Sofia Kapellaki

A Proxy for Privacy: the Discreet Box

The issue of user privacy is constantly brought to the spotlight since an ever increasing number of online services collects and processes personal information from users, in the context of personalized service provision. Although technology makes the collection of data easy, their protection against abuse is left to data protection legislation. However, the privacy requirements, other than being general and abstract terms to be regarded as legislature issues, should be brought down in the technological reality and carefully accounted for in devising technical solutions. In order to limit the disclosure and avoid the misuse of personal data, this paper discusses an architectural proposal for a middleware system that will enforce protection of user privacy through technical means. This goal is facilitated by a combination of a policy framework, a sensible interpretation of regulations into policies and the introduction of a privacy broker, named the discreet box.

An OSA/Parlay-Based Middleware Architecture for Location-Based Services

The shift of the telecommunication world towards Next Generation Networks (NGNs) has triggered the interest in location-based services (LBSs) for service providers. This interest has elevated the need for seamless access to location information by anyone wishing to evade the overhead of adapting to proprietary interfaces. This paper discusses the use of Open Application Interfaces to unify the access to location information maintained by network components and describes the implementation of a middleware gateway to location information, which complies with these open interfaces. Additionally, the performance of different distributed technologies providing access to the gateway is evaluated.

Facilitating context-awareness through hardware personalization devices: the simplicity device

The paper presents the specification, development and initial performance evaluation of the Simplicity Device (SD), which is one of the key components of the SIMPLICITY Architecture. The SD is both a portable personalization device and a hardware Single-Sign-On (SSO) token. It accommodates the Simplicity User Profile (SUP), which contains user context related information and has been designed according to 3GPP and W3C standards. In cooperation with a distributed brokerage framework the SD provides the users with the means to automatically personalize terminals and services according to their context by the simple act of “plugging” the SD into any SIMPLICITY compliant user equipment. Within this paper we present the generic SD architecture which is the basis for different SD implementations and consequently we focus on a JavaCard SD implementation and its performance evaluation.

Architectural framework for resource management optimization over heterogeneous wireless networks

The main goal of wireless telecommunication world can be briefly summarized as: “communication anywhere, anytime, any-media and principally at high-data rates.” On the other hand, this goal is in conflict with the co-existence of plenty different current and emerging wireless systems covering almost the whole world, since each one follows its own architecture and is based on its particular bedrocks. This results in a heterogeneous depiction of the hyper-set of wireless communications systems. The scope of this paper is to present a highly innovative and scalable architectural framework, which will allow different wireless systems to be interconnected in a common way, able to achieve resource management optimization, augmentation of network performance and maximum utilization of the networks. It will describe a hierarchical management system covering all GSM, GPRS, UMTS and WLAN networks each one individually, as well as a unified and wide wireless telecommunication system including all later, in order to provide enhanced capacity and quality via the accomplished network interworking. The main idea is to monitor all the resources using distributed monitoring components with intention to feed an additional centralized system with alarms, so that a set of management techniques will be selected and applied where needed. In parallel, the centralized system will be able to combine the aforementioned alarms with business models for the efficient use of the available networks according to the type of user, the type of application as well as the user’s location.