Information Centric Networking (ICN) has been a popular research topic in the last few years, but has not attracted industry attention because of its disruptive view; this is expected considering the evolution from PSTN to IP. Towards its adoption, ICN should not only address challenges raised by current applications, but also enable a compelling service framework for next generation of networking. We envision that in the next generation networks, the network narrow waist will allow an efficient distribution of intelligence across terminals, access, edge and core network. This will enable new applications, services and future business models to be realized. Two other technologies, NFV and SDN, which in essence are frameworks that enable service-centric networking, fit well with the objective of information-centric networking, where the delivered content is a result of contextual interaction between consumers and services orchestrated to meet service objectives. Most significant benefit of this interaction will be in the network-edge considering sensitivity to service latency, customization, and contextualization. This paper provides an overview of an ICN based edge service framework, with comprehensive discussion on service composition, orchestration, and routing logic with mapping to resources in the underlying substrate. We also provide a discussion of the prototype to realize this platform and a network based conferencing system scalable to large number of participants; however the platform itself is generic to handle any service type including content distribution, video conferencing, and M2M applications.

Recent shift in the networking paradigm towards networking of information enables semantically rich interconnection and open interaction among the entities of well known services like video distribution and emerging applications like Internet of Things (IoT). Information-centric Networking (ICN) realizes a rich networking layer with ability to support computing and caching usable by any application. The success of ICN depends on enabling new services for which an ICN-based edge service framework was proposed. This paper extends our proposal by elaborating on service functions to enable contextual interaction between users and services. Towards this, an overview of the proposed ICN-based edge cloud framework is provided, with comprehensive discussion on service composition, orchestration, and routing logic with mapping to resources in the underlying substrate. In this work, we elaborate on an ICN perspective of a self managing network. We formulate the problem with optimization problems at different stages consisting of user's context and requirements, Service Level Agreement (SLA) and available resources. We demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach by means of simulation and analytical reasoning.

Toward the progress in the era of globalization and ubiquity of sensors and devices, sharing and dissemination of information dominate todays networks. Content-centric networking, cloud services, and open connectivity form the main ingredients of the future Internet architecture. With the problem of information overload, the networking paradigm of cloud computing can benefit from transitioning to a network of information in which information is the main token of communication instead of physical address. Available methods may not be efficient in exploiting the semantics of information for content dissemination. Considering a content-centric approach, we intend to tackle this problem by using the expander graphs for an enhanced network coding scheme that takes an opportunistic strategy to utilize the spectral characteristics of the network topology to achieve a better solvability and reliability and lowering the processing cost for the entire system. By simulation and analytical evaluation, we compare our proposed method with an epidemic network coding based approach. Our evaluation examines the performance of our clustering method in the presence of different random topology models as well as examining the impact on the network coding technique.

In this paper, we propose a new model of community cloud (ComC) interaction that is based on the demand of tenants and propose an intrusion detection mechanism for the proposed model. ComC is a solution that is more secure than the public cloud, and less costly than the private cloud. We argue that our proposed model of the ComC will be more beneficial to consumers as well as providers. Our evaluation shows the efficiency of the proposed model from cost and operation point of views. In addition, our analysis shows that our proposed IDS can make the ComC a safe environment and can guarantee the security and privacy of the customers.

Smart Grid (SG) uses communication technology to gather information about the actual and planned power usage in order to enable efficient power provisioning and consumption. Wireless multi-hop communications are used for exchanging data and control messages between smart meters and the utility. With the advent of cybercrimes, there is a growing concern on privacy of the clients. We argue that any communication paradigm used in the SG should support privacy, anonymity, unlinkability, unobservablity, and undetectablity. Due to the broadcast nature of wireless transmissions, many cyber-attacks such as traffic analysis and flow tracing compromise privacy of the clients. We propose an innovative scheme for traffic routing that benefits from the enhanced network coding technology. Our analysis shows that our scheme maintains privacy of the users despite the possibility of detecting transmitted traffic by an adversary. Moreover, our scheme has extra favourable features such as less computation complexity and robustness of communication.

In a smart grid system, the metering data collected by smart meters (SMs) and transferred via an Advanced Metering Infrastructure to the utility for billing purposes, and to the demand-response system to achieve cost effective resource allocation. The collected data at the SMs are sent to aggregators (AGRs), which in turn forward these data to a higher layer data collection system using secured communications. However, metering data are typically transferred between SMs and AGRs over wireless multi-hop communication networks. Due to the broadcast nature of wireless transmissions, the communications between a SM and AGR are susceptible to many security attacks. We argue that advanced network coding (NC) technology can be utilized to address this problem. We propose a novel system that supports data collection security at AGR by encrypting metering data transmitted between SMs and AGR using NC technology. Our innovative scheme eliminates the use of previously specified public key encryption system between SMs and AGR, which consequently makes our system very efficient. Analyses show that our proposed scheme enhances robustness and throughput of data routing in the wireless multi-hop network between SMs and AGR while maintaining a strong security.

The concept of Electric Vehicle as Power Energy Storage has gained much attention from the research community and market recently. The increasing capacity of the power storages in the electric vehicles (EV) motivates this concept and makes it more feasible. However, the privacy of the customers can be compromised by tracing the stations that an EV has been connected to during a period of the time. The stations that are providing power charging as well as purchasing the power back from EVs can be owned by third party businesses. EVs should be authenticated through these stations in order to give or receive appropriate credit for the power. In this paper, we identify potential privacy issues and propose a robust privacy-preserving authentication scheme for communication of the EV and the station to prevent customer information leakage. In our approach, the EV and the station communication utilizes pseudonym of the EV, in which only the smart grid server (a trusted entity) can map the pseudonym to the real vehicle identity and provide the identity management. The pseudonym of an EV changes when the EV moves from one station to another, which prevents the adversary from tracing foot prints of the EV. Our analysis shows that our model is robust enough to make sure the privacy of the customers is fully preserved, and at the same time, it is efficient by consuming very limited resources.

Conventional network services operate like silos in that a specific set of services are offered over a specific type of access network. As access networks evolve to provide IP-based packet access, it becomes attractive to break these "service silos" by offering a converged set of IP-based services to users who may access these services using a number of alternative access networks. This trend has started with 3rd generation cellular mobile networks, which have standardized on the use of the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) to manage user access to a wide variety of multimedia services over the mobile Internet, while facilitating interworking of heterogeneous wireless and landline access networks. This paper reviews the function of the IMS, and presents the use of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) above IMS to further enable service convergence. Examples of converged services are presented. Technical challenges in network and service convergence are discussed and some recent results are presented.