Sunil Kumar Vuppala

iSense: a wireless sensor network based conference room management system

In this paper, we have studied the IT system (e.g. MS-outlook) that is used to book meeting rooms in a corporate environment. In the existing IT system, the status of meeting rooms is manually entered, and as a result, it is not reflected in real time in the IT system. This results in severe underutilization of resources (conference rooms) across the corporation, and wastage of electricity with the lights and air-conditioning system being operational even when the rooms are unoccupied. We have created a test bed of motes and analyzed the occupancy and electricity consumption data to estimate the under-utilization of conference rooms, and the wastage of electricity in the process. In order to eliminate these problems, we have designed a wireless sensor network based solution which results in two main benefits: (i) the utilization of the conference room is increased from 67% to 90% and (ii) electricity saving is equivalent to 16000 full grown banyan trees in a year.

Incorporating fairness within Demand response programs in smart grid

Basic Demand response (DR) programs aim to modulate the demand of electricity in accordance with its supply. The existing DR programs have only been of limited success, though the participation has steadily increased in the recent past. This paper establishes the lack of fairness principles within the DR programs, as perceived by the customers to be one of the key deterrents. Fair DR (FDR) scheme criteria are defined and compared with existing pricing schemes. In this context, a simplified pricing model that takes into consideration fairness criteria for residential category is also proposed in this paper. The proposed pricing model is simulated in Gridlab-D and the results are compared with that of the flat and the price based pricing schemes. Initial results establish that our pricing scheme is fair, it flattens the demand curve over a day and provides a win-win situation for both - the customer and the utility company.

SBAC: Service Based Access Control

In this paper we propose a dynamically invoked Service Based Access Control (SBAC) Model to efficiently deal with the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The main idea of the SBAC is based on the observation that if the routers have information about the services that are running on the end host and can identify the upper layer traffic from the IP packet payload, then it becomes easy to differentiate between legitimate and attack traffic for that particular victim server. To minimise the overhead on the routers, the SBAC model is invoked during the attack times only and the victim’s traffic is processed separately. The boundary routers in SBAC model validate each incoming packet to the victim on a per server basis. Only the packets that are considered to be accessing the legitimate services are passed and the remaining packets are dropped. Hence, at this stage the victim’s network is immune to any dynamic changes in attack pattern if the attack packets are not accessing the legitimate services at the victim end. The packets that are considered to be accessing legitimate services of the victim machine/network are marked with a unique ID and destined to the victim. If any of the received packets are found to be malicious, the unique ID enables the victim to identify service specific attack signature for each ingress SBAC router and prevent the attack traffic at that particular router. We will also discuss how the SBAC model deals with attacks on the infrastructure of the Autonomous System.

A Scalable WSN Based Data Center Monitoring Solution with Probabilistic Event Prediction

The two most important objectives of the data center operators are to reduce operating cost and minimize carbon emission. Consolidation of data centers is not always possible and big enterprise end up having data centers in multiple locations across different cities and countries. In such a diverse deployment manual monitoring is not a cost effective solution. ASHRAE [1] suggested considering the energy efficiency as key factor in data center design. Our initial experiments reveal that a reduction in one degree Celsius of data center room temperature results in 4% excess consumption of electricity. We developed a WSN based data center monitoring (DCM) solution which includes the hardware system and an enterprise application. We deployed the hardware system in hundreds of location at 7 different cities and monitored them from a central enterprise application dashboard. In this paper, we describe the system architecture and analyzed data that was captured for nine months. This is one of the largest real life WSN deployment and based on the result we argue that the manual monitoring cost of data centers is reduced by 80%. This deployment also helped in avoiding a significant amount of carbon emission. DCM also provides a mechanism to predict events in real time.

An Adaptive Data Aggregation Algorithm in Wireless Sensor Network with Bursty Source

The Wireless Sensor network is distributed event based systems that differ from conventional communica-tion network. Sensor network has severe energy constraints, redundant low data rate, and many-to-one flows. Aggregation is a technique to avoid redundant information to save energy and other resources. There are two types of aggregations. In one of the aggregation many sensor data are embedded into single packet, thus avoiding the unnecessary packet headers, this is called lossless aggregation. In the second case the sensor data goes under statistical process (average, maximum, minimum) and results are communicated to the base station, this is called lossy aggregation, because we cannot recover the original sensor data from the received aggregated packet. The number of sensor data to be aggregated in a single packet is known as degree of ag-gregation. The main contribution of this paper is to propose an algorithm which is adaptive to choose one of the aggregations based on scenarios and degree of aggregation based on traffic. We are also suggesting a suitable buffer management to offer best Quality of Service. Our initial experiment with NS-2 implementa-tion shows significant energy savings by reducing the number of packets optimally at any given moment of time.

PLEMS: Plug Load Energy Management Solution for Enterprises

Maximizing energy utilization is a key strategy for todays enterprise in their effort towards sustainable tomorrow. Energy accounts for 50% or more of operating profit and 60%of energy in enterprise is under utilized. Plug loads typically consume up to 50% of the overall electrical energy usage in an enterprise. Even though multiple solutions exist such as Building Management System (BMS) to monitor and control electrical energy at main level such as HVAC but there are no solutions that can detect, analyze and trigger automatic actions in real time at plug load points. The proposed solution for managing plug loads is called PLEMS which allows to monitor and control appliances connected to smart plugs in a policy adaptable way and extend the coverage of existing BMS to plug loads. PLEMS helps to identify the consumption pattern of any appliance using a weighted moving average model. New policies are proposed based on usage/budget along with time based policies to trigger actions that mitigate or minimize energy wastage. The solution allows unified monitoring across enterprise with energy integration dashboard. Two case studies which were carried out in our enterprise (on office appliances) proved that we can potentially save energy by up to 60% eventually leading to a reduction in carbon footprint. We showcased another case study to highlight the actual savings achieved from the same appliances by using adaptable policies.

Security Techniques for Beyond 3G Wireless Mobile Networks

Significant developments in the recent times have led to an increasing use of mobile devices such as smart phones in accessing Internet services and applications over wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a security architecture for counteracting denial of service attacks in Beyond 3G (B3G) network architecture with mobile nodes. We describe the system architecture and discuss the different cases of attack scenarios involving the mobility of the attacking and victim nodes. Our proposed solution takes into account practical issues such as limited resources of the mobile nodes. It has distinct advantages such as monitoring of the traffic to the victim node and the attack traffic being dropped before reaching the victim, the ability to trace back the attacking node and prevent the attack at the home agent or foreign agent that is closer to the attacking node, and the ability to deal with dynamic changes in attack traffic patterns. We also present an analysis of our proposed architecture as well as simulation results.

DDoS: design, implementation and analysis of automated model

Earlier, we have proposed an automated model to minimise DDoS attacks in single ISP domain and extended the model to multiple ISP domains. Our approach has several advanced features to minimise DDoS attacks in the internet. The focus of this paper is twofold: firstly, to present a detailed description of the design and implementation of the proposed model and second to discuss and analyse the extensive set of results obtained from the implementation and simulations. We describe the prototype implementation of our automated model using NetProwler network intrusion detection system and HP OpenView Network Node Manager. We will also discuss the performance analysis of our model on a large scale using NS2 tool. Both prototype and simulation test results confirm that our approach offers a promising solution against DDoS problem in the internet and the model can be implemented in real time with minor modifications to the existing tools.

Service Applications - Exploiting the Internet of Things

Internet of things (IoT) is connected world of capabilities and services that enable interaction among physical objects supported by technologies such as sensors, RFID, wireless, mobile, cloud and internet. In this paper we analyze the drivers for IT services to use IoT and challenges involved and establish the need for accelerators. Various service applications can be built using IoT in all the verticals to improve process efficiency and productivity. We propose IoT Application Accelerator in this paper which is a light-weight IoT platform that can be used to rapidly prototype, develop and deploy value-added IoT applications, solutions and services. This paper highlights the case studies developed using the application accelerator platform and highlights the technical enablers such as analytics, machine learning, big data and cloud for rapid IoT services, business offerings and benefits.

Securing Wireless Sensor Network based solutions

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) based systems are becoming mainstream and are getting deployed in critical business environments. Thus, any failure of such a system due to potential security attacks would have serious business implications for an enterprise. So far the community has looked into the security of WSN in isolation and to our knowledge there is no study looking into end-to-end security issues of a WSN based business solution, such as, datacenter monitoring. This paper provides an insight into the security issues in the deployment of WSN based solutions and briefly outlines the possible security measures that can be applied.