Dave Marples

Service portability of networked appliances

Networked appliances are popularly viewed as one of the next major Internet growth areas. This document outlines an approach for delivering services to networked appliances using techniques that allow mobility of these services both in a conventional location independent sense and between physical devices. Key requirements to address this market are identified and the document then goes on to present a technical solution to meet these requirements together with worked examples. It concludes with suggestions for further work.

Feature interactions in services for Internet personal appliances

This paper investigates the feature interaction problem, known from traditional telephony environments, in the context of Internet personal appliances (IPA). IPAs are dedicated consumer devices which contain at least one network processor. They include the Internet alarm clock, which takes into account road conditions or expected arrival times of air planes when setting the alarm time, or the Internet enabled fridge, which keeps an inventory of groceries and issues orders to suppliers. The results of our investigation are threefold. The first part of this paper introduces a service taxonomy supported by a list of example services. The second part discusses feature interactions between services for appliances. A classification for such interactions and example interactions and possible conflicts are presented. The final part contains an outline for an approach to handle such interactions.

Hybrid approach to software interworking problems: managing interactions between legacy and evolving telecommunications software

Interworking problems between software services arise for a number of reasons; they may occur because the services, or their component parts, have evolved to fulfil different roles from the originally intended ones, resulting in conflicting requirements. Alternatively, the services themselves may be undocumented, poorly understood, or required to interwork with services from third party legacy systems. Interworking problems are difficult to predict and detect, as well as to resolve in an acceptable manner. The problems are particularly acute in the telecommunications domain with its supplementary concerns of real−time, distributed control and data, high reliability, rapid evolution, and a deregulated market that is encouraging multiple service providers. Approaches to interworking problems may be characterised as being either online or offline, formally or pragmatically/experimentally based. While numerous approaches have been developed, there have been very few attempts to combine formally based and online approaches to produce a technique. The research goal is to develop such a technique because experience with other combinations has led to the belief that they are not sufficient to deal with the interworking problems of complex, evolving software systems, as common in telecommunications. This is particularly the case for systems which also have to interwork with third party and legacy code: a hybrid approach which combines both online and formally based approaches promises to address problems which have proven very difficult to resolve with other techniques. The paper outlines a hybrid approach based on a transactional technique with rollback capability. While the approach described is applied specifically to telecommunications services software, many aspects of the approach are applicable to other software domains which exhibit similar characteristics of real-time, event driven operation, such as control systems.

Enabling revenue-generating digital content distribution for telecom carriers

Distribution of digital content is a key revenue opportunity for telecommunications carriers. Currently, as media content moves from analog and physical media distribution to digital on-line distribution, a great opportunity exists for carriers to claim their role in the media value chain and grow revenue by shifting their broadband offer from “all you can eat” high speed Internet access to delivery of a variety of paid content. By offering a distributed peer to peer content delivery capability with authentication, personalization and payment functions, carriers can gain a larger portion of the revenue paid for content both within and beyond their traditional service territories. This paper describes a solution architecture and an approach to digital content distribution that leverages existing Intelligent Network infrastructure that many carriers already possess, as well as Web Services.

An Enhanced Digital Content Mediator (DCM) Approach to Implementing Legitimate and Secure P2P Online Transactions

In this paper we enhance the Digital Content Mediator (DCM) approach, a legitimate online service that uses financial incentives as an effective weapon to fight against online piracy. We provide needed network security support for the DCM service. The DCM mediator is a trusted notary to ensure fair and legitimate deals between digital content selling peers and buying peers. (1) In our design, the mediator sees no raw bits of digital contents. This saves storage and communication resource for the central mediator. (2) For the seller and buyer in a DCM-legitimized transaction, one wants payment and the other wants the content. The DCM protocol ensures that neither of them can stop the protocol in the middle to steal its service without serving the other party. (3) A digital content may have many legitimate copies from large amount of sellers. In a large-scale random network like the Internet, transaction fairness is defined as the condition that a buyer wants to buy the copy from the seller with shortest downloading delay (i.e., largest seller-to-buyer pairwise bandwidth) given the same amount of financial charge. DCM employs flow network security countermeasures to ensure that a seller keeps its bandwidth promises. Our experiments on the Internet confirm the effectiveness of our design.

Content Distribution for Telecom Carriers

Distribution of digital content is a key revenue opportunity for telecommunications carriers. As media content moves from analog and physical media-based distribution to digital on-line distribution, a great opportunity exists for carriers to claim their role in the media value chain and grow revenue by enhancing their broadband “all you can eat” high speed Internet access offer to incorporate delivery of a variety of paid content. By offering a distributed peer to peer content delivery capability with authentication, personalization and payment functions, carriers can gain a larger portion of the revenue paid for content both within and beyond their traditional service domains. This paper describes an approach to digital content distribution that leverages existing Intelligent Network infrastructure that many carriers already possess, as well as Web Services.