Cross-Domain Discovery of Communication Peers. Identity Mapping and Discovery Services (IMaDS)

The upcoming WebRTC-based browser-to-browser communication services present new challenges for user discovery in peer-to-peer mode. Even more so, if we wish to enable different web communication services to interact. This paper presents Identity Mapping and Discovery Service (IMaDS), a global, scalable, service independent discovery service that enables users of web-based peer-to-peer applications to discover other users whom to communicate with. It also provides reachability and presence information. For that, user identities need to be mapped to any compatible service identity as well as to a globally unique, service-independent identity. This mapping and discovery process is suitable for multiple identifier formats and personal identifying properties, but it supports user-determined privacy options. IMaDS operates across different service domains dynamically, using context information. Users and devices have profiles containing context and other specific information that can be discovered by a search engine. The search results reveal the user's allocated globally unique identifier (GUID), which is then resolved to a list of the user's service domains identities, using a DHT-based directory service. Service-specific directories allow tracking of active endpoints, where users are currently logged on and can be contacted.Comment: Accepted for publication at the 2017 European Conference on Networks and Communications (EuCNC

Genet: A Quickly Scalable Fat-Tree Overlay for Personal Volunteer Computing using WebRTC

WebRTC enables browsers to exchange data directly but the number of possible concurrent connections to a single source is limited. We overcome the limitation by organizing participants in a fat-tree overlay: when the maximum number of connections of a tree node is reached, the new participants connect to the node's children. Our design quickly scales when a large number of participants join in a short amount of time, by relying on a novel scheme that only requires local information to route connection messages: the destination is derived from the hash value of the combined identifiers of the message's source and of the node that is holding the message. The scheme provides deterministic routing of a sequence of connection messages from a single source and probabilistic balancing of newer connections among the leaves. We show that this design puts at least 83% of nodes at the same depth as a deterministic algorithm, can connect a thousand browser windows in 21-55 seconds in a local network, and can be deployed for volunteer computing to tap into 320 cores in less than 30 seconds on a local network to increase the total throughput on the Collatz application by two orders of magnitude compared to a single core

Pando: Personal Volunteer Computing in Browsers

The large penetration and continued growth in ownership of personal electronic devices represents a freely available and largely untapped source of computing power. To leverage those, we present Pando, a new volunteer computing tool based on a declarative concurrent programming model and implemented using JavaScript, WebRTC, and WebSockets. This tool enables a dynamically varying number of failure-prone personal devices contributed by volunteers to parallelize the application of a function on a stream of values, by using the devices' browsers. We show that Pando can provide throughput improvements compared to a single personal device, on a variety of compute-bound applications including animation rendering and image processing. We also show the flexibility of our approach by deploying Pando on personal devices connected over a local network, on Grid5000, a French-wide computing grid in a virtual private network, and seven PlanetLab nodes distributed in a wide area network over Europe.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures, 2 table

AMC Native WebRTC Client

Traditional call center and telecommunication hardware is being replaced by thin, browser-based, cloud enabled web services. Industry standards for web based communication protocols, such as WebRTC, are being established. AMC needed to address this new technology, while maintaining a hybrid approach of server-based capabilities, taking advantage of the web-based communication channel, while broadcasting events to the Contact Canvas Server. Contact Canvas Agent Palette is the editing platform of the AMC adapter for Salesforce.com, allowing agents to communicate with customers through the AMC adapter/ Softphone. Using Agent Palette, the task was to integrate Video Chat using WebRTC into the AMC toolbar. Two agents use a peer-to-peer connection to establish communication with one another. The connected two can communicate through video chat which supports screen pop. The components that were provided and used were the AMC adapter for salesforce.com, the Agent Palette, and the salesforce.com Customer Relation Management (CRM) database. The AMC adapter is an HTML Softphone that can be used to voice enable salesforce.com, while Socket.io and Node.js were used to communicate with the server side. Eventually this video chat will advance to the point where communication will be established between agents and their customers.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/capstone/1162/thumbnail.jp

Options for Securing RTP Sessions

The Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) is used in a large number of different application domains and environments. This heterogeneity implies that different security mechanisms are needed to provide services such as confidentiality, integrity, and source authentication of RTP and RTP Control Protocol (RTCP) packets suitable for the various environments. The range of solutions makes it difficult for RTP-based application developers to pick the most suitable mechanism. This document provides an overview of a number of security solutions for RTP and gives guidance for developers on how to choose the appropriate security mechanism

Smart hospital emergency system via mobile-based requesting services

In recent years, the UK’s emergency call and response has shown elements of great strain as of today. The strain on emergency call systems estimated by a 9 million calls (including both landline and mobile) made in 2014 alone. Coupled with an increasing population and cuts in government funding, this has resulted in lower percentages of emergency response vehicles at hand and longer response times. In this paper, we highlight the main challenges of emergency services and overview of previous solutions. In addition, we propose a new system call Smart Hospital Emergency System (SHES). The main aim of SHES is to save lives through improving communications between patient and emergency services. Utilising the latest of technologies and algorithms within SHES is aiming to increase emergency communication throughput, while reducing emergency call systems issues and making the process of emergency response more efficient. Utilising health data held within a personal smartphone, and internal tracked data (GPU, Accelerometer, Gyroscope etc.), SHES aims to process the mentioned data efficiently, and securely, through automatic communications with emergency services, ultimately reducing communication bottlenecks. Live video-streaming through real-time video communication protocols is also a focus of SHES to improve initial communications between emergency services and patients. A prototype of this system has been developed. The system has been evaluated by a preliminary usability, reliability, and communication performance study