Heterogeneous Wireless Interworking for Multimedia QoS Provisioning
Wei Song (University of New Brunswick, Canada)
The next-generation wireless data communications have been envisioned to be supported by heterogeneous networks using various wireless access technologies. The popular cellular networks and wireless local area networks (WLANs) present perfectly complementary characteristics in terms of service capacity, mobility support, and quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning. The cellular/WLAN interworking is thus an effective way to promote the evolution of wireless networks. As an essential aspect of the interworking, resource allocation is vital for efficient utilization of the overall resources.
In this tutorial, we introduce and analyze effective traffic assignment/reassignment strategies and admission control policies to distribute multi-service traffic to the overlay cell or WLAN. As such, the multi-service provisioning can be enhanced by taking a good advantage of the complementary network strength and an overlay structure. The overall resource utilization and QoS satisfaction are improved substantially by taking into account the multi-service traffic characteristics, such as the delay-sensitivity of voice traffic, elasticity and heavy-tailedness of data traffic, and rate-adaptiveness of video streaming traffic. Also, the impact of user mobility is properly addressed in the tutorial. Distributed implementation is enabled with a randomized strategy to reduce deployment cost.
Network Intrusion Detection and Prevention
Wei Lu (Q1 Labs, Canada)
With the complexity of today's networks, it is impossible to know you are actually secure. You can prepare your network's defenses, but what threats will be thrown at it, what combinations will be tried, and what directions they will come from are all unknown variables. Most medium and large-scale network infrastructures include multiple high-speed connections to the Internet and support many customer collaborative networks, thousands of internal users and various web servers. Many of these systems are faced with an ever-increasing likelihood of unplanned downtime due to various attacks and security breaches. In this environment of uncertainty, which is full of hackers and malicious threats, those systems that are the best at maintaining the continuity of their services (i.e., survive the attacks) enjoy a significant competitive advantage. Minimizing unexpected and unplanned downtime can be done by identifying, prioritizing and defending against misuse, attacks and vulnerabilities.
Intrusion Detection and Prevention is a rapidly growing field that deals with detecting and responding to malicious network traffic and computer misuse. Intrusion detection is the process of identifying and (possibly) responding to malicious activities targeted at computing and network resources. Any hardware or software automation that monitors, detects or responds to events occurring in a network or on a host computer is considered relevant to the intrusion detection approach. Different intrusion detection systems provide varying functionalities and benefits.
This tutorial provides detailed and concise information on different types of attacks, theoretical foundation of attack detection approaches, implementation, data collection, evaluation, and intrusion response. Additionally, it provides an overview of some of the commercially/publicly available intrusion detection and response systems. The tutorial is for researchers and practitioners in industry, as well as for advanced-level students in computer science and engineering.
IPv6 for the (Wireless) Masses
Colin P. O'Flynn (Dalhousie University, Canada)
The use of IPv6 on wireless networks allows extending existing IP solutions to small low-cost nodes. A temperature sensor can use a HTTP request to send sensor readings to a central server. A technician can upload new firmware to a node around the world using TFTP as easily as if the node was connected to their computer. This tutorial will provide end-to-end coverage of how IPv6 can be used on low-power constrained wireless nodes. A participant in this tutorial can expect to learn how to understand and implement IPv6 wireless sensor networks. In addition current research directions and new research opportunities will be presented.
To begin the tutorial, a brief introduction to IPv6 will be provided for those unfamiliar with this version of the internet protocol. Next the IEEE 802.15.4 networking standard will be presented, which is used by many wireless sensor networks. This will introduce 6LoWPAN, which is the IETF standard used to transmit IPv6 packets across IEEE 802.15.4 networks. With basic IPv6 connectivity coverage of higher-layers will be provided, such as using TCP, UDP, HTTP, and TFTP. This will also touch on work done to define standard higher-layer protocols.
Security issues will be covered, especially the required trade-offs to use security in low-power and constrained nodes. Security issues will also include a discussion and demonstration of realistic attacks on wireless sensor networks.
A live demonstration will be used throughout the tutorial. This demonstration will help show how these networks can be used in real life, and the simplicity IP gives. The demonstration will attempt to use easily available hardware and software which participants could replicate.
Finally current standards and research directions will be presented. As the presenter is an active participant in the various standards being developed for this market, this section should be timely and update with any current developments.
Exploiting Beamforming Antennas in Wireless Ad hoc Networks
Osama Bazan (Ryerson University, Canada)
Using smart beamforming (directional) antennas in wireless ad hoc networks has recently received increasing attention in the networking community due to their potential benefits and numerous advantages over the traditional omni-directional antennas. Beamforming antennas have the ability to increase the spatial reuse, reduce the interference, extend the transmission range, improve the transmission reliability and/or save the power consumption. If they are effectively used, they can significantly improve the network capacity, lifetime, connectivity and security. Since it is not sufficient to plug-and-play beamforming antennas to exploit their offered potential, the beamforming antenna systems need to be appropriately controlled by upper layers of the networking protocol stack. This half-day tutorial will provide a comprehensive discussion of the design and implementation issues of the antenna-aware network protocols mainly at the medium access and networking layers. We will address the benefits as well as the challenges of using beamforming antennas in multi-hop wireless networks. The tutorial will survey the state-of-the-art in directional MAC and directional routing protocols that are designed to harness the potential benefits of beamforming antennas. Where important, performance results will be presented. Theoretical capacity bounds and some practical aspects will also be discussed. We will conclude the talk by highlighting open research work.