Aref Meddeb

Internet QoS: Pieces of the puzzle

One of the biggest challenges faced when dealing with QoS over the Internet is how to deliver QoS over an unregulated, connectionless network that was designed, deployed, operated, managed, and commercialized without any QoS perspectives. This article gives a concise but comprehensive overview of the Internet QoS puzzle. We aim not only at identifying all the pieces of the puzzle, but also at discovering how to join them together. These include terminology, definitions and standards, architectures, traffic engineering, regulation, accounting, pricing, and marketing. We also explain throughout the article how network providers should envision their service offerings in the context of an SLA and QoS-centric Internet.

Why ethernet WAN transport

The ubiquitous and plug-and-play characteristics of Ethernet provide a unique opportunity for service providers to-offer a variety of innovative and affordable application-centric services, resulting in a much broader networking culture. Before that can really happen, Ethernet has to overcome some challenging obstacles and prove efficient support of SLAs, at least similar to that offered by traditional layer 2 WAN technologies. In this article we describe some of the most commonly used WAN transport technologies. We compare Ethernet WAN transport to these traditional WAN technologies. We discuss QoS, CAM, security, and resilience issues. Pros and cons of Ethernet WAN transport are also enumerated.

NGL01-3: Multiple Spanning Tree Generation and Mapping Algorithms for Carrier Class Ethernets

Ethernet is evolving from a plug-and-play LAN technology towards a carrier grade WAN technology. In order to support Service Level Agreements (SLA) over Public Ethernets, extensions to STP include RSTP and MSTP. RSTP offers faster convergence than STP but uses a single tree for the entire network. In order to achieve a better utilization of the network links, MSTP supports multiple spanning trees, one tree per VLAN group. However, MSTP does not provide efficient methods to build those spanning trees. Furthermore, MSTP does not provide methods to perform efficient VLAN-Spanning-Tree Mapping. Operators must manually provision this mapping which might seriously impact OPEX and network performance. In this paper, we propose very simple and yet easy to use spanning tree generation and mapping algorithms; which can be used to extend and/or work with the 802.1s MSTP. We show that these algorithms yield optimal bandwidth utilization and enhanced network throughput compared to existing methods.

Internet of things standards: who stands out from the crowd?

While time-to-market constraints are accelerating the deployment of a variety of fragmented and proprietary IoT products, there is still a lack of understanding of what an IoT service is meant to be, what its consequences are, and how to promote standard IoT services. This article gives a concise but comprehensive survey of IoT service definition, regulation, and standardization activities. We discuss mainstream standards as well as emerging, independent, and state-funded projects.

An efficient source authentication scheme in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are being widely deployed in military, healthcare and commercial environments. Since sensor networks pose unique challenges, traditional security methods, commonly used in enterprise networks, cannot be directly applied. In particular, broadcast source authentication is a critical security service in wireless sensor networks since it allows senders to broadcast messages to multiple receivers in a secure way. Public-key cryptography based solutions such as Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Identity Based Cryptography (IBC) have been proposed but they all suffer from severe energy depletion attacks, resulting from a high computational and communication overheads. In this paper, we present a novel symmetric-key-based authentication scheme that exhibits low broadcast authentication overhead and thus avoiding the problem flaws inherent to the public key cryptography based schemes. Our scheme is built upon the integration of multi-level μTesla protocol, staggered authentication and the Bloom Filter. We show that our authentication scheme is very efficient in terms of energy consumption related to both computation and communication.

A secure authentication mechanism for resource constrained devices

The Internet of Things (IoT) is formed by smart objects and services to interact in real time, and that are deployed in various applications such as home monitoring, healthcare, and smart cities. However, security concerns should not be overlooked since an adversary could exploit the vulnerabilities in the design of some secure protocols. To this aim, in this paper we focus in particular on broadcast authentication in resource constrained devices. This security service is still in its infancy when devices are deployed in unattended environments. We propose a new authentication mechanism based on the state of the art protocol μTESLA, that aims to reduce the delay of forged packets in the receivers buffer, by efficiently computing the key disclosure delay. Then, we integrate this mechanism to two protocols of state of the art LEAP and LEAP++. Furthermore, we assess the feasibility of our solution with a thorough simulation study, taking into account the energy consumption, the delay of forged packets, and the authentication delay.

Augmented Reality Based Traffic Sign Recognition for Improved Driving Safety

In recent years, automotive active safety systems have become increasingly common in road vehicles since they provide an opportunity to significantly reduce traffic fatalities by active vehicle control. Augmented Reality (AR) applications can enhance intelligent transportation systems by superimposing surrounding traffic information on the users view and keep drivers and pedestrians view on roads. However, due to the existence of a complex environment such as weather conditions, illuminations and geometric distortions, Traffic Sign Recognition(TSR) systems has always been considered as a challenging task. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the effectiveness of AR cues in improving driving safety by deploying an on-board camera-based driver alert system against approaching traffic signs such as stop, speed limit, unique, danger signs, etc. A new approach is presented for marker-less AR-TSR system that superimposes augmented virtual objects onto a real scene under all types of driving situations including unfavorable weather conditions. Our method is composed of both online and offline stages. An intrinsic camera parameter change depending on the zoom values is calibrated. A Haar-like feature with Adaboost has been used to train a Haar detector in the offline stage. Extrinsic camera parameters are then estimated based on homography method in the online stage. With the complete set of camera parameters, virtual objects can be coherently inserted into the video sequence captured by the camera so that synthetic traffic signs may be added to increase safety.

Smart Spanning Tree Bridging for Metro Ethernets

Metro Ethernet is taking off rapidly as a WAN service and the simplicity, ubiquity, and plug-and-play features of Ethernet are some key success factors. The original bridging methods assumed the use of VLANs and spanning tree protocols within provider bridge (PB) and provider backbone bridge (PBB) networks. Because of the inadequacy of the existing spanning tree protocols to support carrier network requirements, very recently, a new class of shortest path routing solutions have been introduced that avoid the use of spanning tree protocols in the core namely, shortest path bridging (SPB). This paper aims at illustrating that we can still use spanning trees in metro ethernet provided that the tree generation and VLAN-spanning-tree mapping are performed adequately. We call our solution smart spanning tree bridging (SSTB). SSTB can be used to enhance the 802.1s MSTP, without requiring significant changes in the current Ethernet equipment. Using very simple but yet realistic numerical examples, we show that SSTB yields near optimal bandwidth and link usage. We also show that SSTB outperforms SPB in terms of service delivery, frame loss and jitter, while being comparable in terms of bandwidth usage and latency. Further, SSTB requires only a couple of spanning tree instances, significantly reducing processing and complexity of bridged networks.

Building cost effective lower layer VPNs: The ILEC/CLEC dilemma

Layer 2 and layer 1 Virtual Private Network (VPN) services; ranging from simple leased lines to extending private LANs across public networks, are commonplace today. With the continuously growing economic difficulties, capital meltdown, and telecommunication business turmoil, delivering those VPN services at the lowest cost or with the maximum revenue margin, while committing to Service Level Agreements (SLA), has become essential. We show that whether we tackle the optimal VPN design problem from an Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier (ILEC) standpoint or from a Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (CLEC) standpoint, we obtain contradictory rules. We show that by building Edge Disjoint VPN trees and spreading the traffic all over the network, the ILEC can achieve maximum throughput and enhanced network performance; while by concentrating all the VPN traffic over a single tree, the CLEC can minimize the cost of leased bandwidth. We then propose two simple algorithms that can help carriers and service providers leverage their networks and increase their revenue margins while meeting SLA requirements. Copyright

In-vehicle augmented reality system to provide driving safety information

Improving traffic safety is one of the important goals of intelligent transportation systems. Traffic signs play a very vital role in safe driving and in avoiding accidents by informing the driver about the speed limits or possible dangers such as icy roads, imminent road works or pedestrian crossings. In-vehicle contextual Augmented reality (AR) has the potential to provide novel visual feedbacks to drivers for an enhanced driving experience. In this paper, we propose a new AR traffic sign recognition system (AR-TSR) to improve driving safety and enhance the driver’s experience based on the Haar cascade and the bag-of-visual-words approach, using spatial information to improve accuracy and an overview of studies related to the driver’s perception and the effectiveness of the AR in improving driving safety. In the first step, the region of interest (ROI) is extracted using a scanning window with a Haar cascade detector and an AdaBoost classifier to reduce the computational region in the hypothesis-generation step. Second, we proposed a new computationally efficient method to model global spatial distribution of visual words by taking into consideration the spatial relationships of its visual words. Finally, a multiclass sign classifier takes the positive ROIs and assigns a 3D traffic sign for each one using a linear SVM. Experimental results show that the suggested method could reach comparable performance of the state-of-the-art approaches with less computational complexity and shorter training time, and the AR-TSR more strongly impacts the allocation of visual attention during the decision-making phase.Graphical Abstract