IEEE Internet Computing

Staring at Clouds

Cloud computing's premise is to lower computing costs by providing computational resources in a shared infrastructure. This could be a godsend to smaller organizations, but interoperability and security challenges still exist for this emerging technology.

Reaping Deep Web Rewards Is a Matter of Semantics

New semantic Web technologies are emerging as viable alternatives to the orthodox Semantic Web framework defined by W3C, creating taxonomies and ontologies for deep Web databases.

IPTV: Reinventing Television in the Internet Age

IPTV is reinventing television for the Internet age, enabling much more freedom of choice, control, and interactivity while delivering a rich, high-definition entertaining, educational, and informational visual experience to a wide variety of connected devices with the ease-of-use required by today's consumers. They introduce the technologies, architecture, and standards associated with this emerging new technology.

Designing a Reliable IPTV Network

Meeting IPTV's quality of service constraints (such as low latency and loss) requires designing the right combination of underlying IP-transport, restoration, and video and packet recovery methods. Carriers use link-based fast reroute (FRR) as the primary transport restoration method to achieve this goal. Although we can carefully tune the link weights in the IP routing protocol to avoid traffic overlap from FRR during single link failures, multiple failures can still cause path overlap in long-distance networks. By having FRR, IGP, and multicast protocols work in harmony and with appropriate link weight assignments, this approach can help minimize path overlap during multiple failures.

Mobile IPTV: Approaches, Challenges, Standards, and QoS Support

IPTV is defined as multimedia services, such as TV, video, audio, text, graphics, and data, delivered over IP-based networks managed to support quality of service (QoS), quality of experience, security, interactivity, and reliability. Mobile IPTV extends those services to mobile networks. The authors discuss mobile IPTV standardization's status, related approaches in the field, and technical challenges to enhancing mobile IPTV services. Given the critical role of QoS in the technology's widespread adoption, the authors also propose an efficient signaling scheme to support QoS for seamless mobile IPTV services.

Standardization Activities for IPTV Set-Top Box Remote Management

IPTV services are gaining widespread use, requiring service providers to have effective methods for remotely configuring and managing IPTV set-top boxes (STBs). Solutions for such remote management are becoming standards-based. This article examines published specifications and ongoing activities on IPTV STB remote management in four standards organizations: the Broadband Forum, the Digital Video Broadcasting Project, the Open IPTV Forum, and the Alliance for Telecommunication Industry Solutions IPTV Interoperability Forum. The authors compare the protocol and data model definitions, investigate interoperability test events, and comment on possible future directions for standardization.

Reducing Channel-Change Times with the Real-Time Transport Protocol

In a multicast IPTV distribution network, each channel is offered in a different multicast session, and the IP set-top box joins the respective session when the viewer tunes to a new channel. Due to delays associated with network components and encoding schemes, the time difference between the channel-change request and when the new channel shows up on the screen can be annoyingly large. This article examines the Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) in IPTV networks and describes how RTP and its control protocol can help reduce channel-change times.

Building the Internet of Things Using RFID: The RFID Ecosystem Experience

At the University of Washington, the RFID Ecosystem creates a microcosm for the Internet of Things. The authors developed a suite of Web-based, user-level tools and applications designed to empower users by facilitating their understanding, management, and control of personal RFID data and privacy settings. They deployed these applications in the RFID Ecosystem and conducted a four-week user study to measure trends in adoption and utilization of the tools and applications as well as users' qualitative reactions.

Fighting Phishing with Discriminative Keypoint Features

Phishing is a form of online identity theft associated with both social engineering and technical subterfuge and is a major threat to information security and personal privacy. Here, the authors present an effective image-based antiphishing scheme based on discriminative keypoint features in Web pages. Their invariant content descriptor, the Contrast Context Histogram (CCH), computes the similarity degree between suspicious and authentic pages. The results show that the proposed scheme achieves high accuracy and low error rates.

A Semantic-Based Solution for UBL Schema Interoperability

The Universal Business Language (UBL) is an initiative to develop common business document schemas for interoperability. However, businesses operate in different industry, geopolitical, and regulatory contexts and have different rules and requirements for the information they exchange. So, several trading communities are tailoring UBL schemas to their needs, requiring that these schemas translate to each other. In this article, the authors describe how to enhance UBL with semantics-based translation mechanisms to maintain interoperability between documents conforming to different schema versions.

Daios: Efficient Dynamic Web Service Invocation

Systems based on the service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm must be able to bind to arbitrary Web services at runtime. However, current service frameworks are predominantly used through precompiled service-access components, which are invariably hard-wired to a specific service provider. The Dynamic and Asynchronous Invocation of Services framework is a message-based service framework that supports SOA implementation, allowing dynamic invocation of SOAP/WSDL-based and RESTful services. It abstracts from the target service's internals, decoupling clients from the services they use.

Agents and Service-Oriented Computing for Autonomic Computing: A Research Agenda

Autonomic computing is the solution proposed to cope with the complexity of today's computing environments. Self-management, an important element of autonomic computing, is also characteristic of single and multiagent systems, as well as systems based on service-oriented architectures. Combining these technologies can be profitable for all — in particular, for the development of autonomic computing systems.

Scala and Lift—Functional Recipes for the Web

Today, there's significant interest in functional languages and frameworks that fit the Web better than imperative languages. We explore Scala, an OO-functional language on the Java virtual machine, and Lift, a framework implemented on Scala's functional features. The Scala language offers functional programming features and asynchronous message-passing concurrency alongside a statically typed model. Lift exploits this model to offer secure, higher-level abstractions to Web developers.

Keys Don't Grow in Threes

Many Internet security mechanisms depend on the use of cryptographic algorithms for various forms of authentication and confidentiality. Even when well-known and standardized cryptographic algorithms are used in well-known protocols, some parameters must be specified, the most important of which are usually algorithm identifiers and key or hash-output lengths. The author reviews some recent key length recommendations and compares those to current usage. He raises some issues that come up once we start to do the updates called for by various cryptographic experts and authorities who've made recommendations on this topic — some of which call for widespread changes to occur in 2010.