An educational support group

This article describes an educational support group (ESG) for a cohort of RMN student nurses and two of their teachers. The group, which ran for about one year, had a double task. Its educational task was for members to learn experientially about group theory and practice. The other task was for the group to provide support for members in their educational endeavours generally. Evaluation during and after the group's term demonstrated that the members had moved through the classical stages of group theory, and had emerged with stronger peer relationships and better communication between students and teachers.     

Manipulating Wi‐Fi packet traces with WiPal: design and experience

Packet traces are important objects in networking, commonly used in a wide set of applications, including monitoring, troubleshooting, measurements, and validation, to cite a few. Many tools exist to produce and process such traces, but they are often too specific; using them as a basis for creating extended tools is then impractical. Some other tools are generic enough, but exhibit performance issues. This paper reports on our experience designing WiPal, a packet trace manipulation framework with a focus on IEEE 802.11. WiPal is designed for performance and re‐usability, while introducing several novel features compared to previous solutions. Besides presenting how WiPal's original design can benefit packet processing programs, we discuss a number of issues a program designer might encounter when writing packet trace processing software. An evaluation of WiPal shows that, albeit generic, it does not impact performance regarding execution speed. WiPal achieves performance levels observed only with specialized code and outperforms some well‐known packet processing programs. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Securing wireless sensor networks against aggregator compromises [security in mobile ad hoc]

A common approach to overcome the limited nature of sensor networks is to aggregate data at intermediate nodes. A challenging issue in this context is to guarantee end-to-end security mainly because sensor networks are extremely vulnerable to node compromises. We propose three schemes to secure data aggregation that rely on multipath routing. The first guarantees data confidentiality through secret sharing, while the second and third provide data availability through information dispersal. Based on qualitative analysis and implementation, we show that by applying these schemes, a sensor network can achieve data confidentiality, authenticity, and protection against denial of service attacks even in the presence of multiple compromised nodes.