Stan Moyer

Service portability of networked appliances

Networked appliances are popularly viewed as one of the next major Internet growth areas. This document outlines an approach for delivering services to networked appliances using techniques that allow mobility of these services both in a conventional location independent sense and between physical devices. Key requirements to address this market are identified and the document then goes on to present a technical solution to meet these requirements together with worked examples. It concludes with suggestions for further work.

Home network configuration management and service assurance

With the growth in home networking driven by the growth of broadband delivery to home environments an opportunity exists for a network-based service assurance and configuration platform for multiple PC households. In the future we would expect this to include smart appliances, digital TV, Web tablets, etc. The configuration requirements become increasingly complex as broadband home network users start to appreciate the power of their connectivity and want to configure additional services such as remote corporate network access (VPN), personal Web server hosting, MP3-file sharing, and multi-player (on-line) gaming. In this paper we describe the motivation for this work, the requirements for providing a network-based home network management solution and then outline a potential solution architecture.

Trends in consumer communications: More services and media, less wires

Current major themes in the consumer communications area are media delivery, and wireless and mobile connectivity to consumer electronic devices. These themes are also strongly represented in the articles in this issue of the Consumer Communications and Networking Series. We have selected seven articles covering a broad range of topics within these themes from multimedia communications, to video delivery to in-home wireless technologies, to mobile technologies, and to privacy and security. The wide range of subject matter in this edition of the series reflects the increasing penetration of communications technology into all areas of consumer electronics (CE).

Consumer communication applications drive network integration [Series Editorial]

This theme is strongly reflected in the four articles we have selected for this edition of the Consumer Communications and Networking series. The theme includes the integration of network features as well as new application and network integration. The first article in this edition, by Stuart Jacobs, focuses on the authentication mechanisms in WiMAX-based metropolitan networks. It discusses how digital certificates are handled and highlights the lack of multiple certificate authority support as an issue that prevents the interoperability of WiMAX devices from different manufacturers.

The latest in consumer communications, straight from the IEEE consumer communications and networking conference 2011 [Series editorial]

Every year in January, researchers working on consumer communications and networking come together for the IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking conference in Las Vegas. Major themes of the conference are Emerging Consumer Technologies and Applications, Peer-to-Peer Networking and Content Distribution, Security and Content Protection, Multimedia and Entertainment Networking and Services, Smart Spaces and Personal Area Networks, and Wireless Consumer Communications and Networking. Each of these themes forms a separate track in the conference program. In addition, the conference is host to a series of Special Sessions and Workshops as well as prototype demonstrations. Some of the latter were selected to also be shown at the Consumer Electronics Show, the world?s largest consumer electronics trade show, which is hosted in Las Vegas around the same time as CCNC.

R&D for broadband communications: a proposal to revitalize broadband R&D in the united states

Successful implementation of the National Broadband Plan is essential for driving the U.S. economy and society, and for meeting the national challenges. It is a critical enabling infrastructure for other industries such as healthcare, energy, and transportation, and in fact is a key component of the value chain across all sectors. Improving the cost effectiveness and impact of ICT will enable a higher-performance nation and boost the overall economy. As this column has emphasized, research, development, and innovation must be supported across the entire technology supply chain from devices, components, and systems to networking, services, applications, content, and media. RD for example, as new networking capabilities are deployed, we must also develop new and enhanced policies for ensuring their security, privacy, and trust in order to realize the value and benefits. We recommend the creation of an objective, trusted organization to provide coordination, management, and oversight for broadband R&D investment funding. With R&D investment directed to key gaps, and the development of public-private partnerships and cross-sector coordination through an entity for broadband and information networking R&D, we can ensure improved international competitiveness and productivity improvements for all citizens, sectors, and organizations, public and private.

Privity: Scalable infrastructure for enforcing privacy and security of personal information

Today, privacy and security concerns are being perceived as major roadblocks to creating vibrant marketplaces for context-aware personalized information services. Marketplace members would benefit if a trusted third-party could manage the complex privacy and security requirements associated with such services accessing end-users personal and confidential information. This paper describes a clearinghouse approach that can foster information services marketplaces for end-users, personal and confidential information database owners, and value-added Application Service Providers (ASPs). The paper focuses on a credential-delegation crypto-system for scaling the clearinghouse by obviating the need for ASPs to proxy every request to the clearinghouse for approval.

Consumer communications and networks: Interest continued to grow Mobile WiMAX [Guest Editorial]

Presents four additional articles on the general topic of Consumer Communications and Networking. The first set of articles appeared in the December 2008 issue.

An Enhanced Digital Content Mediator (DCM) Approach to Implementing Legitimate and Secure P2P Online Transactions

In this paper we enhance the Digital Content Mediator (DCM) approach, a legitimate online service that uses financial incentives as an effective weapon to fight against online piracy. We provide needed network security support for the DCM service. The DCM mediator is a trusted notary to ensure fair and legitimate deals between digital content selling peers and buying peers. (1) In our design, the mediator sees no raw bits of digital contents. This saves storage and communication resource for the central mediator. (2) For the seller and buyer in a DCM-legitimized transaction, one wants payment and the other wants the content. The DCM protocol ensures that neither of them can stop the protocol in the middle to steal its service without serving the other party. (3) A digital content may have many legitimate copies from large amount of sellers. In a large-scale random network like the Internet, transaction fairness is defined as the condition that a buyer wants to buy the copy from the seller with shortest downloading delay (i.e., largest seller-to-buyer pairwise bandwidth) given the same amount of financial charge. DCM employs flow network security countermeasures to ensure that a seller keeps its bandwidth promises. Our experiments on the Internet confirm the effectiveness of our design.

Special issue on advances in consumer communications and networking

The demand for networked consumer systems and devices is large and growing rapidly. At home, in a car or truck, at work or at play, Internet users want transparent internetworking of their systems and devices to provide them entertainment, information, and communications. This internetworking should be on-demand and should be set up with whomever or whatever users want, regardless of time or location. As a result, consumer networking is gaining increasing attention from industry, spawning a range of dramatically different solutions in different environments such as wireless, wireline, and power-line communications systems. These environments have their own strengths and challenges to overcome. The scope of consumer networking spans from the body area and personal area networks to home and wide area networks. In the not too distant future, we will see ad hoc networks augmented with sensors sharing network information that enables devices and systems to seamlessly interact with Internet and wide area wireless systems such as WiFi, 3G and future 4G networks. This phenomenon, Consumer Communications and Networking, has been raising a number of interesting research questions and has been attracting many researchers in diverse specializing areas from networking to consumer electronics. The focus of this Special Issue was to present the latest approaches and technical solutions in these areas. The papers we selected bear witness to the fact that Consumer Communications and Networking promotes such interdisciplinary fusion. For example, in the first article, BTAG a Tree-Assisted Gossip Protocol for On-Demand Overlay Video Streaming,^ by Ming Zou and Jiangchuan Liu, an efficient pull-based gossip protocol is discussed that mitigates the impact of network dynamicity on the distribution of streamed video. The second article, BTime-Aware Disk Cache Prefetching for On-Demand Video Services in a Residential Service Gateway,^ coauthored by Eunsam Kim and Jonathan C. L. Liu, presents intriguing experimentation that makes evident how the Fiber Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) system outperforms traditional SCSI-based systems for the delivery of multimedia services in densely populated areas. The third article, BDynamic Service Composition in Wireless Home Appliances Networks,^ co-authored by A. Mingkhwan, P. Fergus, O. Abuelmaatti, M. Merabti, B. Askwith and M. Hannegan, shows how it is possible to dynamically incorporate services offered by independent wireless home appliances within a unique framework. In the fourth article, BRouting Protocols in Wireless Mesh Networks,^ Raouf Boutaba, Youssef Iraqi and Brent Ishibashi outline their approach for deriving key design features for routing in wireless mesh networks. The fifth article, BGeneric Forward Error Correction of Short Audio Frames for IP Multimed Tools Appl (2006) 29: 209–210 DOI 10.1007/s11042-006-0014-6