Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Secure Application-Aware Service Differentiation in Public Area Wireless Networks

  • Computer Network and Internet
  • Published:
Journal of Computer Science and Technology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

We are witnessing the increasing demand for pervasive Internet access from public area wireless networks (PAWNs). As their popularity grows, the inherent untrusted nature of public places and the diverse service requirements of end users are two key issues that need to be addressed. We have proposed two approaches to address these issues. First, the Home-based Authentication Protocol (HAP) that provides a framework by which to establish trust between a nomadic client and a service provider using a trusted third party (home). Second, we argue that the best-effort-based service model provided by many access points is not enough to satisfy the end user fairness and to maximize the wireless link utilization for a diverse user population. We have proposed an application-aware service differentiation (AASD) mechanism that takes both application semantics and user requirements into consideration. Our analysis of this framework shows several fruitful results. The total authentication latency increases with the number of clients but at a rate that is much less than linear increasing latency. Also, in comparison with two other bandwidth allocation approaches, the best effort and static access control, our proposed application-aware service differentiation method, outperforms them in terms of the client fairness and wireless bandwidth utilization.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Bahl P, Russell W, Wang Y et al. PAWNs: Satisfying the need for ubiquitous secure connectivity and location services. IEEE Personal Communications Magazine, February 2002, 9(1): 40–48.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Public-Key Infrastructure (X.509). http://www.ieft.org/html.charters/pkix-charter.html.

  3. IEEE Std 802.11 –- Wireless LAN medium access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) specifications, 1997.

  4. Zhang L, Deering S, Estrin D. RSVP: A new resource ReSerVation protocol. IEEE Network, September 1993, 7(5): 8–18.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Breslau L, Knightly E, Shenker S et al. Endpoint admission control: Architectural issues and performance. In Proc. SIGCOMM, Stockholm, Sweden, September 2000, pp.57–69.

  6. B Clifford Neumann, T Ts'o. Kerberos: An authentication service for computer networks. IEEE Communications Magazine, September 1994, 32(9): 33–38.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Balachandran A, Voelker G, Bahl P, Rangan V. Characterizing user behavior and network performance in a public wireless LAN. In Proc. ACM SIGMETRICS 2002, Marina Del Rey, CA, June 2002.

  8. Barford P, Crovella M E. Generating representative web workloads for network and server performance evaluation. In Proc. Performance'98/ACM SIGMETRICS '98, Madison, WI, July, 1998.

  9. Zhu Z, Mao Y, Shi W. Workload characterization of uncacheable web content. In Proc. the 4th Int. Conf. Web Engineering (ICWE'04), Munich, Germany, July 2004.

  10. Krishnamurthy B, Rexford J. Web Protocols and Practice: HTTP/1.1, Networking Protocols, Caching and Traffic Measurement. Addison-Wesley, Inc, 2001.

  11. OpenSSL Project. http://www.openssl.org.

  12. Rivest R L, Shamir A, Adleman L. On digital signatures and public key cryptosystems. Comm. Ass. Comp. Machine., February 1978, 21.

  13. Apache HTTP Server Project. http://httpd.apache.org.

  14. Wireless LAN Traces from ACM SIGCOMM'01, 2001. http://ramp.ucsd.edu/pawn/sigcomm-trace.

  15. Nist Network Emulation Tool (NISTnet). http://www.antd.nist.gov/nistnet/index.html.

  16. Kindberg T et al. People, places, things: Web presence for the real world. In Proc. WMCSA'2000, Monterey, CA, December 2000.

  17. Zhang K, Kindberg T. An authroization infrastructure for nomadic computing. In Proc. SACMAT'2002, Monterey, CA, May, 2002.

  18. Blaze M, Feigenbaum J, Ioannidis I et al. The role of trust management in distributed systems security. In Chapter in Secure Internet Programming: Security Issues for Mobile and Distributed Objects, Vitek and Jensen (eds.), 1999.

  19. Blaze M, Feigenbaum J, Strauss M. Decentralized trust management. In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Oakland, CA, May 1996, pp.164–173.

  20. Corner M, Noble B. Zero-interaction authentication. In Proc. the 8th ACM SIGMOBILE Int. Conf. Mobil Computing and Networking (MobiCom'02), Atlanta, GA, USA, Sept. 2002.

  21. Perkins C E. Mobile IP. IEEE Communications Magazine, May 1997, 35(5): 84–99.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Nandagopal T, Kim T, Gao X, Bharghavan V. Achieving MAC layer fairness in wireless packet networks. In Proc. the 6th ACM SIGMOBILE Int. Conf. Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom'00), Boston, MA, USA, August 2000, pp. 87–98.

  23. Vaidya N H, Bahl P, Gupta S. Distributed fair scheduling in a wireless LAN. In Proc. the 6th ACM SIGMOBILE Int. Conf. Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom'00), Boston, MA, USA, August 2000, pp.167–178.

  24. Qiu L, Bahl P, Adya A. The effect of first-hop wireless bandwidth allocation on end-to-end network performance. In Proc. NOSSDAV 2002, Miami Beach, FL, USA, May 2002, pp.85–93.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Wayne State University, 431 State Hall, 5143 Cass Ave., Detroit, MI, 48202, U.S.A.

    Weisong Shi, Sharun Santhosh & Hanping Lufei

Authors
  1. Weisong Shi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Sharun Santhosh
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Hanping Lufei
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Weisong Shi.

Additional information

This work was supported in part by Michigan Life Science Corridor under Grant No. MEDC-459 and Wayne State University Faculty Research Grant.

Weisong Shi is an assistant professor of computer science at Wayne State University. He received his B.S. degree from Xidian University in 1995., and Ph.D. degree from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2000, both in computer engineering. His current research focuses on dynamic Web content delivery, trusted resource sharing in peer-to-peer systems, mobile computing, and wireless sensor networks. Dr. Shi has published more than 40 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers in these areas. He is the author of the book Performance Optimization of Software Distributed Shared Memory Systems (High Education Press, 2004). He has also served on technical program committees of several international conferences, including the chair of poster track of WWW 2005 and 2006. He is a recipient of Microsoft Fellowship in 1999, the President Outstanding Award of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2000, one of 100 outstanding Ph.D. dissertations (China) in 2002, “Faculty Research Award” of Wayne State University in 2004 and 2005, the “Best Paper Award” of ICWE' 04 and IPDPS' 05. He is a member of ACM, USENIX, and IEEE.

Sharun Santhosh has completed his M.S. in computer science at Wayne State University. His research has ranged from security protocols, to service differentiation in wireless networks, to resource discovery and distributed computing. His thesis studies user behavior and file access patterns to come up with new methods of improving distributed file system design and performance. He received his B.E. degree in 1998 from the University of Madras in India, in computer science and engineering.

Hanping Lufei is a Ph.D. candidate of computer science at Wayne State University. His current research focuses on systems security, access control, and trust management in mobile computing environment. He is also interested in computing enhancement for handheld device and resource management in distributed systems. He received his B.S. degree in 1998 and M.S. degree in 2001 from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) in China and the University of Toledo in USA, both in electrical engineering.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Shi, W., Santhosh, S. & Lufei, H. Secure Application-Aware Service Differentiation in Public Area Wireless Networks. J Comput Sci Technol 20, 676–688 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-005-0676-y

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-005-0676-y

Keywords

Search

Navigation