Wi-Fi Deployment in Large New Zealand Organizations

Wi-Fi (also known as IEEE 802.11b) networks are gaining widespread popularity as wireless local area networks (WLANs) due to their simplicity in operation, robustness, low cost, and user mobility offered by the technology. It is a viable technology for wireless local area networking applications in both business and home environments. This chapter reports on a survey of large New Zealand organizations focusing on the level of Wi-Fi deployment, reasons for non-deployment, the scope of deployment, investment in deployment, problems encountered, and future plans. Our findings show that most organizations have at least considered the technology, though a much smaller proportion has deployed it on any significant scale. A follow up review of the latest published case studies and surveys suggests that while Wi-Fi networks are consolidating, interest is growing in wider area wireless networks.

Mobile Information Systems in a Hospital Organization Setting

The emerging of wireless computing motivates radical changes of how information is obtained. Our paper discusses a practical realisation of an application using push and pull based mechanism in a wireless ad-hoc environment. We use a hospital information system as a case study scenario for our proposed application. The pull mechanism is initiated from doctors as mobile client to retrieve and update patient records in the central database server. The push mechanism is initiated from the server without a specific request from the doctors. The application of push mechanism includes sending a message from central server to a specific doctor, and multicasting a global message to all doctors connected to the server application. The global message can be disabled by each doctor to perform selective recipients.

Mobile Multimedia

Mobile multimedia, referring to multimedia information exchange over wireless networks or wireless Internet, is made possible due to the popularity and evolution of mobile computing devices, coupled with fast and affordable mobile networks. This chapter discusses various state-of-the-art communication technologies to support mobile multimedia. The range of complexity of applications and services provided to end-users also play an important part in the success of mobile multimedia.

Network Quality of Service for Enterprise Resource Planning Systems

The research reported in this chapter studied the relevance of the application of network quality of service (QoS) technologies for modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, explored the state-of-art for QoS technologies and implementations, and finally provided a framework for the provision of QoS for ERP systems that utilise Internet protocol (IP) networks. The motivation for conducting this research has been the fact that, to date, there is a dearth of literature on the realisation of network QoS for mission-critical ERP systems. Nor have the current implementations of QoS been studied with the objective of developing a practical framework, based on the knowledge and experiences of the practitioners, to allow a structured approach for the provision of QoS for modern ERP systems. Due to the intent and the nature of the research, an interpretivist research paradigm underlies the work and informed a qualitative research method. Based upon the research problem and the context of research, a case study research method has been selected. Four individual cases—including both leading ERP vendors and network technology vendors—were conducted. The primary data collection was done using semi-structured interviews and this data was supplemented by an extensive array of secondary material. The case data collected was then analysed using qualitative data analysis strategies derived from the existing literature. Cross-case analysis confirmed that the traditional approaches for ensuring the performance of ERP systems on IP networks do not address network congestion and latency effectively, nor do they offer guaranteed network service quality for ERP systems. Moreover, a cross-case comparative data analysis was used to review the pattern of existing QoS implementations and it concluded that while QoS is increasingly being acknowledged by enterprises as an important issue, its deployment remains limited. The findings from the cross-case analysis ultimately became the basis of the proposed framework for the provision of network QoS for ERP systems. The proposed framework focuses on providing a structured, yet practical approach to implement end-to-end IP QoS that accommodates both ERP systems and their Web-enabled versions based on state-of-art traffic classification mechanisms. The value of the research is envisioned to be most visible for two major audiences: enterprises that currently utilise best-effort IP networks for their ERP deployments and ERP vendors.

Design of High Capacity Survivable Networks

Survivability, also known as terminal reliability, refers to keeping at least one path between specified network nodes so that some or all of traffic between nodes is routed through. Survivability in high capacity telecommunication networks is crucial as failure of network component such as nodes or links between nodes can potentially bring down the whole communication network, as happened in some real-world cases. Adding redundant network components increases the survivability of a network with an associated increase in cost. In this chapter we consider the design of survivable telecommunications network architecture that uses high-capacity transport facilities. The model considers selection of capacitated links and routing of multicommodity traffic flow in the network that minimizes overall network cost. Two node disjoint paths are selected for each commodity. In case of failure of the primary path, a portion of the traffic for each commodity is rerouted through the secondary path. The methodology presented in this chapter can be used by the network designer to construct cost-effective high capacity survivable networks.

Mining Walking Pattern from Mobile Users

Mining walking pattern from mobile users represents an interesting research area in the field of data mining which is about extracting patterns and knowledge out from a given dataset. There are a number of related works in knowledge extraction from mobile users, but none have previously examined the situation of how mobile users walks from one location of interest to another location of interest in the mobile environment. Walking pattern is the proposed method where it examines from the source data in order to find out the two-step, three-step and four-step walking patterns that are performed by mobile users significantly and strongly through location movement database using measure of support and confidence. Performance evaluation shows the tendency for the increased number of candidate walking patterns with the increase in location of interest and steps. Walking pattern has proven itself to be a suitable method in finding knowledge from mobile users.

Fighting the Problem of Unsolicited E-Mail Using a Hashcash Proof-of-Work Approach

This chapter investigates the problem of e-mail spam, and identifies methods to minimize the volumes. The analysis focuses on the hashcash proof-of-work approach, and investigates the feasibility of a hashcash-based solution. A potential problem with proof-of-work is that disparity across different powered computers may result in some unfortunate users spending a disproportionately long time calculating a stamp. An experiment is carried out to time how long it takes to calculate stamps across a variety of processor speeds. It is concluded from the analysis of the results that due to this problem of egalitarianism, hashcash (or CPU-bound proof-of-work in general) is not a suitable approach as a stand-alone anti-spam solution. It appears that a hybrid anti-spam system in conjunction with a legal and policy framework is the best approach.

A SEEP Protocol Design Using 3BC, ECC(F2m) and HECC Algorithm

Unlike SET (secure electronic transaction) protocol. This chapter proposes a SEEP (highly secure electronic payment) protocol, which uses ECC (elliptic curve cryptosystem with F2 mnot Fp) (Koblitz, 1987; Miller, 1986; Harper, Menezes, & Vanstone, 1993), SHA (secure hash algorithm) and 3BC (block byte bit cipher) instead of RSA and DES. To improve the strength of encryption and the speed of processing, the public key and the private key of ECC and HECC (Hyper Elliptic Curve Cryptosystem) are used in 3BC (Cho, Shin, Lee, & Lee, 2002; Cho & Lee, 2002) algorithm, which generates session keys for the data encryption. In particular, when ECC and HECC are combined with 3BC, the strength of security is improved significantly. As the process of the digital envelope used in the existing SET protocol is removed by the 3BC algorithm in this chapter, the processing time is substantially reduced. In addition, the use of multiple signatures has some advantages of reducing the size of transmission data as an intermediate payment agent and avoiding the danger of eavesdropping of private keys.

Addressing WiFi Security Concerns

Signal leakage means that wireless network communications can be picked up outside the physical boundaries of the building in which they are being operated, meaning a hacker can operate from the street outside. In addition to signal leakage—the wired equivalent privacy protocol is inherently weak and there are various other attacks that can be initiated against WLAN’s. This research commences by conducting a war driving expedition to ascertain the number of unprotected WLAN devices in use in a one small town. We conclude by making recommendations for three groups of user; home user, small office/home office (SOHO) and medium to large organisations. Home users should implement all the security measures their hardware offers them, to include WEP at the longest key length permitted and implement firewalls on all connected PCs changing their WEP key on a weekly basis. The small office group should implement WPA-SPK; and the medium to large organisations should implement one or more of either WPA enterprise with a RADIUS server, VPN software, IDSs, and provide documented policies in relation to WLANs and their use.

Applications and Future Trends in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

This chapter presents the current state of the art of mobile ad hoc network and some important problems and challenges related to routing, power management, location management, security as well as multimedia over ad hoc networks. A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a temporary, self-organizing network of wireless mobile nodes without the support of any existing infrastructure that may be readily available on the conventional networks. Since there is no fixed infrastructure available for MANET with nodes being mobile, routing becomes a very important issue. In addition, we also explain the various emerging applications and future trends of MANET.