Flávio de Oliveira Silva

Empowering software defined wireless Networks through Media Independent Handover management

Internet access and service utilization has been exploding in mobile devices, through the leverage of WLAN, 3G and now LTE connections. It is this explosion as well that is stressing the underlying fabric of the Internet, and motivating new solutions, such as Software Defined Networking (SDN), to build the controlling support and extension capabilities of the Future Internet. However, SDN has yet to reach the necessary traction to be deployed, and has been more relayed towards experimentation supporting frameworks and away from wireless environments. This paper explores SDN mechanisms and increments them with Media Independent Handover services from the IEEE 802.21 standard, coupling them in a single framework for the dynamic optimized support of OpenFlow path establishment and wireless connectivity establishment. The framework was implemented over open-source software in a physical testbed, with results showing the benefits that this solution brings in terms of performance and signaling overhead, when compared with more basic approaches.

Enabling Future Internet Architecture Research and Experimentation by Using Software Defined Networking

Internet core protocols were designed in the seventies and after four decades and a huge success, most of that initial design is still in place. As stated by Moores law, current digital devices offer a huge processing capacity when compared to the computational resources of the early Internet. Moreover, physical links, wired or not, offer great connectivity and high throughput capacity. New applications bring a new set of requirements that the Internet is not able to satisfy in a proper way. The Internet architecture must be reviewed and several research groups are engaged in this design. Software Defined Networking (SDN), currently materialized in OpenFlow, represents an extraordinary opportunity to rethink computer networks, enabling the design and deployment of a future Internet. This paper presents SDN based technologies available, describes some research initiatives and discusses how the research community can use them to shape future Internet architecture.

On the analysis of multicast traffic over the Entity Title Architecture

New applications bring a new set of requirements that the Internet is not able to satisfy in a proper way. Internet architecture must be reviewed and researchers from all over the world are engaged in the design of a new Internet. Software Defined Networking (SDN), which is materialized in OpenFlow, represents an extraordinary opportunity to rethink computer networks. In this paper, taking advantage of SDN and the concepts of our previous work regarding the Entity Title Model, we present a proof of concept OpenFlow based implementation of the Entity Title Architecture. It is a clean slate network architecture for future networks where multicast and mobility are seamlessly provided. By using this implementation, we describe some experiments conducted and present a comparison between a video application implemented first, using the TCP/IP stack and then using our architecture focusing on its multicast capabilities and by consequently reducing bandwidth consumption. The results presented in this paper show that this consumption near the source by using our architecture remains constant while using TCP/IP it increases monotonically.

Software defined eHealth networking towards a truly mobile and reliable system

The eHealth technology will change the way the health system is handled, mainly in developing countries, such as Brazil, where there is a huge shortage of healthcare professionals to assist the patients, especially for those living in rural and remote areas. The Context-Aware Mobile Approach (CAMA) seeks to improve the Brazilian primary healthcare system through context-aware eHealth facilities, such as people mobility, expecting to change the way that healthcare services are applied, managed, and maintained to achieve efficiency and safety for both patients and hospital staffs. Since this type of technology will handle vital parameters of people, it is mandatory that the involved network infrastructure can provide dependability and reliability so it can fulfill their role properly. This paper presents a network infrastructure based on the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm to enable quality-oriented mobility control capabilities in the CAMA approach, to deploy mobility prediction, Point of Attachment (PoA) decision and handover setup meeting both application quality requirements and current wireless quality conditions, then improving the dependability and reliability of the eHealth biofeedback systems.

Entity title architecture extensions towards advanced quality-oriented mobility control capabilities

The emergence of new technologies, in addition with the popularization of mobile devices and wireless communication systems, demands a variety of requirements that current Internet is not able to comply adequately. In this scenario, the innovative information-centric Entity Title Architecture (ETArch), a Future Internet (FI) clean slate approach, was design to efficiently cope with the increasing demand of beyond-IP networking services. Nevertheless, despite all ETArch capabilities, it was not projected with reliable networking functions, which limits its operability in mobile multimedia networking, and will seriously restrict its scope in Future Internet scenarios. Therefore, our work extends ETArch mobility control with advanced quality-oriented mobility functions, to deploy mobility prediction, Point of Attachment (PoA) decision and handover setup meeting both session quality requirements of active session flows and current wireless quality conditions of neighbouring PoA candidates. The effectiveness of the proposed additions were confirmed through a preliminary evaluation carried out by MATLAB, in which we have considered distinct applications scenario, and showed that they were able to outperform the most relevant alternative solutions in terms of performance and quality of service.

An innovative software-defined WiNeMO architecture for advanced QoS-guaranteed mobile service transport

The spread of wireless networks and the growing proliferation of mobile devices require the development of new mobility control mechanisms to support the different demands of traffic in different network conditions. A major obstacle to developing this kind of technology refers to the complexity involved in handling all the information about the large number of Moving Objects (MOs), as well as the total signaling overhead required to manage these procedures in the network. Several initiatives proposed by the scientific community to address this issue reveal weakness, particularly by relying on the MO for the responsibility in triggering the mobility process. Moreover, they are often only guided by wireless medium statistics, such as the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) of the candidate Point of Attachment (PoA). Thus, this work seeks to develop, evaluate and validate a high-level communication infrastructure for Wireless Networking for Moving Objects (WiNeMO) systems by making use of the flexibility provided by the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm, where network functions are easily and efficiently deployed by integrating OpenFlow and IEEE 802.21 standards. The Software-Defined WiNeMO (SDWiNeMO) holistic framework is largely aimed at enabling the network infrastructure to provision service transport while guaranteeing Quality of Service (QoS) for multiple mobile applications, as well as providing seamless mobility for MOs always seeking the best connectivity to maintain good Quality of Experience (QoE) over time. Moreover, SDWiNeMO deploys a new mobility-based load balancing technique to increase MO admissions for situations involving PoA resource saturation. The feasibility and effectiveness of our proposal is assessed by prototyping and evaluating the SDWiNeMO architecture in a baseline emulated testbed comprising realistic networking conditions. For purposes of benchmarking, the analysis was conducted in the control and data plane aspects, which demonstrate that the SDWiNeMO proposal significantly outperforms typical QoS-capable Internet Protocol (IP)-based SDN configurations by allowing the network to handle the multimedia traffic with optimal QoS-guaranteed transport and acceptable QoE over time.

Title model ontology for future internet networks

The currently Internet foundation is characterized on the interconnection of end-hosts exchanging information through its network interfaces usually identified by IP addresses. Notwithstanding its benefits, the TCP/IP architecture had not a bold evolution in contrast with the augmenting and real trends in networks, becoming service-aware. An Internet of active social, mobile and voracious content producers and consumers. Considering the limitations of the current Internet architecture, the envisaged scenarios and work efforts for Future Internet, this paper presents a contribution for the interaction between entities through the formalization of the Entity Title Model.

The quest for the web services stack: a fast trip

The strong use of distributed applications is due to the fact that Internet and the Web are based on common and widely accepted standards. Web services can be the basis of the next generation of applications. Unfortunately if someone asks for the layers of the Web Services protocol stack, the answer cannot be given right away. Considering that this technology is emerging and its bases are being defined, different companies and working groups propose standards that come and go with the same speed. Another problem is that these groups provide their own vision about the stack and, finally, the widely available standards proposals makes this environment a standards Babel. In this paper we will run a quest in order to find the Web Services protocol stack, by putting together different standards and visions and finally providing an independent Web Services protocol stack.

A Web service authentication control system based on SRP and SAML

Actually Internet applications can provide not only information, but also, another way of getting distributed computing. Cooperative information systems are autonomous and heterogeneous systems, distributed geographically, but interconnected. Web Services provides a set of interoperable standards that can be used to connect distributed applications. On this environment, security is a critical issue, and an attack can expose systems services without authentication. An end-to-end connection, like the ones involved in such systems, usually requires that an authentication can be shared between different information systems. Web Services security model is not yet fully defined and a lot of proposals are emerging, delaying the adoption of this technology in many situations. In this paper we present multiplatform authentication control system based on an extension of SRP protocol, using SAML. Within this solution, authentication control can be leveraged, even with weak passwords and an authentication assertion can be exchanged with different cooperative information systems.

Semantically enriched services to understand the need of entities

Researchers from all over the world are engaged in the design of a new Internet, and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is one of the results of this engagement. Net-Ontology uses a SDN approach to bring semantics to the intermediate network layers and make them capable of handling application requirements and adapt their behaviour over time as required. In this paper we present an experimental evaluation of Net-Ontology and a feature comparison against the traditional TCP/IP stack. This paper extends our earlier work towards a Future Internet, showing a viable approach to introduce semantics at network lower layers by contributing to bring richer and efficient services.