Security in multicast communication

Multicast is one method to transfer information in IPv4 based communication. Other methods are unicast and broadcast. Multicast is based on the group concept where data is sent from one point to a group of receivers and this remarkably saves bandwidth. Group members express an interest to receive data by using Internet Group Management Protocol and traffic is received by only those receivers who want it. The most common multicast applications are media streaming applications, surveillance applications and data collection applications. There are many data security methods to protect unicast communication that is the most common transfer method in Internet. Popular data security methods are encryption, authentication, access control and firewalls. The characteristics of multicast such as dynamic membership cause that all these data security mechanisms can not be used to protect multicast traffic. Nowadays the protection of multicast traffic is possible via traffic restrictions where traffic is allowed to propagate only to certain areas. One way to implement this is packet filters. Methods tested in this thesis are MVR, IGMP Filtering and access control lists which worked as supposed. These methods restrict the propagation of multicast but are laborious to configure in a large scale. There are also a few manufacturerspecific products that make possible to encrypt multicast traffic. These separate products are expensive and mainly intended to protect video transmissions via satellite. Investigation of multicast security has taken place for several years and the security methods that will be the results of the investigation are getting ready. An IETF working group called MSEC is standardizing these security methods. The target of this working group is to standardize data security protocols for multicast during 2004.

Um protocolo de comunicação multicast na camada de aplicação com Consciência de Localização

Internet applications such as media streaming, collaborative computing and massive multiplayer are on the rise,. This leads to the need for multicast communication, but unfortunately group communications support based on IP multicast has not been widely adopted due to a combination of technical and non-technical problems. Therefore, a number of different application-layer multicast schemes have been proposed in recent literature to overcome the drawbacks. In addition, these applications often behave as both providers and clients of services, being called peer-topeer applications, and where participants come and go very dynamically. Thus, servercentric architectures for membership management have well-known problems related to scalability and fault-tolerance, and even peer-to-peer traditional solutions need to have some mechanism that takes into account member's volatility. The idea of location awareness distributes the participants in the overlay network according to their proximity in the underlying network allowing a better performance. Given this context, this thesis proposes an application layer multicast protocol, called LAALM, which takes into account the actual network topology in the assembly process of the overlay network. The membership algorithm uses a new metric, IPXY, to provide location awareness through the processing of local information, and it was implemented using a distributed shared and bi-directional tree. The algorithm also has a sub-optimal heuristic to minimize the cost of membership process. The protocol has been evaluated in two ways. First, through an own simulator developed in this work, where we evaluated the quality of distribution tree by metrics such as outdegree and path length. Second, reallife scenarios were built in the ns-3 network simulator where we evaluated the network protocol performance by metrics such as stress, stretch, time to first packet and reconfiguration group time

SNOMC: An overlay multicast protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Using multicast communication in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is an efficient way to disseminate the same data (from one sender) to multiple receivers, e.g., transmitting code updates to a group of sensor nodes. Due to the nature of code update traffic a multicast protocol has to support bulky traffic and end-to-end reliability. We are interested in an energy-efficient multicast protocol due to the limited resources of wireless sensor nodes. Current data dissemination schemes do not fulfill the above requirements. In order to close the gap, we designed and implemented the SNOMC (Sensor Node Overlay Multicast) protocol. It is an overlay multicast protocol, which supports reliable, time-efficient, and energy-efficient data dissemination of bulky data from one sender to many receivers. To ensure end-to-end reliability, SNOMC uses a NACK-based reliability mechanism with different caching strategies.

Adaptive Routing Approaches for Networked Many-Core Systems

Through advances in technology, System-on-Chip design is moving towards integrating tens to hundreds of intellectual property blocks into a single chip. In such a many-core system, on-chip communication becomes a performance bottleneck for high performance designs. Network-on-Chip (NoC) has emerged as a viable solution for the communication challenges in highly complex chips. The NoC architecture paradigm, based on a modular packet-switched mechanism, can address many of the on-chip communication challenges such as wiring complexity, communication latency, and bandwidth. Furthermore, the combined benefits of 3D IC and NoC schemes provide the possibility of designing a high performance system in a limited chip area. The major advantages of 3D NoCs are the considerable reductions in average latency and power consumption. There are several factors degrading the performance of NoCs. In this thesis, we investigate three main performance-limiting factors: network congestion, faults, and the lack of efficient multicast support. We address these issues by the means of routing algorithms. Congestion of data packets may lead to increased network latency and power consumption. Thus, we propose three different approaches for alleviating such congestion in the network. The first approach is based on measuring the congestion information in different regions of the network, distributing the information over the network, and utilizing this information when making a routing decision. The second approach employs a learning method to dynamically find the less congested routes according to the underlying traffic. The third approach is based on a fuzzy-logic technique to perform better routing decisions when traffic information of different routes is available. Faults affect performance significantly, as then packets should take longer paths in order to be routed around the faults, which in turn increases congestion around the faulty regions. We propose four methods to tolerate faults at the link and switch level by using only the shortest paths as long as such path exists. The unique characteristic among these methods is the toleration of faults while also maintaining the performance of NoCs. To the best of our knowledge, these algorithms are the first approaches to bypassing faults prior to reaching them while avoiding unnecessary misrouting of packets. Current implementations of multicast communication result in a significant performance loss for unicast traffic. This is due to the fact that the routing rules of multicast packets limit the adaptivity of unicast packets. We present an approach in which both unicast and multicast packets can be efficiently routed within the network. While suggesting a more efficient multicast support, the proposed approach does not affect the performance of unicast routing at all. In addition, in order to reduce the overall path length of multicast packets, we present several partitioning methods along with their analytical models for latency measurement. This approach is discussed in the context of 3D mesh networks.

Utilizing the CORBA platform in the construction of a highly immersive virtual environment

This article presents the implementation of a distributed system of virtual reality, through the integration of services offered by the CORBA platform (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) and by the environment of development of 3D graphic applications in real time, the WorldToolkit, of Sense8. The developed application for the validation of this integration is that of a virtual city, with an emphasis on its traffic ways, vehicles (movable objects) and buildings (immovable objects). In this virtual world, several users can interact, each one controlling his/her own car. Since the modelling of the application took into consideration the criteria and principles of the Transport Engineering, the aim is to use it in the planning, project and construction of traffic ways for vehicles. The system was structured according to the approach client/server utilizing multicast communication among the participating nodes. The chosen implementation for the CORBA was the Iona's ORBIX software. The performance results obtained are presented and discussed in the end.

Support on the remote interaction for augmented reality system

This article presents a support on the remote interaction for utilization in augmented reality systems based on ARToolkit. It utilizes the multicast communication in order to improve the scalability of distributed environment. This support may be utilized in production of specific applications pointed to distance education, training and entertainment. The validity of support happened with the implementation of a prototype and realization of tests for communication latency analysis and frames per second rate. © 2007 IEEE.

Energy-Efficient Management Of Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Various applications for the purposes of event detection, localization, and monitoring can benefit from the use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Wireless sensor networks are generally easy to deploy, with flexible topology and can support diversity of tasks thanks to the large variety of sensors that can be attached to the wireless sensor nodes. To guarantee the efficient operation of such a heterogeneous wireless sensor networks during its lifetime an appropriate management is necessary. Typically, there are three management tasks, namely monitoring, (re) configuration, and code updating. On the one hand, status information, such as battery state and node connectivity, of both the wireless sensor network and the sensor nodes has to be monitored. And on the other hand, sensor nodes have to be (re)configured, e.g., setting the sensing interval. Most importantly, new applications have to be deployed as well as bug fixes have to be applied during the network lifetime. All management tasks have to be performed in a reliable, time- and energy-efficient manner. The ability to disseminate data from one sender to multiple receivers in a reliable, time- and energy-efficient manner is critical for the execution of the management tasks, especially for code updating. Using multicast communication in wireless sensor networks is an efficient way to handle such traffic pattern. Due to the nature of code updates a multicast protocol has to support bulky traffic and endto-end reliability. Further, the limited resources of wireless sensor nodes demand an energy-efficient operation of the multicast protocol. Current data dissemination schemes do not fulfil all of the above requirements. In order to close the gap, we designed the Sensor Node Overlay Multicast (SNOMC) protocol such that to support a reliable, time-efficient and energy-efficient dissemination of data from one sender node to multiple receivers. In contrast to other multicast transport protocols, which do not support reliability mechanisms, SNOMC supports end-to-end reliability using a NACK-based reliability mechanism. The mechanism is simple and easy to implement and can significantly reduce the number of transmissions. It is complemented by a data acknowledgement after successful reception of all data fragments by the receiver nodes. In SNOMC three different caching strategies are integrated for an efficient handling of necessary retransmissions, namely, caching on each intermediate node, caching on branching nodes, or caching only on the sender node. Moreover, an option was included to pro-actively request missing fragments. SNOMC was evaluated both in the OMNeT++ simulator and in our in-house real-world testbed and compared to a number of common data dissemination protocols, such as Flooding, MPR, TinyCubus, PSFQ, and both UDP and TCP. The results showed that SNOMC outperforms the selected protocols in terms of transmission time, number of transmitted packets, and energy-consumption. Moreover, we showed that SNOMC performs well with different underlying MAC protocols, which support different levels of reliability and energy-efficiency. Thus, SNOMC can offer a robust, high-performing solution for the efficient distribution of code updates and management information in a wireless sensor network. To address the three management tasks, in this thesis we developed the Management Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks (MARWIS). MARWIS is specifically designed for the management of heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. A distinguished feature of its design is the use of wireless mesh nodes as backbone, which enables diverse communication platforms and offloading functionality from the sensor nodes to the mesh nodes. This hierarchical architecture allows for efficient operation of the management tasks, due to the organisation of the sensor nodes into small sub-networks each managed by a mesh node. Furthermore, we developed a intuitive -based graphical user interface, which allows non-expert users to easily perform management tasks in the network. In contrast to other management frameworks, such as Mate, MANNA, TinyCubus, or code dissemination protocols, such as Impala, Trickle, and Deluge, MARWIS offers an integrated solution monitoring, configuration and code updating of sensor nodes. Integration of SNOMC into MARWIS further increases performance efficiency of the management tasks. To our knowledge, our approach is the first one, which offers a combination of a management architecture with an efficient overlay multicast transport protocol. This combination of SNOMC and MARWIS supports reliably, time- and energy-efficient operation of a heterogeneous wireless sensor network.

Reliable real-time communication in CAN networks

Controller area network (CAN) is a fieldbus network suitable for small-scale distributed computer controlled systems (DCCS), being appropriate for sending and receiving short real-time messages at speeds up to 1 Mbit/sec. Several studies are available on how to guarantee the real-time requirements of CAN messages, providing preruntime schedulability conditions to guarantee the real-time communication requirements of DCCS traffic. Usually, it is considered that CAN guarantees atomic multicast properties by means of its extensive error detection/signaling mechanisms. However, there are some error situations where messages can be delivered in duplicate or delivered only by a subset of the receivers, leading to inconsistencies in the supported applications. In order to prevent such inconsistencies, a middleware for reliable communication in CAN is proposed, taking advantage of CAN synchronous properties to minimize the runtime overhead. Such middleware comprises a set of atomic multicast and consolidation protocols, upon which the reliable communication properties are guaranteed. The related timing analysis demonstrates that, in spite of the extra stack of protocols, the real-time properties of CAN are preserved since the predictability of message transfer is guaranteed.

LNT: a logical neighbor tree secure group communication scheme for wireless sensor networks

Secure group communication is a paradigm that primarily designates one-to-many communication security. The proposed works relevant to secure group communication have predominantly considered the whole network as being a single group managed by a central powerful node capable of supporting heavy communication, computation and storage cost. However, a typical Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) may contain several groups, and each one is maintained by a sensor node (the group controller) with constrained resources. Moreover, the previously proposed schemes require a multicast routing support to deliver the rekeying messages. Nevertheless, multicast routing can incur heavy storage and communication overheads in the case of a wireless sensor network. Due to these two major limitations, we have reckoned it necessary to propose a new secure group communication with a lightweight rekeying process. Our proposal overcomes the two limitations mentioned above, and can be applied to a homogeneous WSN with resource-constrained nodes with no need for a multicast routing support. Actually, the analysis and simulation results have clearly demonstrated that our scheme outperforms the previous well-known solutions.

Multicast algorithms evaluation using an adaptative routing in ATM networks

This paper proposes a multicast implementation based on adaptive routing with anticipated calculation. Three different cost measures for a point-to-multipoint connection: bandwidth cost, connection establishment cost and switching cost can be considered. The application of the method based on pre-evaluated routing tables makes possible the reduction of bandwidth cost and connection establishment cost individually

Multicast algorithms evaluation using an adaptative routing in ATM networks

This paper proposes a multicast implementation based on adaptive routing with anticipated calculation. Three different cost measures for a point-to-multipoint connection: bandwidth cost, connection establishment cost and switching cost can be considered. The application of the method based on pre-evaluated routing tables makes possible the reduction of bandwidth cost and connection establishment cost individually

Multi-objective optimization scheme for static and dynamic multicast flows

Muchas de las nuevas aplicaciones emergentes de Internet tales como TV sobre Internet, Radio sobre Internet,Video Streamming multi-punto, entre otras, necesitan los siguientes requerimientos de recursos: ancho de banda consumido, retardo extremo-a-extremo, tasa de paquetes perdidos, etc. Por lo anterior, es necesario formular una propuesta que especifique y provea para este tipo de aplicaciones los recursos necesarios para su buen funcionamiento. En esta tesis, proponemos un esquema de ingeniería de tráfico multi-objetivo a través del uso de diferentes árboles de distribución para muchos flujos multicast. En este caso, estamos usando la aproximación de múltiples caminos para cada nodo egreso y de esta forma obtener la aproximación de múltiples árboles y a través de esta forma crear diferentes árboles multicast. Sin embargo, nuestra propuesta resuelve la fracción de la división del tráfico a través de múltiples árboles. La propuesta puede ser aplicada en redes MPLS estableciendo rutas explícitas en eventos multicast. En primera instancia, el objetivo es combinar los siguientes objetivos ponderados dentro de una métrica agregada: máxima utilización de los enlaces, cantidad de saltos, el ancho de banda total consumido y el retardo total extremo-a-extremo. Nosotros hemos formulado esta función multi-objetivo (modelo MHDB-S) y los resultados obtenidos muestran que varios objetivos ponderados son reducidos y la máxima utilización de los enlaces es minimizada. El problema es NP-duro, por lo tanto, un algoritmo es propuesto para optimizar los diferentes objetivos. El comportamiento que obtuvimos usando este algoritmo es similar al que obtuvimos con el modelo. Normalmente, durante la transmisión multicast los nodos egresos pueden salir o entrar del árbol y por esta razón en esta tesis proponemos un esquema de ingeniería de tráfico multi-objetivo usando diferentes árboles para grupos multicast dinámicos. (en el cual los nodos egresos pueden cambiar durante el tiempo de vida de la conexión). Si un árbol multicast es recomputado desde el principio, esto podría consumir un tiempo considerable de CPU y además todas las comuicaciones que están usando el árbol multicast serán temporalmente interrumpida. Para aliviar estos inconvenientes, proponemos un modelo de optimización (modelo dinámico MHDB-D) que utilice los árboles multicast previamente computados (modelo estático MHDB-S) adicionando nuevos nodos egreso. Usando el método de la suma ponderada para resolver el modelo analítico, no necesariamente es correcto, porque es posible tener un espacio de solución no convexo y por esta razón algunas soluciones pueden no ser encontradas. Adicionalmente, otros tipos de objetivos fueron encontrados en diferentes trabajos de investigación. Por las razones mencionadas anteriormente, un nuevo modelo llamado GMM es propuesto y para dar solución a este problema un nuevo algoritmo usando Algoritmos Evolutivos Multi-Objetivos es propuesto. Este algoritmo esta inspirado por el algoritmo Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm (SPEA). Para dar una solución al caso dinámico con este modelo generalizado, nosotros hemos propuesto un nuevo modelo dinámico y una solución computacional usando Breadth First Search (BFS) probabilístico. Finalmente, para evaluar nuestro esquema de optimización propuesto, ejecutamos diferentes pruebas y simulaciones. Las principales contribuciones de esta tesis son la taxonomía, los modelos de optimización multi-objetivo para los casos estático y dinámico en transmisiones multicast (MHDB-S y MHDB-D), los algoritmos para dar solución computacional a los modelos. Finalmente, los modelos generalizados también para los casos estático y dinámico (GMM y GMM Dinámico) y las propuestas computacionales para dar slución usando MOEA y BFS probabilístico.

LDM teknologiaren errendimenduaren azterketa multicast zerbitzuetarako

[EN]The purpose of this project is to study the performance and the efficiency of the LDM technology for the transmission of multicast services in a cellular network and vehicular communication environment. In order to achieve this goal, it will be done a comparison with LTE, the technology nowadays used for multicast-grouping techniques. Thus, the specific parameters of each technology are going to be analyzed and a simulation software is going to be developed. Finally, the results from the above mentioned comparison will be shown, as well as an implementation of LDM in multicast-grouping technique.

Protocolo multiciclos para automação hospitalar sobre Multicast com IEEE 802.3 utilizando

The concepts of the industrial automation are being incorporated in the medical area, in other words, they also pass to be applied in the hospital automation. In this sense, researches have been developed and have usually been approached several of the problems that are pertinent to the processes that can be automated in the hospital environment. Considering that in the automation processes, an imperative factor is the communication, because the systems are usually distributed, the network for data transference becomes itself an important point in these processes. Because this network should be capable to provide the exchange of data and to guarantee the demands that are imposed by the automation process. In this context, this doctorate thesis proposed, specified, analyzed and validated the Multicycles Protocol for Hospital Automation (MP-HA), which is customized to assist the demands in these automation processes, seeking to guarantee the determinism in the communications and to optimize the factor of use of the mean of transmission