Michael Nidd

Service discovery in DEAPspace

The DEAPspace group at IBM Research, Zurich Lab is developing a system in which services can be shared between proximate devices. The target environment is single-hop short-range wireless systems, and the solution must offer prompt responsiveness for transient devices. In this article, the service discovery algorithm is presented. Through this new algorithm, a computing device can detect the presence of neighboring devices, share configuration and service information with those devices, and also notice when devices become unavailable. Targeted for wireless ad hoc single-hop networks, this solution improves the responsiveness of devices to changes in their environments. The effectiveness of this algorithm is demonstrated through comparison with others that achieve similar goals, considering the responsiveness to changes in the local environment, power consumption, and bandwidth requirement of devices.

Remote health-care monitoring using personal care connect

Caring for patients with chronic illnesses is costly-nearly

Personal mobile hub

1.27 trillion today and predicted to grow much larger. To address this trend, we have designed and built a platform, called Personal Care Connect (PCC), to facilitate the remote monitoring of patients. By providing caregivers with timely access to a patients health status, they can provide patients with appropriate preventive interventions, helping to avoid hospitalization and to improve the patients quality of care and quality of life. PCC may reduce health-care costs by focusing on preventive measures and monitoring instead of emergency care and hospital admissions. Although PCC may have features in common with other remote monitoring systems, it differs from them in that it is a standards-based, open platform designed to integrate with devices from device vendors and applications from independent software vendors. One of the motivations for PCC is to create and propagate a working environment of medical devices and applications that results in innovative solutions. In this paper, we describe the PCC remote monitoring system, including our pilot tests of the system.

DEAPspace: transient ad-hoc networking of pervasive devices

As advances are made in wearable computing, there is a need for a personal mobile hub that can manage interactions between the wearable devices and act as a proxy for these devices. In this paper we describe why this is a good model, why the interfaces need to be open, and why different parties in the value chain, such as wireless service providers and device manufacturers, may prefer such architecture. Our personal mobile hub supports multiple wireless protocols, some short range and some wide area so that the power of the Internet is available even to body worn sensors. We describe custom hardware that we built for this purpose and also the software necessary to make this concept work. We have tested out this architecture with an end-to-end application. The working system was demonstrated at the annual IBM Stockholders meeting in 2004 and is also available for customers to see at the IBM Industry Solutions Lab in Zurich.

Timeliness of service discovery in DEAPspace

The DEAPspace project is building an interaction framework for connecting pervasive devices over the wireless medium, supporting the development of new proximity-based collective distributed applications. The main components of this framework are the discovery algorithm and the service description model. DEAPspace provides devices with useful information about the other devices in their surroundings. This information can be queried in a consistent way that will tolerate evolutions, and allow legacy devices to continue to function in the fast-developing world of pervasive gadgets. The discovery is done in a power-efficient, and network-friendly way, and will adapt to a wide range of error conditions. This framework has been implemented, and allows the development of distributed applications that use ad-hoc transient networking as part of their function. The primary implementation was in Java. A subset of the code was also written in C, to allow the use of machines which do not have a JVM. In addition to simulation, the code has been tested over TCP/IP and the Ethernet interface of an 802.11 link.

Automated business application discovery

A new algorithm is presented, through which a computing device can detect the presence of neighbouring devices, share configuration and service information with those devices, and also notice when devices become unavailable. Targeted for wireless ad-hoc, single-hop networks, this solution reduces the number of transmissions required from individual devices. The effectiveness of this algorithm is demonstrated through comparison with others that achieve similar goals.

Tool-based risk assessment of cloud infrastructures as socio-technical systems

When planning a data center migration it is critical to discover the clients business applications and on which devices (server, storage and appliances) those applications are deployed in the infrastructure. It is also important to understand the dependencies the applications have on the infrastructure, on other applications, and in some cases on systems external to the client. Clients can only rarely provide that information in a complete and accurate manner. The usual approach then has been to obtain the information by asking the clients application and platform owners a series of questions but in most cases clients do not have the tools or skills to acquire the requested information. The lack of accurate information leads to project delays, increased cost and higher levels of risk. In this paper we present an algorithm and tools for programmatically identifying and locating business application instances in an infrastructure, based on weighted similarity metric. We discuss results from our preliminary evaluation and the correctness of the algorithm. Such automated approach to application discovery significantly helps clients to achieve their project objectives and timeline without imposing additional work on the application and platform owners.

CA-PK: conditional access for broadcast networks

Assessing risk in cloud infrastructures is difficult. Typical cloud infrastructures contain potentially thousands of nodes that are highly interconnected and dynamic. Another important component is the set of human actors who get access to data and computing infrastructure. The cloud infrastructure therefore constitutes a socio-technical system. Attacks on socio-technical systems are still mostly identified through expert brainstorming. However, formal risk assessment for systems including human actors requires modeling human behavior, which is difficult at best. In this chapter, we present a modeling exercise for cloud infrastructures using the socio-technical model developed in the TRESPASS project; after showing how to model typical components of a cloud infrastructure, we show how attacks are identified on this model and discuss their connection to risk assessment. The technical part of the model is extracted automatically from the configuration of the cloud infrastructure, which is especially important for systems so dynamic and complex.

Aligning infrastructure and business processes using watermarks

This paper presents a conditional access solution suitable for broadcast networks (e.g. Eureka‐147 DAB, XM Radios SDARS, etc.). This solution, called CA‐PK (Conditional Access through Public Keys), can only be implemented in software, although it can utilize external crypto processors and allows a content provider to operate a conditional access system independently of third parties (i.e. DAB or GSM network operators). Furthermore, it integrates the consumer into the protection chain, creating a social environment that discourages illegal redistribution of access keys. Copyright

Service advertisements in wireless local networks

Associating business information with information about IT resources is important. Organizations need to understand the business relevance of resources to answer questions such as which business applications are affected in case of a server outage, and to understand the resource footprint of business applications. Maintaining this relationship over the life cycles of resources and business applications is difficult because data on business applications and IT configuration information are maintained very differently. Business application information is maintained by employees in the course of a management process, whereas IT configuration information can be maintained more vigorously by scanning IT resources and storing the results in a Configuration Management Database (CMDB), where this actual configuration information can be reconciled with an authorized configuration. This paper proposes an approach to associate business application information with configuration information by “watermarking” IT resources with references to information on the business purpose they serve. This enables the establishment of a relationship between automatically detected and manually managed information in a consistent, reliable, and cost-effective way as well as the identification of inconsistencies that may develop over time.