Giuseppe Tropea

On the interplay among naming, content validity and caching in Information Centric Networks

Information Centric Networking (ICN) is paradigm in which the network layer provides users with content addressed “by name”. In-network caching is one of the key functionality to be provided by ICN nodes. To avoid network nodes caching fake contents, it is necessary to verify the validity of data items. A content is deemed to be valid if it verifies three properties: i) integrity: it has not be modified; ii) provenance: it comes from the intended source; iii) relevance: it is indeed the content requested from the user (by using the name of that content). In this paper, we discuss the interplay among three pivotal ICN aspects: caching, validity and naming. Specifically, we will investigate different naming and digital signature schemes, evaluating their speed, overhead and their impact on caching performance. Perhaps counter-intuitively, we find that the relatively slow verification time of todays signatures, which bottlenecks the rate of storing new data items in the network caches, does not come as a critical shortcoming, but may actually even improve the cache hit probability when the LRU caching policy is employed.

Combining Monitoring and Privacy-Protection Perspectives in a Semantic Model for IP Traffic Measurements

Several research efforts have focused on the topic of unified data models for IP traffic measurements. However, this domain is so rich in semantics and comprises so many challenges that a standard for sharing and handling datasets is difficult to achieve consensus on. This work is backed by the know-how coming from two projects dealing with unified, privacy-aware access to network data and aims to achieve an integrated model, combining the various concepts involved.

MPEG-M: A digital media ecosystem for interoperable applications

MPEG-M is a suite of ISO/IEC standards (ISO/IEC 23006) that has been developed under the auspices of Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). MPEG-M, also known as Multimedia Service Platform Technologies (MSPT), facilitates a collection of multimedia middleware APIs and elementary services as well as service aggregation so that service providers can offer users a plethora of innovative services by extending current IPTV technology toward the seamless integration of personal content creation and distribution, e-commerce, social networks and Internet distribution of digital media.

Introducing Privacy Awareness in Network Monitoring Ontologies

The availability of IP traffic monitoring data is of great importance to network operators, researchers and law enforcement agencies. However, privacy legislation, commercial concerns and their implications constitute an impediment in the exploitation of such data. In order to allow compliance to the derived issues and protect privacy without compromising information usability, this chapter leverages findings from two separate research initiatives and aims at paving the way towards a unified approach for privacy-aware collection, processing and exchange of data that stem from network monitoring activities. It investigates the fundamental principles and requirements for a privacy-aware ontological model in the semantic domain of monitoring-data management and exchange, as well as a rule-based approach in specifying the appropriate privacy policies, and enables a clean separation between data models and security semantics. It pursues the definition of the appropriate structures for seamlessly introducing privacy awareness in network monitoring ontologies, including user context, intended usage purpose, data age and privacy obligations. Such an approach enables to transfer the expressiveness of legislation rules into the model and allow their automatic processing.

Semantically connected web resources with MPEG-21

The Web is rapidly becoming the prime medium for human socialization. The resources that enable that process (social web sites, blogs, media objects, etc.) present growing complexity and, collectively, weave an ever more intricate web of relationships. Current technology for declaring those relationships is predominantly implicit, ambiguous and semantically poor. As a consequence, their automatic assessment is complex and error prone, preventing the satisfaction of users’ needs such as effective semantic searches. To address these limitations, whilst enabling the explicit declaration of semantically unambiguous relationships between digital resources, a solution employing structured semantic descriptors and ontologies was conceived, based on MPEG-21. This paper explains the functioning of the devised mechanism, and goes beyond that, into the definition of two novel employment venues for it, at the service of two real-world usage scenarios. These demonstrate the mechanism’s added value as a powerful alternative for the semantically aware interconnection of web resources, and highlight the increased QoE that said mechanism enables.

Digital forgetting in information-centric networks: the CONVERGENCE perspective

The Web is rapidly becoming the prime medium for human socialization. As it evolves towards an information-centric operation, it records everything and forgets nothing, assuming that every online resource disclosed by people (photos, posts, multimedia files, etc.) is permanently valid and is to be stored forever. However, throughout their lives, people tend to change, both in their habits as well as in their views and opinions. In many situations, as the years go by, information released loses relevance or people may decide they no longer want others to access information they have previously published. The work presented in this paper strives for a new information persistence paradigm, whereby the enforcement of “digital forgetting” is implemented over an information-centric model for the Internet. The defined solution enables the definitive elimination of digital objects, either on-demand or on a pre-scheduled basis, and, hence, their “forgetting.” The solution, conceived within the framework of the European project CONVERGENCE, is based on the employment of metadata descriptions about resources, which unambiguously identify their rightful owners. This additional data is efficiently bound to the resource through the use of an extended version of the MPEG-21 Digital Item specification, and its prescriptions are enforced by CONVERGENCEs distributed provisions.

The Versatile Digital Item

This chapter provides the definition of the Versatile Digital Item, the basic unit for data distribution used within the CONVERGENCE system. It explains how the VDI builds on, and extends the scope, of the MPEG-21 Digital Item to build a self-contained data package that can be used to encapsulate any kind of digital information in an information-centric, publish-subscribe framework. This chapter details some of the most relevant aspects pertaining to the structure of the VDI, its identification, its connection into sequences, and its logical interweaving into a fabric of inter-VDI relationships. It also explores some implications of the above aspects on the system’s operations.

Business Models and Exploitation

This chapter provides the CONVERGENCE business Models for the commercial and non-commercial exploitation of CONVERGENCE applications and technology. The chapter collects the studies of feasibility and implications of alternative exploitation strategies. We identified competing products and services, and evidenced the market risks and threats.

The Adoption of Rights Expression Language in CONVERGENCE

This chapter describes CONVERGENCE’s licensing scheme and its governance, based on the MPEG-21 part 5 standard and on the specific content protection and rights management requirements, identified in the CONVERGENCE use scenarios. In the digital media value chain, Rights Expression Languages (RELs) are used to enable controlled access to digital resources, addressing several different issues from the description of licenses to access and usage control, payments, etc. A REL is an essential component of any security infrastructure supporting differentiated controlled access to digital resources, and providing adequate protection of intellectual property rights. Among these, the project has selected the MPEG-21 part 5 open standard, which can be implemented in XML, and is one of the main current contenders for a general-purpose REL. Our scheme is designed in the light of CONVERGENCE’s ability to distribute and manage any kind of digital resource in a large distributed environment, and this chapter explains how REL data is embedded into the CONVERGENCE data unit, the Versatile Digital Item (VDI) and introduces a basic set of security features, based on digital certificates, for the enforcement of the rights and conditions expressed in CONVERGENCE licenses.