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While the Internet is open by design, it is still the case that users can be subject to censorship by governments or enterprises in accessing Web services and data. In this paper we propose SEnD, a fully-distributed censorship circumvention system built upon an overlay, where users have peer-to-peer virtual private IP tunnels to proxies within their social network. With SEnD, users in an uncensored area can act as proxy servers for their social friends in a censored area, allowing them to bypass the censorship. SEnD is able to outperform the current censorship techniques, such as IP address blocking and active probing attacks. We assessed the effectiveness of SEnD through extensive simulations based on a synthetic dataset, as well as experiments based on a prototype implementation. We built our synthetic dataset based on parameters obtained from questionnaires administered both inside and outside China (we consider China as a case study of censorship area). The results show that SEnD is feasible, efficient and scalable. For example, when the proportion of concurrent active users is less than 60, 99.9 percent of these users are able to find proxy servers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The IoT extends the idea of interconnecting computers to a plethora of different devices, collectively referred to as smart devices. These are physical items, that is, "things", such as wearable devices, home appliances, and vehicles, enriched with computational and networking capabilities. Due to the huge set of devices involved, and therefore its pervasiveness, IoT is a great platform to leverage for building new applications and services or extending existing ones. In this regard, expanding online advertising into the IoT realm is an under-investigated yet promising research direction, especially considering that the traditional Internet advertising market is already worth hundreds of billions of dollars. In this article, we first propose the architecture of an IoT advertising platform inspired by the well known business ecosystem, which the traditional Internet advertising is based on. Additionally, we discuss the key challenges to implement such a platform, with a special focus on issues related to architecture, advertisement content delivery, security, and privacy of the users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet protocol (IP) is the lifeblood of the modern Internet. Its simplicity and universality have fueled the unprecedented and lasting global success of the current Internet. Nonetheless, some limitations of IP have been emerging in recent years. Furthermore, starting in mid-1990s, the advent of mobility, wirelessness, and the Web substantially shifted Internet usage and communication paradigms. This accentuated long-term concerns about the current Internet architecture and prompted interest in alternative designs. The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has been one of the key supporters of efforts to design a set of candidate next-generation Internet architectures. As a prominent design requirement, NSF emphasized “security and privacy by design” in order to avoid the long and unhappy history of incremental patching and retrofitting that characterizes the current Internet architecture. To this end, as a result of a competitive process, four prominent research projects were funded by the NSF in 2010: nebula, named-data networking, MobilityFirst, and expressive Internet architecture. This paper provides a comprehensive and neutral analysis of salient security and privacy features (and issues) in these NSF-funded future Internet architectures. Prior surveys on future Internet architectures provide a limited, or even no, comparison on security and privacy features. In addition, this paper also compares the four candidate designs with the current IP-based architecture and discusses similarities, differences, and possible improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent energy measurements on smartphones have shown that parallel communications (e.g., data transfer and voice call) require less energy than their stand-alone execution. Guided by these results, we investigate the possibility of scheduling communications in pairs for minimizing the energy consumption. We define two energy optimization problems to postpone delay-tolerant services and perform them in parallel with real-time services in order to save energy. The first problem, called single delay-tolerant assignment (SDA), allows at most one delay-tolerant service to be paired with each real-time service, whereas the second problem, called multiple delay-tolerant assignment (MDA), allows multiple delay-tolerant services to be paired (in different times) with the same real-time service. For the SDA problem, we propose an optimal algorithm. For the MDA problem, which is computationally intractable, we give an approximation algorithm. We evaluate the benefits of the energy-efficient pairing strategy via simulations on synthetic traces. The MDA algorithm can save up to the 60 percent of the energy consumption using 4G network assuming an intensive smartphone usage, while the SDA algorithm saves up to the 20 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Internet-of-Things (IoT) promises to provide services to the end users by connecting physical things around them through Internet. The conventional services build for web are primarily based on the pull technology, where the user actively engages with system to get the services. However, in IoT environment, the services are based on push-based, where information and value added services will be pushed towards the user. Unless, these push-based services are properly managed they would overwhelm the user with unnecessary information, thus, it will soon start annoying the user. In this paper, we propose a lightweight context-aware IoT service architecture namely LISA to support IoT push services in an efficient manner. In particular, LISA filter and forward the most important and relevant services to the users by understanding their context. To achieve its goals, LISA formulates a user model to resolve local decision making by using agents and available web services paradigm. The proposed user model describes the user in an abstract way by considering the context and profile information of the user. For evaluation, we simulate LISA by considering an IoT tourist guide system as a use case scenario, and we show the performance of the our user model concerning precision and recall metrics. The results of our preliminary experiments confirm that LISA successfully reduces the information provided to the user by selecting only the most relevant among those. The evaluation shows that LISA can extract services for a user by selecting from 15000 services with precision upto 0.3 and recall upto 0.8, and it can be further optimized by tuning the user-specific design settings. Additionally, our approach shows improvements in query processing time which also includes the query generation time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart city vision brings emerging heterogeneous communication technologies such as Fog Computing (FC) together to substantially reduce the latency and energy consumption of Internet of Everything (IoE) devices running various applications. The key feature that distinguishes the FC paradigm for smart cities is that it spreads communication and computing resources over the wired/wireless access network (e.g., proximate access points and base stations) to provide resource augmentation (e.g., cyberforaging) for resource- and energy-limited wired/wireless (possibly mobile) things. Motivated by these considerations, this paper presents a Fog-supported smart city network architecture called Fog Computing Architecture Network (FOCAN), a multi-tier structure in which the applications are running on things thatjointly compute, route, and communicate with one another through the smart city environment. FOCAN decreases latency and improves energy provisioning and the efficiency of services among things with different capabilities. In particular, three types of communications are defined between FOCAN devices – interprimary , primary , and secondary communication –to manage applications in a way that meets the quality of service standards for the Internet of Everything. One of the main advantages of the proposed architecture is that the devices can provide the services with low energy usage and in an efficient manner. Simulation results for a selected case study demonstrate the tremendous impact of the FOCAN energy-efficient solution on the communication performance of various types of things in smart cities. • Present a generalized multi-tiered smart city architecture utilizes FC for devices. • Develop an FC-supported resource allocation model to cover FNs/device components. • Provide various types of communications between the components. • Evaluate the performance of the solution for an FC platform on real datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]