Showing papers in "IEEE Internet Computing in 2006"

Deploying a wireless sensor network on an active volcano

Abstract: Augmenting heavy and power-hungry data collection equipment with lighten smaller wireless sensor network nodes leads to faster, larger deployments. Arrays comprising dozens of wireless sensor nodes are now possible, allowing scientific studies that aren't feasible with traditional instrumentation. Designing sensor networks to support volcanic studies requires addressing the high data rates and high data fidelity these studies demand. The authors' sensor-network application for volcanic data collection relies on triggered event detection and reliable data retrieval to meet bandwidth and data-quality demands.

Advanced Message Queuing Protocol

Abstract: The advanced message queuing protocol (AMQP) working group's goal is to create an open standard for an interoperable enterprise-scale asynchronous messaging protocol. AMQP is finally addressing the lack of enterprise messaging interoperability standards. This relatively simple yet compellingly powerful enterprise messaging protocol is thus poised to open up a bright new era for enterprise messaging

Denial-of-service attack-detection techniques

Abstract: Denial-of-service (DoS) detection techniques - such as activity profiling, change-point detection, and wavelet-based signal analysis - face the considerable challenge of discriminating network-based flooding attacks from sudden increases in legitimate activity or flash events. This survey of techniques and testing results provides insight into our ability to successfully identify DoS flooding attacks. Although each detector shows promise in limited testing, none completely solve the detection problem. Combining various approaches with experienced network operators most likely produce the best results.

Monitoring civil structures with a wireless sensor network

Abstract: Structural health monitoring (SHM) is an active area of research devoted to systems that can autonomously and proactively assess the structural integrity of bridges, buildings, and aerospace vehicles. Recent technological advances promise the eventual ability to cover a large civil structure with low-cost wireless sensors that can continuously monitor a building's structural health, but researchers face several obstacles to reaching this goal, including high data-rate, data-fidelity, and time-synchronization requirements. This article describes two systems the authors recently deployed in real-world structures.

Distributed Data Mining in Peer-to-Peer Networks

Abstract: Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are gaining popularity in many applications such as file sharing, e-commerce, and social networking, many of which deal with rich, distributed data sources that can benefit from data mining. P2P networks are, in fact, well-suited to distributed data mining (DDM), which deals with the problem of data analysis in environments with distributed data, computing nodes, and users. This article offers an overview of DDM applications and algorithms for P2P environments, focusing particularly on local algorithms that perform data analysis by using computing primitives with limited communication overhead. The authors describe both exact and approximate local P2P data mining algorithms that work in a decentralized and communication-efficient manner

An antiphishing strategy based on visual similarity assessment

Abstract: The authors' proposed antiphishing strategy uses visual characteristics to identify potential phishing sites and measure suspicious pages similarity to actual sites registered with the system. The first of two sequential processes in the SiteWatcher system runs on local email servers and monitors emails for keywords and suspicious URLs. The second process then compares the potential phishing pages against actual pages and assesses visual similarities between them in terms of key regions, page layouts, and overall styles. The approach is designed to be part of an enterprise antiphishing solution.

When TCP Breaks: Delay- and Disruption- Tolerant Networking

Abstract: The authors give an overview of current work on delay- and disruption-tolerant networking and review the overall architecture proposed by the Internet Research Task Force's Delay Tolerant Networking Research Group. Their approach to networking makes no assumption that nodes will have end-to-end connectivity, which could be missing with extremely high-latency connections, if the nodes are only in contact with one another infrequently or if contacts are being continually disrupted. They also describe the main protocols the group is developing and give examples of some pilot networks that use these protocols

Kansei: a high-fidelity sensing testbed

Abstract: Hardware and software testbeds are becoming the preferred basis for experimenting with embedded wireless sensor network applications. The Kansei testbed at the Ohio State University features a heterogeneous hardware infrastructure, with dedicated node resources for local computation, storage, data retrieval, and back-channel communication. Kansei includes a time-accurate hybrid simulation engine that uses testbed hardware resources to simulate large arrays. It supports high-fidelity sensor data generation as well as real-time data and event injection. The testbed also includes software components and an associated job-control language for complex multi-tier experiments.

Integrating Semantic and Syntactic Descriptions to Chain Geographic Services

Abstract: Integrating multiple geographic services from different information communities and spatiolinguistic regions is challenging because of its inherent complexity and heterogeneity. A geographic information systems workflow approach can use semantic and syntactic service descriptions to form service chains that can integrate service discovery, composition, and reuse. Service chaining links remote geographic services to help expert users form complex geoprocessing services and perform timely analysis of geodata. This method facilitates the use of XML-based service description languages to build a geoservice-reuse architecture based on common ontologies and shared service descriptions

Microformats: the next (small) thing on the semantic Web?

Abstract: Clever application of existing XHTML elements and class attributes can make it easier to describe people, places, events, and other semistructured information in human-readable form. In this paper, the author takes a more detailed look at some examples of microformats, the general principles by which they can be constructed, and how a community of users is forming around these seemingly ad hoc specifications to advance the cause of what some call an alternative to the semantic Web, the "lowercase semantic Web".

Analyzing conversations of Web services

Abstract: A composite Web service consists of a set of individual services (or peers), which interact with each other via messages. A conversation is a global sequence of messages exchanged among peers participating in a composite Web service. Interestingly, conversation behavior differs significantly for synchronous and asynchronous communication, even if peers' local behaviors remain the same. The authors use synchronizability and realizability analysis techniques to analyze conversations in the presence of asynchronous communication. With these analyses, they can use model checking to automatically verify conversation behavior for bottom-up and top-down Web service specifications.

Semantic Web and semantic Web services: father and son or indivisible twins?

Abstract: The semantic Web is, without a doubt, gaining momentum in both industry and academia. The recent International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) attracted more than 500 researchers; major vendors including IBM, Oracle, and Software AG have released or announced products; and the forthcoming Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose, California, is poised to be an impressive showcase for executives and venture capitalists on the business potential of semantic technologies. Unfortunately, semantic Web services are underrepresented on the agenda, at least if we take the number of scientific publications about semantic Web services as a proxy. Most semantic Web researchers dedicate their attention to annotating Web content stored in static documents or database-driven applications. Semantic Web services (SWS) frameworks are mandatory components of the semantic Web, primarily because entities are more willing to expose functionality than data in business settings.

Mobile Web services: a new agent-based framework

Abstract: Mobile devices and server applications often run on different platforms, which can make integration problematic. Web services might offer a solution, but they typically include XML protocols that are too "heavy" for mobile devices. In this article, we describe agent-based mobile services framework. It uses wireless portal networks and eliminates XML processing on mobile clients. It also offers dynamic service selection and rapid application development and deployment for Web service providers

Reliability prediction for service-oriented computing environments

Abstract: A key issue in the development of service-oriented computing applications is the dynamic and efficient prediction of their overall quality to appropriately drive the selection and assembly of services. This article focuses on the reliability quality measure and presents an implementation of a reliability prediction methodology that respects SOC's decentralization and autonomy principles. Despite the focus on reliability, you can extend the architecture to the prediction of other quality measures

'Publish-subscribe grows up: support for management, visibility control, and heterogeneity

Abstract: Message-oriented middleware is used to decouple the operation of cooperating applications. Existing approaches have concentrated mainly on scalability issues, but dynamic business processes and the integration of a wide range of data sources and applications, require a middleware that is customizable. The Rebeca publish-subscribe service uses scoping to structure both middleware and applications. It thus offers advanced routing mechanisms to subsystems that need high scalability and it allows for heterogeneous message models that are transparently mapped onto each other.

Architecting RFID Middleware

Abstract: Radio frequency identification is a wireless identification technology that relies on cheap tags that can be attached to objects and that nearby readers can track. The computer science and computer engineering department at the University of Arkansas started a project aimed at developing open-source RF middleware to address this latter problem. In this article, we describe that software's development and the challenges and benefits of large-scale software development in universities

Guest Editors' Introduction: Sensor-Network Applications

Abstract: Wireless sensor network technologies let us view and access large parts of the physical world from cyberspace via sensor monitoring. The three theme features in this issue address some of the challenges inherent to developing and fielding wireless sensor networks.

Search engine coverage of the OAI-PMH corpus

Abstract: Having indexed much of the "surface" Web, search engines are now using various approaches to index the "deep" Web. At the same time, institutional repositories and digital libraries are adopting the open archives initiative protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH) to expose their holdings. The authors harvested nearly 10 million records from OAI-PMH repositories. From these records, they extracted 3.3 million unique resource URLs and then conducted searches on samples from this collection to determine how much of the OAI-PMH corpus the three major search engines have indexed.

Service Mosaic: A Model-Driven Framework for Web Services Life-Cycle Management

Abstract: Although Web services provide abstractions for simplifying integration at lower levels of the interaction stacks, they don't yet help simplify integration at higher abstraction levels such as business-level interaction protocols. Using a model-driven framework for Web services life-cycle management, the authors help facilitate the scalable development and maintenance of service-oriented applications by analyzing and managing Web service business protocols. Instead of using simple black and white measures, they identify different classes of protocol compatibility and replaceability. They implemented this framework in a prototype platform called Service Mosaic

Concurrent Multiple-Issue Negotiation for Internet-Based Services

Abstract: Negotiation is a technique for reaching a mutually beneficial agreement among autonomous entities. In an Internet-based services context, multiple entities are negotiating simultaneously. The concurrent negotiation protocol extends existing negotiation protocols, letting both service requestors and service providers manage several negotiation processes in parallel. Colored Petri nets, which have greater expressive power than finite state machines and offer support for concurrency, represent the negotiation protocol and facilitate the analysis of desirable properties

Web Services for Geographic Information Systems

Abstract: A surge in Web services and applications for geographic information systems (GISs) has made large spatial-data archives available over the Internet Significant accomplishments in GIS Web services have led to several exemplifying map and image services that adhere to Web services standards and provide geospatial data and digital maps to enterprise developers

Publish-subscribe for high-performance computing

Abstract: High-performance computing could significantly benefit from publish-subscribe communication, but current systems don't deliver the kind of performance required by applications in that domain. In response, the authors developed Echo, a high-performance event-delivery middleware designed to scale to the data rates typically found in grid environments. This article provides an overview of Echo, the infrastructure on which it's built, and the techniques used to implement it.

Evaluating Performance in Spatial Data Infrastructures for Geoprocessing

Abstract: Effective and efficient Web services infrastructures for geoprocessing are essential for fields such as e-government and e-tourism. However, few model-based approaches exist that let researchers analyze and measure system implementation performance. The authors present a performance evaluation of a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) implementation based on common standards. The SDI's purpose is to compute groundwater vulnerability function. The authors study four influential performance issues: caching, network adaptation, data granularity, and communication mode

Avoid XML schema wildcards for Web service interfaces

Abstract: Developers risk negative side effects when they attempt to make Web services interfaces extensible without understanding the context in which various mechanisms are applied. Given the overuse and misapplication of the HTML example, developers often litter their interfaces with XML Schema wildcards. This increases complexity and results in ambiguous interface definitions. A more appropriate versioning strategy for Web services development can help developers avoid these problems

Anteater: A Service-Oriented Architecture for High-Performance Data Mining

Abstract: Data mining focuses on extracting useful information from large volumes of data, and thus has been the center of much attention in recent years. Building scalable, extensible, and easy-to-use data mining systems, however, has proved to be difficult. In response, the authors developed Anteater, a service-oriented architecture for data mining that relies on Web services to achieve extensibility and interoperability, offers simple abstractions for users, and supports computationally intensive processing on large amounts of data through massive parallelism

Service-Oriented Distributed Data Mining

Abstract: Data mining research currently faces two great challenges: how to embrace data mining services with just-in-time and autonomous properties and how to mine distributed and privacy-protected data. To address these problems, the authors adopt the business process execution language for Web services in a service-oriented distributed data mining (DDM) platform to choreograph DDM component services and fulfil global data mining requirements. They also use the learning-from-abstraction methodology to achieve privacy-preserving DDM. Finally, they illustrate how localized autonomy on privacy-policy enforcement plus a bidding process can help the service-oriented system self-organize

Municipal Wi-Fi: big wave or wipeout?

Abstract: This article describes some contemporary cases, explores the perspectives of municipalities, providers, and legislators, and examines some examples that could synchronize the various stake-holders' positions. We focus here mostly on US cases. Deployment of wireless services to cities and towns has become a topic of considerable controversy. At the center of the debate is the decision by municipalities to offer low-cost service to citizens who would normally be excluded from the Internet. This "digital divide" justification often pits large cities against incumbent telecommunications providers. Legislation at the national and state levels has been somewhat favorable to the providers so far, but this bias might be shifting as more large providers join, rather than oppose, municipal wireless projects

QoS assessment via stochastic analysis

Abstract: Using a stochastic modeling approach based on the Unified Modeling Language and enriched with annotations that conform to the UML profile for schedulability performance, and time, the authors propose a method for assessing quality of service (QoS) in fault-tolerant (FT) distributed systems. From the UML system specification, they produce a generalized stochastic Petri net (GSPN) performance model for assessing an FT application's QoS via stochastic analysis. The ArgoSPE tool provides support for the proposed technique, helping to automatically produce the GSPN model

Enhancing the US Navy's GIDB Portal with Web Services

Abstract: Using Web services, the authors have been able to increase the amount of data accessible through the Naval Research Laboratory's geospatial information database (GIDB) portal. They created a Web crawler for Web mapping services (WMS) that harvests and adds data to the portal index and a translator that provides access to non-WMS data through the WMS interface. The integrated Web services broker, using traditional Web services standards, provides automated access to meteorological and oceanographic data

The Transition to IPv6, Part 1: 4over6 for the China Education and Research Network

Abstract: Researchers at the Tsinghua University in Beijing propose a mechanism for letting IPv4 networks communicate with each other across an IPv6 backbone via a Border- Gateway Protocol (BGP)-based control plane for advertising tunnels and lPv4 network prefixes. They've deployed a prototype implementation on the native lPv6 China Education and Research Network 2 (CERNet2) backbone as the major part of the China Next-Generation Internet (CNGI) project, using current packet-encapsulation technology and an extension of BGP, and the IETF is currently considering their 4over6 mechanism as well