Therefore they have to make intelligent use of the given device control and management protocols. In this work, we propose an architecture for remote discovery and management of devices in a highly heterogeneous home network. A proof-of-concept is developed for the remote management of UPnP devices in the home with a TR-069/UPnP proxy on the HG. Although this architecture is protocol specific, it can be easily adapted to other web-services based protocols. Service providers are also asking for diagnostic tools with which they can remotely troubleshoot the home networks. One of these tools should be able to gather information about the topology of the home network. Although topology discovery protocols already exist, nothing is known yet about their performance. In this work we propose a set of key performance indicators for home network topology discovery architectures, and how they should be measured. We applied them to the Link-Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD) protocol and the Link-Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP). Our performance measurement results show that these protocols do not fulfill all the requirements as formulated by the service providers. With regard to the third area, current QoS solutions are mostly based on traffic classification. Because they need to be supported by all devices in the network, they are relatively expensive for home networks. Furthermore, they are not interoperable between different networking technologies. Alternative QoS provision techniques have been proposed in the literature. These techniques require end-user services to pragmatically adapt their properties to the actual condition of the network. For this, the condition of the home network in terms of its available bandwidth, delay, jitter, etc., needs to be known in real time. Appropriate tools for determining the available home network resources do not yet exist. In this work we propose a new method to probe the path capacity and available bandwidth between a server and a client in a home network. The main features of this method are: (a) it does not require adaptation of existing end devices, (b) it does not require pre-knowledge of the link-layer network topology, and (c) it is accurate enough to make reliable QoS predictions for the most relevant home applications. To use these predictions for effective service- or content-adaptation or admission control, one should also know how the state of the home network is expected to change immediately after the current state has been probed. However, not much is known about the stochastic properties of traffic in home networks. Based on a relatively small set of traffic observations in several home networks in the Netherlands, we were able to build a preliminary model for home network traffic dynamics

    Future benefits and applications of intelligent on-board processing to VSAT services

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    The trends and roles of VSAT services in the year 2010 time frame are examined based on an overall network and service model for that period. An estimate of the VSAT traffic is then made and the service and general network requirements are identified. In order to accommodate these traffic needs, four satellite VSAT architectures based on the use of fixed or scanning multibeam antennas in conjunction with IF switching or onboard regeneration and baseband processing are suggested. The performance of each of these architectures is assessed and the key enabling technologies are identified
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