Trevor Burbridge

Standardizing large-scale measurement platforms

Over the last few years, we have witnessed the deployment of large measurement platforms that enable measurements from many vantage points. Examples of these platforms include SamKnows and RIPE ATLAS. All told, there are tens of thousands of measurement agents. Most of these measurement agents are located in the end-user premises; these can run measurements against other user agents located in strategic locations, according to the measurements to be performed. Thanks to the large number of measurement agents, these platforms can provide data about key network performance indicators from the end-user perspective. This data is useful to network operators to improve their operations, as well to regulators and to end users themselves. Currently deployed platforms use proprietary protocols to exchange information between the different parts. As these platforms grow to become an important tool to understand network performance, it is important to standardize the protocols between the different elements of the platform. In this paper, we present ongoing standardization efforts in this area as well as the main challenges that these efforts are facing.

Security considerations in the design and peering of RFID Discovery Services

There is growing interest in Discovery Services for locating RFID and supply chain data between companies globally, to obtain product lifecycle information for individual objects. Discovery Services are heralded as a means to find serial-level data from previously unknown parties, however more realistically they provide a means to reduce the communications load on the information services, the network and the requesting client application. Attempts to design a standardised Discovery Service will not succeed unless security is considered in every aspect of the design. In this paper we clearly show that security cannot be bolted-on in the form of access control, although this is also required. The basic communication model of the Discovery Service critically affects who shares what data with whom, and what level of trust is required between the interacting parties.

Building a standard measurement platform

Network management is achieved through a large number of disparate solutions for different technologies and parts of the end-to-end network. Gaining an overall view, and especially predicting the impact on a service user, is difficult. Recently, a number of proprietary platforms have emerged to conduct end-to-end testing from user premises; however, these are limited in scale, interoperability, and the ability to compare like-for-like results. In this article we show that these platforms share similar architectures and can benefit from the standardization of key interfaces, test definitions, information model, and protocols. We take the SamKnows platform as a use case and propose an evolution from its current proprietary protocols to standardized protocols and tests. In particular, we propose to use extensions of the IETFs IPFIX and NETCONF/YANG in the platform. Standardization will allow measurement capabilities to be included on many more network elements and user devices, providing a much more comprehensive view of user experience and enabling problems and performance bottlenecks to be identified and addressed.

Supply chain control using a RFID proxy re-signature scheme

The use of RFID tags allows many new approaches to the old problems of supply chain control and product anti-counterfeiting. Many of the schemes suggested to-date do not adequately meet the needs of the supply chain industry. Some require unjustifiable expense or performance and resilience issues, while others face deployment barriers where the party that deploys the technology is not the party the benefits. Many of the schemes, however, will ultimately fail because they inadequately address the issues of trust and business confidentiality. We present a supply chain control solution using the principle of proxy re-signatures to establish secure and verifiable supply chain paths. Critically our scheme does not require centralized run-time services and provides minimal visibility of supply chain operations to other parties.

An Adaptive Method for Dynamic Audience Size Estimation in Multicast

We develop an end-to-end protocol for real-time estimation of the size of dynamic multicast groups. Unlike previously proposed methods our approach alleviates feedback implosion in a dynamic setting, and is scalable to large groups. The protocol is based on probabilistic polling combined with adaptive feedback control, and the use of a time-dependent Wiener filter to enhance estimation accuracy. We examine the performance of our protocol through simulations for multicast groups with up to 10,000 members, and different scenarios of group membership dynamics. Our simulation studies show that the method is capable of tracking, in a scalable manner, the size of dynamic multicast groups with high accuracy in the face of large dynamic variations.