Joshua Joy

ICEMAN: A System for Efficient, Robust and Secure Situational Awareness at the Network Edge

Situational awareness applications in disaster response and tactical scenarios require efficient communication without a managed infrastructure. In principle, the performance, size, weight, and power of commercial off-the-shelf mobile phones and tablets are sufficient to support such applications, provided that efficient protocols and mechanisms are put in place for the efficient and secure sharing and storage of content among such devices. ICEMAN (Information CEntric Mobile Ad-hoc Networking) is a system that allows applications to request content objects by their attributes, and integrates its API with utility-based dissemination, caching, and network-coding mechanisms to deliver content. ICEMAN is implemented based on the Haggle architecture running in the Android operating system, and supports distributed situational-awareness applications operating in networks subject to severe disruption. Its functionality is described, and performance results of the ICEMAN implementation running in mobile phones and the CORE/EMANE network emulation are presented for several test scenarios.

CLIPS: Infrastructure-free collaborative indoor positioning scheme for time-critical team operations

Indoor localization has attracted much attention recently due to its potential for realizing indoor location-aware application services. This paper considers a time-critical scenario with a team of soldiers or first responders conducting emergency mission operations in a large building in which infrastructure-based localization is not feasible (e.g., due to management/installation costs, power outage, terrorist attacks). To this end, we design and implement a collaborative indoor positioning scheme (CLIPS) that requires no preexisting indoor infrastructure. We assume that each user has a received signal strength map for the area in reference. This is used by the application to compare and select a set of feasible positions, when the device receives actual signal strength values at run time. Then, dead reckoning is performed to remove invalid candidate coordinates eventually leaving only the correct one which can be shared amongst the team. Our evaluation results from an Android-based testbed show that CLIPS converges to an accurate set of coordinates much faster than existing noncollaborative schemes (more than 50% improvement under the considered scenarios).

Network coding for content-based intermittently connected emergency networks

First responders at the edge of the network rely on situation awareness updates to arrive in a timely matter, even when the fixed infrastructure is unavailable. The technical advancements of the commercial mobile phones make them capable of supporting such requirements under very disruptive network conditions. In this demo, we present a network architecture that exploits partial caches by utilizing network coding to deliver large files (e.g. images) to first responders. The architecture is based on a content centric network platform called ICEMAN(Information CEntric Mobile Ad-hoc Networking) and runs on Android phones. We demonstrate our system in a file dissemination scenario in a CORE/EMANE network emulation. We measure file delivery ratio, latency, and network overhead and report significant improvements that network coding achieves over fragmentation.

ICEMAN: A Practical Architecture for Situational Awareness at the Network Edge

Situational awareness applications used in disaster response and tactical scenarios require efficient communication without support from a fixed infrastructure. As commercial off-the-shelf mobile phones and tablets become cheaper, they are increasingly deployed in volatile ad-hoc environments. Despite wide use, networking in an efficient and distributed way remains as an active research area, and few implementation results on mobile devices exist. In these scenarios, where users both produce and consume sensed content, the network should efficiently match content to user interests without making any fixed infrastructure assumptions. We propose the ICEMAN (Information CEntric Mobile Ad-hoc Networking) architecture which is designed to support distributed situational awareness applications in tactical scenarios. We describe the motivation, features, and implementation of our architecture and briefly summarize the performance of this novel architecture.

Recent advances and challenges in human-centric multimedia mobile cloud computing

The increasing usage of cloud computing, along with the proliferation of mobile devices and the demand for multimedia services, are changing the life style of users and creating new opportunities to providers and clients. Multimedia data will account for up to 90% of all Internet traffic in a few years, where most of the content will be created, shared, and accessed by mobile smartphones/tablets (carried by humans or placed in vehicles). However, this novel mobile multimedia era imposes new challenges for the networks, content, terminals, and humans, and must overcome problems associated, for instance, with high congestion, low scalability, fast battery consumption, and poor user experience. This paper discusses recent advances and challenges in human-centric mobile multimedia cloud computing approaches. On the one hand, Internet cloud will ubiquitously enrich multimedia mobile environments with more advanced and powerful features, including high processing and memory, scalability, availability, and adaptability. On the other hand, mobile devices will efficiently cooperate with each other to form mobile clouds that offload the Internet clouds from tasks that the latter cannot perform in a timely or efficient manner, including video and resource sharing. Both Internet and mobile clouds will be efficiently used to adapt/optimize multimedia flows to a single user or a group of users according to the current network conditions, context-awareness, content characteristics, device capabilities, and human experience.

DiscoverFriends: Secure social network communication in mobile ad hoc networks

This paper presents a secure communication application called DiscoverFriends. Its purpose is to communicate to a group of online friends while bypassing their respective social networking servers under a mobile ad hoc network environment. DiscoverFriends leverages Bloom filters and a hybrid encryption technique with a self-organized public-key management scheme to securely identify friends and provide authentication. Firstly, Bloom filters provide a space-efficient means of security for friend discovery. Secondly, a combination of asymmetric and symmetric encryptions algorithms utilizes both benefits to provide increased security at lower computational cost. Thirdly, a self-organized public-key management scheme helps authenticate users using a trust graph in an infrastructureless setting. With the use of Wi-Fi Direct technology, an initiator is able to establish an ad hoc network where friends can connect to within the application. DiscoverFriends was analyzed under two threat models: replay attacks and eavesdropping by a common friend. Finally, the paper evaluates the application based on storage usage and processing.

Autonomic Communications in Software-Driven Networks

Autonomic communications aim to provide the quality-of-service in networks using self-management mechanisms. It inherits many characteristics from autonomic computing, in particular, when communication systems are running as specialized applications in software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV)-enabled cloud environments. This paper surveys autonomic computing and communications in the context of software-driven networks, i.e., networks based on SDN/NFV concepts. Autonomic communications create new challenges in terms of security, operations, and business support. We discuss several goals, research challenges, and development issues on self-management mechanisms and architectures in software-driven networks. This paper covers multiple perspectives of autonomic communications in software-driven networks, such as automatic testing, integration, and deployment of network functions. We also focus on self-management and optimization, which make use of machine learning techniques.

DT-ICAN: A Disruption-Tolerant Information-centric Ad-Hoc Network

Recently, Information-Centric Network (ICN) has been attracting much attention with its promising future as next-generation Internet architecture. While ICN is scalable and efficient in Internet, concerns are raised when ICN is deployed in frequently-disruptive vehicular ad-hoc networks. In this paper, we introduce DT-ICAN, which provides low-cost, bandwidth efficient network operations to conquer disruptions while preserving the context awareness of ICN. We implement DT-ICANSIM, an open-source simulator for DT-ICAN in Qual Net. We evaluate the trade-off between the performance gain in data availability and the overhead due to epidemic dissemination using real-world traces. Our results show that DT-ICAN improves the file retrieval rate by 45% compared to traditional multi-hop ICN in real-world scenario, proving the necessity of providing an opportunistic networking option when end-to-end connectivity is unavailable for VANET ICN.

A new approach to coding in content-based MANETs

In content-based mobile ad hoc networks (CB-MANETs), random linear network coding (NC) can be used to reliably disseminate large files under intermittent connectivity. Conventional NC involves random unrestricted coding at intermediate nodes. This however is vulnerable to pollution attacks. To avoid attacks, a brute force approach is to allow mixing only at the source. However, source restricted NC generally reduces the robustness of the code in the face of errors, losses and mobility induced intermittence. CB-MANETs introduce a new option. Caching is common in CB MANETs and a fully reassembled cached file can be viewed as a new source. Thus, NC packets can be mixed at all sources (including the originator and the intermediate caches) yet still providing protection from pollution. The hypothesis we wish to test in this paper is whether in CB-MANETs with replicated caches of a file, the performance (in terms of robustness) of the coding restricted to full caches equals that of unrestricted coding. In this paper, we examine and compare four options: unrestricted coding, full cache coding, source only coding, and no coding. As expected, we find that full cache coding remains competitive with unrestricted coding while maintaining full protection against pollution attacks.

DiscoverFriends: secure social network communication in mobile ad hoc networks

This paper presents a secure communication application called DiscoverFriends. Its purpose is to communicate to a group of online friends while bypassing their respective social networking servers under a mobile ad hoc network environment. DiscoverFriends leverages Bloom filters and a hybrid encryption technique with a self-organized public-key management scheme to securely identify friends and provide authentication. Firstly, Bloom filters provide a space-efficient means of security for friend discovery. Secondly, a combination of asymmetric and symmetric encryptions algorithms utilizes both benefits to provide increased security at lower computational cost. Thirdly, a self-organized public-key management scheme helps authenticate users using a trust graph in an infrastructureless setting. With the use of Wi-Fi Direct technology, an initiator is able to establish an ad hoc network where friends can connect to within the application. DiscoverFriends was analyzed under two threat models: replay attacks and eavesdropping by a common friend. Finally, the paper evaluates the application based on storage usage and processing.