Location-aware mobile applications based on directory services

Location-aware applications are becoming increasingly attractive due to the widespread dissemination of wireless networks and the emergence of small and cheap locating technologies. We developed a location information server that simplifies and speeds up the development of these applications by offering a set of generic location retrieval and notification services to the application. The data model and the access protocols of these services are based on the X.500 directory service and the lightweight directory access protocol LDAP since these are becoming the standard attribute-value-pair retrieval mechanisms for Internet and Intranet environments. This approach establishes a smooth migration path from conventional to location-aware applications. The paper presents the location information server concepts, defines its directory data model and access services, and discusses the implementation options of the location information server. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Telephone access to special services in Russia

The paper describes the inquiry and information service offices that may be accessed by telephone in Russia. These offices are accessible to the subscribers by dialing an abbreviated number beginning with zero. The paper also describes the concept of a special service network, and the equipment used for special service offices with telephone access     

The Satchel system architecture: Mobile access to documents and services

Mobile professionals require access to documents and documentrelated services, such as printing, wherever they may be. They may also wish to give documents to colleagues electronically, as easily as with paper, facetoface, and with similar security characteristics. The Satchel system provides such capabilities in the form of a mobile browser, implemented on a device that professional people would be likely to carry anyway, such as a pager or mobile phone. Printing may be performed on any Satchelenabled printer, or any fax machine. Scanning, too, may be accomplished at any Satchelenabled scanner. Access rights to individual documents may be safely distributed, without regard to document formats. Access to document services is greatly simplified by the use of context sensitivity. The system has been extensively tested and evaluated. This paper describes the architecture of the Satchel system.     

Wireless provision of true VoD services and fast access to Internet

The evolution of digital compression techniques has made possible the provision of full‐motion video services through networking infrastructures of sufficient bandwidth. This paper presents a wireless broadband network, which is capable of providing true interactive VoD services (with full VCR functions) and fast access to Internet to a number of simultaneous clients. The network is based on frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) technology operating in the 2.4 GHz frequency band. The paper describes the system architecture and configuration adopted in a real environment trial and elaborates on the provided picture quality in a multi‐client environment. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A WDM-based optical access network for wide-area gigabit access services

This article proposes and demonstrates a WDM-based access network that directly connects end users over a wide area to the center node and provides guaranteed full-duplex Gigabit Ethernet access services to each of over 100 users. The center node employs an optical carrier supply module that generates not only the optical carriers for the downstream signals but also those for the upstream signals. The latter are supplied to optical network units (ONUs) at users' homes/buildings via the network. Since the ONUs simply modulate the optical carriers supplied from the center node via the network, they are wavelength-independent.     

The full services access networks initiative

An international collaboration aimed at kick-starting investment in broadband access networks is discussed. This activity has focused on producing requirements and design solutions for a low-cost full services access network which is suitable for both home and business service delivery, starting from the telco position where enormous investment has already been made in copper pair technology. This article reports on the drivers, key issues, and top-level view of key requirements as agreed on by the seven major telcos and ten leading suppliers involved until June 1996     

Persistent access control to prevent piracy of digital information

Marshall McLuhan's statement that “the medium is the message” captured the reality of communications until the digital age. Communicating digitally involves the transfer of information as streams of bits. No longer does matter need to be moved. In the case of data representing continuous waveforms, the communication is complete when the recipient possesses a digital representation of the original signal with a given fidelity criterion. This allows one to embed watermarks to deliver hidden information. In the case of discrete data files, the communication is complete when the recipient possesses the identical stream of bits delivered by the source: at that moment there are two, identical, streams of bits. It is impossible to characterize one as the original and the other as the copy. Consequently, one loses control of digital information after transmitting it to another. The recipient is free to use their original as they see fit. The ubiquitous PC and Internet provide the means easily and inexpensively to copy and distribute data files to anyone wishing to do so. We introduce a framework for persistent access control over digital data. That is, data remain under the control of their originator, even after another has received them. This requires the use of multiple levels of encryption, transmission of ciphering keys through licenses associated with the data, and of trusted hardware and trusted software (access control mechanism) to ensure that the originator's restrictions are not circumvented. We show how a PC or consumer electronics appliance can accommodate the required system-while remaining compatible with previously produced data. This material is the subject of a pending U.S. Patent Application (allowed) and foreign applications     

Energy-efficient and intrusion-resilient authentication for ubiquitous access to factory floor information

Linking factory floors to the Internet, coupled with the rapid deployment of wireless access networks, is initiating a new paradigm for factory automation-a corporate employee with a handheld computing device can have anytime, anywhere access to the latest factory floor information. Authentication between a factory database and a remote user is crucial for such paradigm; however, existing authentication protocols are inadequate to defend against strong adversaries with break-in capabilities. In this paper, we design and implement the Energy-Efficient and Intrusion-Resilient Authentication (ERA) protocol. Through a novel combination of hash chain,pin, and message authentication code (MAC), ERA can achieve the security self-recovery when strong adversaries compromise either a user's handheld device or a factory authentication server to obtain the authentication secrets. The technique of mutual MAC is proposed to defend against online pin-guessing attacks launched by strong adversaries. Furthermore, an optimization of tuning hash chain iteration is introduced to reduce energy consumption of a handheld device. Analytical and experimental results show that ERA provides a better security guarantee and incurs much less computation and communication overhead than the existing authentication protocols.     

ADSL: a new twisted-pair access to the information highway

The asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) takes advantage of the existing twisted-pair copper loop that currently provides customer access to the telephone network. An ADSL modem is placed at each end of the loop to create a high speed access link above the existing telephone service. Since ADSL makes use of the existing copper telephone line, its application in the telephone network can conceivably be nearly as ubiquitous as the public telephone network itself. With ADSL, it is possible to connect small numbers of customers to broadband services in areas where full upgrade to hybrid fiber coaxial or fiber facilities is not economical in the near term. ADSL systems offer a means to introduce broadband services using the embedded base of metallic loops in areas where optic fiber-based, hybrid fiber-coaxial radio systems or other broadband transport systems may not be scheduled for deployment in time to meet business needs and customer demand. The article concentrates on ADSL systems capable of at least a nominal 6 Mb/s payload transport toward the customer, in addition to associated upstream channels and symmetrical “telephony” services via nonloaded loops that comply with carrier serving area design guidelines     

IP-based access networks for broadband multimedia services

The increasing demands of new services and applications are pushing for drastic changes in the design of access networks for residential and SOHO users. Future access networks will provide full service integration, resource sharing at the packet level, and QoS support. It is expected that using IP as the base technology, the ideal plug-and-play scenario, where the management actions of the access network operator are kept to a minimum, will be achieved easily. In this article we start by giving a historical perspective of the evolution of access networks. We then describe an IP-based architecture targeted for integrated support of broadband multimedia services, designed to be low-cost and easily manageable. We illustrate the different phases of a multimedia Internet access session, when using SIP for session initiation, COPS and DIAMETER for QoS policy management, and AAA and RSVP for resource reservation.     

承载多媒体业务的光接入系统设计

文章设计完成了DVB、IPTV两种多媒体业务的光接入解决方案,根据不同的接入环境可以灵活选择最合适的光接入技术.系统支持广播和点播两种收看方式,并且实现有线和无线接入的融合.同时系统最大限度地利用了已有的入户线资源,降低建设成本.     

卫星DVB在因特网接入业务中的应用

介绍了卫星DVB接入因特网的应用模式，采用卫星回传信道时的系统组成以及需要解决的问题，并展望了其应用前景。     

It's good to talk [speech technology for on-line services access]

Although there are several hundred million Internet-connected PCs in the world, this figure is dwarfed by the two billion fixed and mobile phones. The telephone is ubiquitous, increasingly mobile and could, in principle, provide a universal platform for accessing on-line services. To date efforts to harness this potential in the form of so-called interactive voice response (IVR) systems have not proved especially popular with users. There's a wind of change blowing through the IVR world, impelled by advances in speech recognition technology and a transformation of the IVR programming environment.     

Drone services: issues in drones for location-based services from human-drone interaction to information processing

Recently, drones (or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)) are getting increasing attention and taking mobile computing to a new era. Due to the support of highly advanced technologies, soon they might be ubiquitous and networks of drones might be used in providing civilian drone services. In this paper, we provide a survey of drone services and applications, data management for drones, data services using drones, distributed computing trends fuelled by drones and a range of human-drone interaction research which is useful if drones are to regularly serve non-technical users, while highlighting the specific concerns in data management and airborne Internet-of-Things (IoT) computing infrastructure. We present concepts such as drones-as-a-service and fly-in, fly-out computing infrastructure, and note data management and system design issues that arise in these situations. Issues of Big Data arising from such applications, optimising the configuration of airborne and ground infrastructure to provide the best QoS and QoE, situation-awareness, scalability, reliability, scheduling for efficiency, interaction with users and drones using different methods are noted.     

A trustworthy system for secure access to patient centric sensitive information

Smart technological innovations in healthcare are continuously generating digitized medical information about each patient, leading to the creation of Patient Centric Big Medical Data (PCBMD). Rapid adoption of PCBMD in healthcare ushers at the cost of its security and privacy concerns. Current methods focus on identifying authorized users who can access PCBMD but they barely identify the insider attackers. Alternatively, these methods do not prevent information leak by authorized users. Working towards this direction, this paper proposes a Trust based Access Control (TAC) system which not only identifies authorized users for PCBMD but also defends Sensitive Personal Information (SPI) of a patient from insider attacks. The proposed method calculates the trust value of each user by considering various quantitative parameters. Based on the calculated trust values, access rights are granted to each user such that SPI can be accessed by only highly trustworthy users. To implement access rights securely, a privacy scheme is also proposed. The experimental results show that the proposed security system can be efficiently used to protect the SPI of patients.     

移动通信与无线接入业务趋于融合

过去的几年里,宽带移动通信引起了人们越来越多的兴趣,这主要由于移动用户数量的增加以及大量的移动用户希望能以高速率接入Internet,从而享受移动Internet和电子商务的乐趣。移动通信和无线接入的融合将会引起无线通信领域的新的热点,从而会出现一种新的网络架构,基于这种新的网络架构的无线通信系统在普通的配置下就可以向移动用户提供宽带服务并且支持高增值业务和交互式多媒体通信。目前半导体技术的高速发展也会使这种系统更容易实现。移动Internet是两者业务融合后的宽带无线通信系统的主要应用,通信终端会变得高度智能化,能…     

支持多媒体业务的接入控制技术研究进展

如何保障不同类型的多媒体业务在通信过程中的通信服务质量(QoS),是目前接入控制技术中一项热点研究问题。通过对近十几年间相关文献的整理和分析,对支持多媒体业务的接入控制技术的研究进展进行综述,具体内容包括多媒体业务类型的设计、支持多媒体业务的接入控制协议、多信道分配策略等方面,并提出了支持多媒体业务的接入控制技术未来的研究方向。     

OA&M for full services access networks

A number of network operators and suppliers have collaborated in the full services access network (FSAN) initiative to agree on a common set of requirements for broadband networks. This article presents the OA&M requirements that have been considered by the OA&M working group with a view to reducing equipment and operational costs. In considering OA&M costs it is necessary to take into account both equipment costs and operational costs. The main principles presented for minimizing OA&M costs are: the use of standard interfaces and information models where possible; minimizing the need for special operational skills and maintenance tools; provision of accurate maintenance information by the system; promoting reuse by locating complex functions at common points to enable sharing of platforms; provision of functions for locating faults and detecting network degradation; and the need to build in the ability to evolve and upgrade the network and its management capability