Architecture for Mobile Heterogeneous Multi Domain Networks

Multi domain networks can be used in several scenarios including military, enterprize networks, emergency networks and many other cases. In such networks, each domain might be under its own administration. Therefore, the cooperation among domains is conditioned by individual domain policies regarding sharing information, such as network topology, connectivity, mobility, security, various service availability and so on. We propose a new architecture for Heterogeneous Multi Domain (HMD) networks, in which one the operations are subject to specific domain policies. We propose a hierarchical architecture, with an infrastructure of gateways at highest-control level that enables policy based interconnection, mobility and other services among domains. Gateways are responsible for translation among different communication protocols, including routing, signalling, and security. Besides the architecture, we discuss in more details the mobility and adaptive capacity of services in HMD. We discuss the HMD scalability and other advantages compared to existing architectural and mobility solutions. Furthermore, we analyze the dynamic availability at the control level of the hierarchy

Integrated Health Coach System

poster abstractThe primary motivation of our project is that, as much research has shown, for most chronic diseases simple lifestyle changes, such as diet and exercise, can be the most effective actions to ameliorate the condition. However, for most people such lifestyle changes become very difficult, if not impossible. Our Integrated Health Coach System will provide patients with immediate feedback regarding the results of their changes in diet and exercise. For example, the physical activity will be captured by the accelerometers implemented in the smart phone. The food used will be captured by the combination of smartphone camera and food description (by voice and text). In addition, the smartphone will record all medications and supplements the patient takes daily. Furthermore, in case of diabetes patients, the smartphone will collect the daily weight, as well as blood sugar levels and blood pressure. All this data will be stored and treated in a cloud computing application, which will correlate changes in diet and exercise to corresponding medical data. Such data will be shown to patients periodically, such that they can really see the concrete results of their actions. For example, one week of changes in diet and exercise would show considerable improvement in blood sugar levels. Alternatively, the application could show rising blood sugar levels in correspondence with lack of physical activity and an unhealthy diet. Such feedback will act as a strong motivator for people to continue with their changes in diet and exercise. The system will be integrated with social network tools, such as Facebook, to enable the creation of support groups for patients to share experiences, efforts, goals and achievements in handling their chronic condition. This social network interaction will be another great support and motivator for people to change their diet and exercise

Secure and Economically Viable Internet Architecture

poster abstractThe evolution of the Internet is one of the most intriguing and magnificent engineering feats in the history of technological innovations. The Internet mirrors and enhances all aspects of our lives, by creating unprecedented opportunities for advancing knowledge in all fields of human activities. However, the 21st century society's needs may not be met by the current trajectory of incremental changes to the current Internet. Furthermore, the continued success of the Internet is increasingly threatened by increased and sophisticated security attacks and by the lack of performance reliability of Internet services. Therefore, the research community worldwide is engaged in exploring new architectures and solutions for the future Internet. We are working to design a new Internet architecture. Our larger team includes multidisciplinary expertise of researchers, from institutions such as Washington University in Saint Louis, Purdue University, and Seikei University in Tokyo Japan. Our research in this field focuses on various major requirements of the future Internet, including security, resilience, mobility, better manageability, economic viability and suitability for the needs of society. The Internet suffers by a number of serious security vulnerabilities, including weak defenses against attacks on hosts, communications, on availability (Denial of Service attacks), and privacy. Furthermore, the existing Internet architecture not only does not provide sufficient security, but worst, it empowers the attacking activities. We are exploring ways make Internet trustworthy, which includes properties such as security, reliability, privacy, and usability. Our multidisciplinary approach is based on the interplay among technical, psychology and legal aspects of system trustworthiness. We propose drastic changes, starting with strong authentication, various layers of security, and evaluation of trust, that will make the Internet a much more trustworthy and resilient system. The future Internet will be composed mostly of mobile nodes such as cell phones, PDAs, various types of sensors, and so on. Unfortunately, today's Internet is not support mobility. We are exploring solutions that provide mobility service based on the interplay among technical, security and economic factors. Our mobility architecture uses cloud computing and explores the tradeoffs among Quality of Service, security, privacy and economic viability of mobility service. This project is currently partially funded by NSF. We are looking forward to expand our collaborations and partnership in this research field

New Architecture for the Future Internet

poster abstractThe Internet is one of the most successful technological achievements of our time. The Internet mirrors and enhances all aspects of your lives, by creating unprecedented opportunities for advancing knowledge in all fields of human activities. However, the 21st century society's needs may not be met by the current trajectory of incremental changes to the current Internet. Therefore, the research community worldwide, well supported by corresponding funding agencies, is engaged in exploring new architectures for the future Internet. We are working on one of the collaborative projects to design a new Internet architecture. Our larger team includes multidisciplinary expertise of researchers from US and the world, from institutions such as Washington University in Saint Louis, Purdue University, Seikei University in Tokyo Japan, and Technical University of Catalonia Spain. Our research in this field focuses on various major requirements of the future Internet, including security, resilience, mobility, better manageability, economic viability and suitability for the needs of society. The today's Internet is marked by a number of serious security issues, including weak defenses against attacks on hosts, attacks that attempt to disrupt communications, attacks on availability (Denial of Service attacks), and attacks on the proper operation of applications. We are exploring approaches that will bring to the Internet concepts that have evolved in real life security. For example, in real life we use satisfying personal authentication mechanisms; our society's security is based on a strong legal system, various complementary agencies, compartmental division of tasks, including national borders and so on. Most of such concepts do not apply to the Internet today. Furthermore, the existing Internet architecture not only does not provide sufficient security, but worst, it empowers the attacking activities. We propose drastic changes, starting with strong authentication, and implementation of various layers of security, that will make the Internet a much more trustworthy and resilient system. The future Internet will be composed mostly of mobile nodes such as cell phones, PDAs, various types of sensors, and so on. Unfortunately, today's Internet is not equipped for mobility. We are exploring solutions that provide mobility service as an interplay among technical and economic factors. The practice has shown that many sound technical solutions have failed because of the lack of economic viability. Therefore, we extend the tradeoff among technical and economic aspects to all future Internet services. Furthermore, our architecture is policy based and its management is business oriented. Our architecture is flexible and open to future needs of society. This project is currently partially funded by NSF. We are looking forward to expand our collaborations and partnership in this research field

Network trust management in emergency situations

AbstractWe study the unique trust management, and more precisely reputation management and revocation of malicious nodes in the context of ad hoc networks used for emergency communications.Unlike in centralized systems, reputation management and revocation in ad hoc networks is non-trivial. This difficulty is due to the fact that the nodes have to collaboratively calculate the reputation value of a particular node and then revoke the node if the reputation value goes below a threshold. A major challenge in this scheme is to prevent a malicious node from discrediting other genuine nodes. The decision to revoke a node has to be communicated to all the nodes of the network. In traditional ad hoc networks the overhead of broadcasting the message throughout the network may be very high. We solve the problem of reputation management and node revocation in ad hoc networks of cell phones by using a threshold cryptography based scheme. Each node of the network would have a set of anonymous referees, which would store the reputation information of the node and issue reputation certificates to the node with timestamps. The misbehavior of a particular cell phone is reported to its anonymous referees, who issue certificates which reflect the positive and negative recommendations

Enhanced Internet Mobility and Privacy Using Public Cloud

Internet mobile users are concerned more and more about their privacy nowadays as both researches and real world incidents show that leaking of communication and location privacy can lead to serious consequence, and many research works have been done to anonymize individual user from aggregated location data. However, just the communication itself between the mobile users and their peers or website could collect considerable privacy of the mobile users, such as location history, to other parties. In this paper, we investigated the potential privacy risk of mobile Internet users and proposed a scalable system built on top of public cloud services that can hide mobile user’s network location and traffic from communication peers. This system creates a dynamic distributed proxy network for each mobile user to minimize performance overhead and operation cost

Economic Viability of Software Defined Networking (SDN)

Economical and operational facets of networks drive the necessity for significant changes towards fundamentals of networking architectures. Recently, the momentum of programmable networking attempts illustrates the significance of economic aspects of network technologies. Software Defined Networking (SDN) has got the attention of researchers from both academia and industry as a means to decrease network costs and generate revenue for service providers due to features it promises in networking. In this article, we investigate how programmable network architectures, i.e. SDN technology, affect the network economics compared to traditional network architectures, i.e. MPLS technology. We define two metrics, Unit Service Cost Scalability and Cost-to-Service, to evaluate how SDN architecture performs compared to MPLS architecture. Also, we present mathematical models to calculate certain cost parts of a network. In addition, we compare different popular SDN control plane models, Centralized Control Plane (CCP), Distributed Control Plane (DCP), and Hierarchical Control Plane (HCP), to understand the economic impact of them with regards to the defined metrics. We use video traffic with different patterns for the comparison. This work aims at being a useful primer to providing insights regarding which technology and control plane model are appropriate for a specific service, i.e. video, for network owners to plan their investments