Table of Contents

Abstract: Pervasive wireless systems have significantly improved end-users’ quality of life. As manufacturing costs decrease, communications bandwidth increases, and contextual information is made more readily available, the role of next generation wireless systems in facilitating users’ daily activities will grow. Unique security and privacy issues exist in these wireless, context-aware, often decentralized systems. For example, the pervasive nature of such systems allows adversaries to launch stealthy attacks against them. In this review paper, we survey several emergent personal wireless systems and their applications. These systems include mobile social networks, active implantable medical devices, and consumer products. We explore each system’s usage of contextual information and provide insight into its security vulnerabilities. Where possible, we describe existing solutions for defendingagainst these vulnerabilities. Finally, we point out promising future research directions for improving these systems’ robustness and security

Abstract: Recent advances in the fields of Cognitive Radio and the proliferation of open spectrum access promise that spectrum-agile wireless communication will be widespread in the near future, and will bring significant flexibility and potential utility improvements for end users. With spectrum efficiency being a key objective, most relevant research focuses on smart coexistence mechanisms. However, wireless nodes may behave selfishly and should be considered as rational autonomous entities. Selfishness, pure malice or even faulty equipment can lead to behavior that does not conform to sharing protocols and etiquette. Thus, there is a need to secure spectrum sharing mechanisms against attacks in the various phases of the sharing process. Identifying these attacks and possible countermeasures is the focus of this work.

Abstract: Semantic technologies are of paramount importance to the future Internet. The reuse and integration of semantically described resources, such as data or services, necessitates the bringing of ontologies into mutual agreement. Ontology alignment deals with the discovery of correspondences between concepts and relations from different ontologies. Alignment provides the key ingredient to semantic interoperability. This paper gives an overview on the state of the art in the field of visually supported semi-automatic alignment techniques and presents recent trends and developments. Particular attention is given to user interfaces and visualization techniques supporting involvement of humans in the alignment process. We derive and summarize requirements for visual semi-automatic alignment systems, provide an overview of existing approaches, and discuss the possibilities for further improvements and future research.

Abstract: In their web search processes users apply multiple types of search strategies, which consist of different search tactics. This paper identifies eight types of information search strategies with associated cases based on sequences of search tactics during the information search process. Thirty-one participants representing the general public were recruited for this study. Search logs and verbal protocols offered rich data for the identification of different types of search strategies. Based on the findings, the authors further discuss how to enhance web-based information retrieval (IR) systems to support each type of search strategy.

Abstract: One of the major issues in the future Internet is the integration of telecom networks with the Internet. In many countries, large Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are also telecom operators that have been focusing on providing Internet services through their telecom networks with telecom-grade mechanisms. In this article, we show that IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a telecom-grade mechanism that addresses this important issue. In Next Generation Network (NGN), IMS supports IP-based multimedia services that can be accessed from various wireless and wired access technologies through fixed-mobile convergence. We show how to integrate Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) with NGN/IMS to offer enhanced IPTV services for subscribers with set-top boxes or mobile phones. We specifically describe the implementations of three services: weather forecasts, short messages on TV screens and TV shopping/food ordering for mobile users. Although these services can be directly implemented in the Internet, our commercial operation experiences indicate that the NGN/IMS implementation has advantages in terms of telecom-grade security, Quality of Service (QoS), and flexible service creation.

Abstract: Dynamic resource control capabilities have become increasingly important for academic networks that must support big scientific research projects at the same time as less data intensive research and educational activities. This paper describes the dynamic resource allocation and QoS control capabilities of the Japanese academic backbone network, called SINET3, which supports a variety of academic applications with a wide range of network services. The article describes the network architecture, networking technologies, resource allocation, QoS control, and layer-1 bandwidth on-demand services. It also details typical services developed for scientific research, including the user interface, resource control, and management functions, and includes performance evaluations.

Abstract: Sensor nodes are characterized by a small size, a low cost, an advanced communication technology, but also a limited amount of energy. Energy efficient strategies are required in such networks to maximize network lifetime. In this paper, we focus on a solution integrating energy efficient routing and node activity scheduling. The energy efficient routing we propose, called EOLSR, selects the route and minimizes the energy consumed by an end-to-end transmission, while avoiding nodes with low residual energy. Simulation results show that EOLSR outperforms the solution selecting the route of minimum energy as well as the solution based on node residual energy. Cross-layering allows EOLSR to use information from the application layer or the MAC layer to reduce its overhead and increase network lifetime. Node activity scheduling is based on the following observation: the sleep state is the least power consuming state. So, to schedule node active and sleeping periods, we propose SERENA that colors all network nodes using a small number of colors, such that two nodes with the same color can transmit without interfering. The node color is mapped into a time slot during which the node can transmit. Consequently, each node is awake during its slot and the slots of its one-hop neighbors, and sleeps in the remaining time. We evaluate SERENA benefits obtained in terms of bandwidth, delay and energy. We also show how cross-layering with the application layer can improve the end-to-end delays for data gathering applications.

Abstract: Recent advances in the fields of digital photography, networking and computing, have made it easier than ever for users to store and share photographs. However without sufficient metadata, e.g., in the form of tags, photos are difficult to find and organize. In this paper, we describe a system that recommends tags for image annotation. We postulate that the use of low-level global visual features can improve the quality of the tag recommendation process when compared to a baseline statistical method based on tag co-occurrence. We present results from experiments conducted using photos and metadata sourced from the Flickr photo website that suggest that the use of visual features improves the mean average precision (MAP) of the system and increases the system's ability to suggest different tags, therefore justifying the associated increase in complexity.

Abstract: Cooperation between networked mobile sensors, wearable and sycophant sensor networks with parasitically sticking agents, and also having human beings involved in the loop is the “Avatarization” within the robotic research community, where all networks are connected and where you can connect/disconnect at any time to acquire data from a vast unstructured world. This paper extensively surveys the networked robotic foundations of this robotic biological “Avatar” that awaits us in the future. Cooperation between networked mobile sensors as well as cooperation of nodes within a network are becoming more robust, fault tolerant and enable adaptation of the networks to changing environment conditions. In this paper, we survey and comparatively discuss the current state of networked robotics via their critical application areas and their design characteristics. We conclude by discussing future challenges.

Abstract: This survey on Quality of Service (QoS) in multicast ad hoc networks uses a framework based on the mechanisms in three important elements: resource estimations, multicast tree/mesh administration, and multicast routing. Our contribution is an exploration of the design space and an identification of areas that have not been fully explored. We discuss the design space of central mechanisms and classify proposed QoS multicast schemes according to the mechanisms they used. In addition, we summarize the scenarios used for evaluating their performance. Furthermore, we identify issues, mechanisms, and scenarios that have not been fully investigated in existing works. The paper provides a coherent understanding of design principles, conceptual operation, and evaluated scenarios of schemes designed for QoS multicast application in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). It also outlines new areas for future research in this field.

Abstract: Traffic in the Internet backbone is expected to grow above a few Tbit/s in 2020. To cope with this, operators are moving to IP/optical network architectures, where IP is the convergence layer for all services. On the other hand, the quality of service (QoS) requirements of future applications encompasses the individualization of services and the assurance of stricter quality parameters such as latency, jitter or capacity. In other words, future optical networks will not only transport more IP data, but they will also have to offer differentiated QoS requirements to services. Finally, some emerging applications, e.g., grid computing, need greater flexibility in the usage of network resources, which involves establishing and releasing connections as if they were virtualized resources controlled by other elements or layers. In this context, traffic-driven lightpath provisioning and service-plane approaches arise as very interesting candidate solutions to solve the main challenges described above. This work reviews the concepts of service-oriented and self-managed networks and relates them to propose an integrated approach to assure QoS by offering flow-aware networking in the sense that traffic demands will be anticipated in a suitable way, lightpaths will be established taking into account QoS information (i.e., impairments) and complex services will be decomposed into optical connections so that the above techniques can be employed to assure QoS for any service.