Mahfuzur Rahman

The war of presence and instant messaging: right protocols and APIs

Instant messaging, coupled with presence and availability management services, is emerging as a killer application in both wireless and wireline networks. This has led to the emergence of a number of standard protocols (SIP/SIMPLE, Wireless Village, JABBER, etc.) in addition to proprietary protocols (MSN, Yahoo!, AOL, etc.) and standard APIs (JAIN SIMPLE, JAIN Presence, JAIN Instant Messaging, PAM, JAIN PAM, etc.). We present the motivations, the objectives, as well as the scope and technical merits of each of these standards. In addition, we discuss, in detail, the chances of any of these standards prevailing in the industry and the relevant standardization bodies. Significant effort is devoted to the discussion and analysis of presence and instant messaging enabling technologies. In particular, we emphasize the role of Java middleware in enabling and animating such services. Finally, we reveal our views on how the various involved forums (in which those presence and instant-messaging protocols and APIs are being elaborated) can work together to define and promote a coherent suite of specifications, architectures, implementations, technology compatibility requirements, and roadmaps.

Mobility support for universal plug and play (UPnP) devices using session initiation protocol (SIP)

Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) consists of a set of protocols that allow consumer electronic (CE) devices to discover, connect and access one another when they are on the same sub-network. However, UPnP does not provide support for device mobility in which devices are allowed to move from one IP networking domain to another without affecting their ability to interact with other devices. In this paper we propose a system level architecture to provide mobility support to UPnP devices and services by utilizing Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). We propose a new UPnP mime type for carrying UPnP data. We also propose a UPnP packet message forwarding architecture, which uses SIP signaling procedures and hides the mobility of UPnP capable devices from other devices in a network.

Remote access and networked appliance control using biometrics features

With the advent of home networks and the proliferation of broadband connectivity to homes, there is an increasing demand for a secure end-to-end mechanism to remotely access home networks and control home appliance from remote sites on the other side of the Internet. We propose an architecture for secure access to home or an organizations networks and control of networked appliances inside a home or within an organization from a remote location. We use biometrics features and a one-time password mechanism on top of secure socket layer (SSL) for authentication. We also provide three layers of security levels for network communication, and also a mechanism for secure file accesses based on the security privileges assigned to various users is proposed The files to be accessed from the server are categorized depending on their access privileges and encrypted using a key assigned to each category.

Standard SIP-based instant messaging and presence APIs for networked devices

With the growing demand of instant messaging and presence services for both wireless and wire-line networks, we have seen the emergence of a number of standard protocols for instant messaging and presence such as SIP [M. Handley, et al., (2002)] for instant messaging and presence leveraging (SIMPLE) [J. Rosenberg, et al., (2001)], presence and instant messaging (PRIM), wireless village protocol and vendor dependent protocols (Yahoo!, MSN, etc.). With the advent of these protocols there is also a need to develop standard set of APIs (application programming interface) to enable application developers implement instant messaging (IM) and presence applications on top of these protocols. We address the standardization work being undertaken at the Java/spl trade/ community process (JCP) to build such APIs. Our work at JAIN/spl trade/ forum of JCP will provide a set of standard APIs for instant messaging and presence based on Internet Engineering Task Forces (IETF) standard protocol SIP and its extension SIMPLE (SIP for instant messaging and presence leveraging). The proposed standard will provide a portable and secure interface to exchange instant messages and presence information for SIMPLE protocol based clients on mobile devices such as PDAs, mobile phones etc.

On secured end-to-end appliance control using SIP

With the advent of home networks and the proliferation of broadband connectivity to homes, there is an increasing demand for a secure end-to-end protocol to remotely control home appliances from remote sites on the other side of the Internet. Recently session initiation protocol (SIP) with some extensions has been proposed as a candidate protocol for delivering control commands to home appliances. We discuss issues related to secure remote appliance control and evaluate SIP as a candidate solution. At the end we propose some extensions to SIP to make it more suitable for appliance control. In particular, we discuss two different security associations that can be established between the user and the controlled appliances. We also argue that mutual authentication, which allows communicating parties to verify each others identity, is an important requirement for remote appliance control, and show how it can be achieved by using SIP. Finally, we describe how appliances can be controlled using the existing SIP message method.

Secure network communication using biometrics

In this paper we propose an architecture for secure access of computers inside an organization from a remote location. We use biometrics features and a one-time password mechanism on top of secure socket layer (SSL) for authentication. We also provide three layers of security levels for network communication, and also a mechanism for secure file accesses based on the security privileges assigned to various users is proposed. The files to be accessed from the server are categorized depending on their access privileges and encrypted using a key assigned to each category.

Handling large real-time disk access requests with variable priorities

This paper addresses the problem of providing different levels of performance guarantee for disk I/O. In typical applications, disk requests are classified into different categories based on the required quality of service (QoS), which is usually characterized by a priority and a deadline for each request. Traditional algorithms usually service all high priority requests before low priority requests, and this may result in potential starvation for the low priority requests. In this paper, a disk-scheduling algorithm is introduced to provide such QoS guarantee and avoid starvation. Our target applications for this algorithm are non-linear editing systems for continuous data, where the block size is large enough to ignore the seek time. The proposed algorithm tries to service a request with lower priority and strict deadline only if servicing this request will not violate the deadline constraints of a higher priority request. Simulation experiments are presented to show the superiority of the proposed algorithm over the traditional ones.