A business model for a sensors-enabled IMS environment

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is one of the key components of third generation (3G) networks, while Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are an emerging type of networks formed by a set of distributed sensor nodes that collaborate to monitor physical and environmental conditions. By integrating the sensing capabilities of WSNs in the IMS, a rich set of contextual information can be exploited to provide new and personalized multimedia services to IMS users. We have previously proposed a presence-based WSNs/IMS integration architecture, and discussed its design and implementation aspects. In this paper, we focus on the aspects needed for the practical deployment of this architecture. An enhanced IMS business model is proposed for the resulting sensors-enabled IMS environment, and several important support functions are elaborated, including: a two-level identification scheme, a charging model, security and information access control mechanisms, as well as WSN gateways\u27 dynamic discovery alternatives. © 2012 IEEE

The design and implementation of a wireless healthcare application for WSN-enabled IMS environments

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is one of the key components of third generation (3G) networks, while Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are an emerging type of networks formed by a set of distributed sensor nodes that collaborate to monitor environmental and physical conditions. Combining the capabilities of WSNs and the IMS opens the door to a wide range of personalized and adaptive value added services for 3G users. We have previously proposed a solution for WSN/IMS integration. This solution enriches the IMS architecture with context acquisition and management components, and enables access to those capabilities via standard IMS interfaces. Wireless healthcare is one of the important application areas that can benefit from the combined IMS/WSNs capabilities. In this paper, we focus on this application area and present a case study on the design and implementation of a context-aware IMS wireless healthcare application, that leverages the capabilities of our WSN/IMS integration solution. The application\u27s detailed scenario and IMS deployment architecture are presented and a prototype is built and tested using Ericsson\u27s IMS simulated environment. © 2013 IEEE

Using Web services for application development in internet telephony : a case study on conferencing in SIP networks

Applications offered to end-users as value-added services are a critical element for the success and the survival of Internet telephony service providers. Some service creation frameworks have been proposed by IETF while alternative frameworks have been proposed by other forums such as Parlay and JAIN. All these frameworks have several drawbacks which may be solved by the use of web services. Web services are self-describing, modular business applications that expose the business logic as services over a network, generally, the Web. This thesis presents a case study on the use of web services to develop conferencing applications in SIP networks. The case study involves the definition of comprehensive web service interfaces that make conferencing capabilities available to developers. It also involves the implementation a sub-set of the interfaces as a gateway using SIP servlets, the development of two applications using the interfaces, and performance evaluation. The applications we have developed consist of dial in and dial out audio conferences. the standard frameworks provide. In addition, their use does not require a background in telephony or telecommunications. This could allow developers who are new to the telecom field, to easily integrate conferencing capabilities to their applications. Furthermore, a considerable reduction of the application footprint is achieved. This reduction saves time and effort for application developers. These benefits make web services an interesting approach, despite the overhead introduced

Integrating Context-Awareness in the IP Multimedia Subsystem for Enhanced Session Control and Service Provisioning Capabilities

The 3GPP-defined IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is becoming the de-facto standard for IP-based multimedia communication services. It consists of an overlay control and service layer that is deployed on top of IP-based mobile and fixed networks. This layer encompasses a set of common functions (e.g. session control functions allowing the initiation/modification/termination of sessions) and service logics that are needed for the seamless provisioning of IP multimedia services to users, via different access technologies. As it continues to evolve, the IMS still faces several challenges including: the enabling of innovative and personalized services that would appeal to users and increase network operators' revenues; its interaction with other types of networks (e.g. wireless sensor networks) as means to enhance its capabilities; and the support of advanced QoS schemes that would manage the network resources in an efficient and adaptive manner. The context-awareness concept, which comes from the pervasive computing field, signifies the ability to use situational information (or context) in support to operations and decision making and for the provision of relevant services to the user. Context-awareness is considered to enhance users' experience and is seen as an enabler to adaptability and service personalization - two capabilities that could play important roles in telecommunication environments. This thesis focuses on the introduction of the context-awareness technology in the IMS, as means to enhance its session control and service provisioning capabilities. It starts by presenting the necessary background information, followed by a derivation of requirements and a review of the related work. To ensure the availability of contextual information within the network, we then propose an architecture for context information acquisition and management in the IMS. This architecture leverages and extends the 3GPP presence framework. Building on the capabilities of this architecture, we demonstrate how the managed information could be integrated in IMS operations, at the control and service levels. Showcasing control level integration, we propose a novel context-aware call differentiation framework as means to offer enhanced QoS support (for sessions/calls) in IMS-based networks. This framework enables the differentiation between different categories of calls at the IMS session control level, via dynamic and adaptive resource allocation, in addition to supporting a specialized charging model. Furthermore, we also propose a framework for enhanced IMS emergency communication services. This framework addresses the limitations of existing IP-based emergency solutions, by offering three main improvements: a QoS-enhanced emergency service; a context-aware personalized emergency service; and a conferencing-enhanced emergency service. We demonstrate the use of context awareness at the IMS service level using two new context-aware IMS applications. Finally, to validate our solutions and evaluate their performance, we build various proof-of-concept prototypes and OPNET simulation model

Open virtual playground: Initial architecture and results

Network virtualization is a promising and technically challenging concept, which enables the dynamic creation of several co-existing logical network instances (or virtual networks) over a shared physical network infrastructure. There are several motivations behind this concept, including: cost-effective sharing of resources; customizable networking solutions; and the convergence of existing network infrastructures. We have previously proposed a new business model for virtual networking environments. In this paper, we use this model as well as concrete use cases as basis for the definition of the Open Virtual Playground - an open virtual multi-services networking architecture in which different levels of services (i.e. essential services, service enablers, service building blocks, and end-user services) offered by various players, can be dynamically discovered, used, and composed. Furthermore, a QoS-enabled VoIP service scenario is used to demonstrate the system operation and preliminary performance measurements are collected. © 2012 IEEE

A new business model and architecture for context-aware applications provisioning in the cloud

Context-aware applications are seen as one of the killer application categories of the future, due to their ability to offer personalized services by adapting their behavior according to the users\u27 needs and changing situation. Context-aware applications rely in their operation on a complex set of functionalities (i.e. context-awareness substrates). In order to facilitate the development of novel context-aware applications and achieve efficiency in terms of resource utilization, there is a need for a unified, openly-accessible, scalable context management platform that enables the dynamic discovery, composition, and reuse of context-awareness substrates by various context-aware applications. The lack of such platform is a major impediment to the fast and resource efficient development of context aware applications. In this paper, we propose a novel virtualized context management platform in the cloud, in which a shared pool of virtualized context-awareness substrates can be offered by different providers, and leased on demand. Those substrates can be dynamically discovered and composed to enable fast and cost-effective development of a variety of context-aware applications. The proposed platform relies on a new business model which introduces the sensors substrate provider and the broker as new roles in the traditional cloud business model. A detailed software architecture and preliminary prototype implementation are also presented. © 2014 IEEE

From the Internet of Things to the web of things-enabling by sensing as-A service

© 2016 IEEE. Sensing as a Service (SenaaS) is emerging as a prominent element in the middleware linking together the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Web of Things (WoT) layers of future ubiquitous systems. An architecture framework is discussed in this paper whereby things are abstracted into services via embedded sensors which expose a thing as a service. The architecture acts as a blueprint to guide software architects realizing WoT applications. Web-enabled things are eventually appended into Web platforms such as Social Web platforms to drive data and services that are exposed by these things to interact with both other things and people, in order to materialize further the future social Web of Things. Research directions are discussed to illustrate the integration of SenaaS into the proposed WoT architectural framework

A green energy-aware hybrid virtual network embedding approach

© 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V. In the past few years, the concept of network virtualization has received significant attention from industry and research fora, as it represents a promising way to diversify existing networks and ensure the co-existence of heterogeneous network architectures on top of shared substrates. Virtual network embedding (VNE) is the process of dynamically mapping virtual resources (i.e. virtual nodes and links) onto physical substrate resources. VNE is the main resource allocation challenge in network virtualization and is considered as an NP-hard problem. Several centralized and distributed VNE approaches have been proposed, with the aim of satisfying different objectives ranging from QoS, to economical profit, and network survivability. More recently, emerging VNE approaches started investigating the optimization of new objectives such as energy-efficiency and networks\u27 security. In this work, we propose a green energy-aware hybrid VNE hybrid VN embedding approach that aims at achieving energy efficiency and resource consolidation, while minimizing CO2 emissions resulting from VNs operation. This approach consists of a hierarchical virtual networking management architecture in which control and management nodes collaborate for the splitting and embedding of sub-VNs requests to the cleanest substrate resources (i.e. the resources deployed in a sector with the smallest CO2 emission factor) available. Three different variants of our VNE algorithms, taking into consideration different resources\u27 selection criteria (i.e. energy source, request priority, and request location) are presented, and their performance is compared with two existing VNE algorithms based on centralized and distributed embedding approaches. The comparative performance analysis shows that our proposed approach enables a more efficient VN embedding in terms of: a reduced number of substrate resources needed, a faster request mapping time, as well as resource consolidation and reduced resource cost. Furthermore, it enables a reduction of the carbon footprint of the VNE operation, thus resulting in a more green and environmentally conscious approach to network virtualization

Exploratory study on innovative use of ISO standards for IT security in the UAE

With the high percentage of security breaches, following IT standards could be one way to protecting sensitive information and auditing the accuracy, confidentiality, and integrity of information within the organization. ISO security standards enable organizations to practice safe security techniques to minimize the number of successful IT security attacks. Many researches have been established extensively in both the research and industry fields that highlighted the need for implementing an information security standards and policy in strive towards the securing of information. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no such study on using ISO standards in the IT field, in the UAE. This paper focuses more specifically on the IT security techniques. Emirates Authority for Standardization and Metrology (ESMA) seeks to focus its efforts on the IT field - IT Security techniques being an area of interest. Since the UAE is always coping with the rapid growth in technology and it has a lack of publications on the topic of IT standards, it is worthy to address the usage of ISO standards in this region. This research survey, which sent to many public and private Emirati organizations, shows that the usage of ISO standards in this region of the world is quite promising

An SLA-Aware Cloud Coalition Formation Approach for Virtualized Networks

IEEE One of the main challenges faced by cloud providers is the uncertainty in their workload, resulting from the high variability and the dynamic nature of clients\u27 demands. The inability to meet those demands during peak times can lead to high service rejection rates, experienced delays, and consequently profit and reputation losses. The concept of cloud federation has been proposed as a way to address this challenge, by enabling a group of cloud providers to collaborate by dynamically combining their resources as needed, to satisfy received requests. Existing cloud federation approaches fail to consider clients\u27 SLA requirements during the coalition formation process or provide a self-healing mechanism to deal with unexpected resources\u27 shortage during operation. Furthermore, the state of the art approaches suffer from performance issues, such as high execution times, unstable performance, and lack of convergence to a solution in complex scenarios (e.g. requests with mixed, independent types of VMs). This paper proposes a novel social gaming based approach for coalition formation in the cloud that finds the best coalition of cloud providers to answer requests, while satisfying the clients\u27 SLA requirements. The proposed algorithm, dubbed SLA Aware Cloud Coalition Formation algorithm (S-ACCF), leverages Irving\u27s roommate algorithm to form a stable coalition of cloud providers, with a rapid execution time. The S-ACCF algorithm is designed to maximize the coalition\u27s profit, while minimizing the number of participants in the coalition as well as the penalty incurred by providers who fail to offer all or some of the promised resources using a self-healing process. The S-ACCF algorithm was extensively tested using a variety of scenarios, and its performance was compared to two state of the art approaches: 1) the Optimal Cloud Federation Mechanism (OCFM) that relies on an exhaustive search of all possible solutions to find the best coalition; and 2) the Cloud Federation Formation Mechanism (CFFM) that relies on an iterative split-and-merge approach to find the best coalition. While the optimal approach (OCFM) always finds the best coalition leading to the highest collective profit, it has an exponential time complexity, thus leading to very large execution times. On the other hand, the split-and-merge approach (CFFM), which relies on random selection of sub-groups for coalition formation, suffers from instability (different results in repeated runs), high and variable execution time, and a noticeable requests\u27 rejection rate that changes between runs. The test results show that the S-ACCF algorithm addresses the limitations of the OCFM and the CFFM algorithms, and outperforms the optimal and split-and-merge approaches in terms of execution time, individual provider payoff, and the number of providers per coalition. Furthermore, it yields higher stability and zero rejection rate, when compared to the split-and-merge approach. Indeed, our proposed approach yields an execution time that is 12 to 25 times faster than the optimal and split-and-merge approaches, which is a major advantage for real-time applications. Moreover, when compared to the two other approaches, our S-ACCF algorithm always finds the smallest coalition possible satisfying the client requirements, thus leading to the highest individual payoff for providers and lower administration overhead. Finally, unlike the split-and-merge approach, our algorithm shows a stable performance, and converges towards the optimal solution in simple and complex scenarios, thus making it suitable for production environments