ConnectKey.com: The use of Open Source technologies to provide cost effective services for eBusiness to SMEs

The emergence of Linux as an open source operating system for business use over the past decade, and of the WWW as a platform for distributed applications development, has led to the availability of a complete software environment which is open source, and yet robust enough to allow the development of on-line services for SMEs. This paper analyses the various open source options available, and explores the experience of ConnectKey.com in offering a subset of these to Irish SMEs. This NITOURA II project was funded under EU TEN-Telecom

New Role of Policy-based Management in Home Area Networks – Concepts, Constraints and Challenges

The management of Home Area Networks (HANs) is problematic. On the one hand there are increasing numbers of IP enabled devices that are connecting to the HAN (wired and wirelessly), some of which need to be managed, especially in terms of granting external access to certain services running on certain devices (e.g. home security, home monitoring, external media access). On the other hand, of any area of network management, the home network is the one where there is least likely to be a capable network manager physically there. So the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have an interesting challenge: do they leave the management to the user and risk the degraded user experience that results, or do they offer to help manage the network for the home users, at potentially very high costs? This means that automated or autonomic (self-governed) network management approaches could potentially offer a solution. Policybased Network Management (PBNM) is a promising network management paradigm that potentially makes administration tasks easier and lessens the complexity involved in the management process for the end user. In this article, we present the potential for PBNM in HAN. Significant concepts, constraints and challenges related to the PBNM implementation are discussed. The potential is that ISPs can use PBNM to improve end user experience in HANs without incurring excessive support costs

Policy-based Network Management in Home Area Networks: Interim Test Results

This paper argues that Home Area Networks (HANs) are a good candidate for advanced network management automation techniques, such as Policy-Based Network Management (PBNM). What is proposed is a simple use of policy based network management to introduce some level of Quality of Service (QoS) and Security management in the HAN, whilst hiding this complexity from the home user. In this paper we have presented the interim test results of our research experiments (based on a scenario) using the HAN testbed. After using policies to prioritize different traffic, packet loss decreased to 30% and VoIP quality improved dramatically without employing any intelligent bandwidth allocation technique

Policy-based Traffic Management in Home Area Network – An Elementary Testbed Model

Traffic management in home area network (HAN) is different from the traditional traffic management in access and core networks. Traditionally network traffic works in best effort fashion and the HAN services are usually accommodated on the basis of first-in first-out rule. However quality can deteriorate when high number of users is connected to the HAN. Moreover the bursty traffic can also impact the quality by chocking the network traffic and blocking the network resources for all other traffic. Traffic management rules can be employed in HAN to prioritise different types of traffic according to user requirements. Dynamic configuration of network resources and services is multifaceted process, which requires many skills and knowledge. Policy-based Traffic Management (PBTM) can play a significant role in managing home networks and configuring the services dynamically according to HAN user requirements. This paper presents a testbed model for HAN to simplify traffic management process based on the principles of policy-based network management

An investigation into QoS provisioning in a DiffServ Network

The objective of this paper is to outline an investigation into the performance of various applications using both Expedited Forwarding (EF) and Assured Forwarding (AF) classification of traffic. Applications will be run on a generic testbed and then, through the use of open source and commercial packages, the traffic will be monitored and a performance evaluation will be carried out of the DiffServ network and the services it provides

Overhead Issues for Local Access Points in IPSec enabled VPNs

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) use the Internet or other network service as a backbone to provide a secure connection across a potentially hostile WAN. Such security guarantees provide the motivation for VPN deployment. This security does, however, come at a performance cost brought about by the increased processing overhead. This paper presents an investigation into these overheads. In particular, this investigation will consider the server side overhead for VPN deployments and seek to establish a relationship between this overhead and the number of clients being serviced

Performance Implications of IPSec Deployment

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) use the Internet or other data network service as a backbone to provide a secure connection across a potentially hostile WAN. Such security guarantees provide the motivation for VPN deployment. This security does, however, come at a performance cost brought about by the increased processing overhead. This paper presents an investigation into these overheads. In particular, this investigation will consider different user resource availability in addition to router type and encryption algorithms

User profiling for content personalisation in information retrieval

One of the key issues with the overabundance of online information sources is that of finding what is relevant. The key to success for any type of information provider must be the personalisation of content in information retrieval, and this can be achieved through the maintenance of user profiles and the matching of these profiles to content metadata. This paper is concerned with user profiling and its role in content personalisation of information retrieval, and in particular presents a profile model which incorporates user preference information and action history information (representing the user’s previous searches). The benefits and costs of such a model are examined and it is argued that the benefits (including personalisation accuracy, computational costs extensibility and flexibility) far outweigh the costs. The matching of profiles to metadata is also discussed as it fulfils an important role in the personalisation process. Although, the user profile model presented is focused on E-Learning, the general platform could be applied to other areas