<p>This thesis presents a comparative study of four Network Access Control (NAC) technologies; Trusted Network Connect by the Trusted Computing group, Juniper Networks, Inc.’s Unified Access Control, Microsoft Corp.’s Network Access Protection, and Cisco Systems Inc.’s Network Admission Control. NAC is a vision, which utilizes existing solutions and new technologies to provide assurance that any device connecting to a network policy domain is authenticated and is subject to the network’s policy enforcement. Non-compliant devices are isolated until they have been brought back to a complaint status. We compare the NAC technologies in terms of architectural and functional features they provide.</p><p>There is a race of NAC solutions in the marketplace, each claiming their own definition and terminology, making it difficult for customers to adopt such a solution, resulting in much uncertainty. The NAC paradigm can be classified into two categories: the first category embraces open standards; the second follows proprietary standards. By selecting these architectures, we cover a representative set of proprietary and open standards-based NAC technologies.</p><p>This study concludes that there is a great need for standardization and interoperability of NAC components and that the four major solution proposals that we studied fall short of the desired interoperability. With standards, customers have the choice to adopt solution components from different vendors, selecting, what is commonly referred to as the best of breed. One example for a standard technology that all four NAC technologies that we studied did adopt is the IEEE’s 802.1X port-based access control technology. It is used to control endpoint device access to the network.</p><p>One shortcoming that most NAC architectures (with the exception of Trusted Network Connect) have in common, is the lack of a strong root-of-trust. Without it, clients’ compliance measurements cannot be trusted by the policy server whose task is to assess each client’s policy compliance.</p>

Load control design is one of the major cornerstones of radio resource management in today's UMTS networks. A WCDMA cell's ability to utilize available spectrum efficiently, maintain system stability and deliver minimum quality of service (QoS) requirements to in-cell users builds on the algorithms employed to manage the load. Admission control (AC) and congestion control (CC) are the two foremost techniques used for regulating the load, and differing environments will place varying requirements on the AC and CC schemes to optimize the QoS for the entire radio network. This thesis studies a real-life situation where cells are put under strenuous conditions, investigates the degrading effects a high-speed train has on the cell's ability to maintain acceptable levels of QoS, and proposes methods for mitigating these effects. The scenario is studied with regard to voice traffic where the limiting radio resource is downlink power. CC schemes that take levels of fairness into account between on-board train users and outdoor users are proposed and evaluated through simulation. Methods to anticipatorily adapt radio resource management (RRM) in a cell to prepare for a train is proposed and evaluated through simulation. A method to detect a high-speed train in a cell, and the users on it, is outlined and motivated but not simulated. Simulation results are promising but not conclusive. The suggested CC schemes show a surprising tendency towards an increase in congestion avoidance performance. Proactive RRM shows a significant increase in QoS for on-board users. No negative effects to users in the macro environment is noticed, with regard to the studied metrics.

In the next generation of networks we will begin to see the true convergence of voice, multimedia, and data traffic. This merging of various dedicated networks will occur both in the wired and wireless domains. Given the growth in the areas of wireless voice and data, we see that the combination of mobile and Internet communication constitutes the driving force behind the third-generation wireless system and makes the basis for the fourth-generation wireless system. For services like voice over IP over wireless (VoIPoW), the main challenge is to achieve QoS and spectrum efficiency. In order to support better QoS the IETF Mobile IP Working Group is discussing a number of enhancements to the base protocol to reduce the latency, packet loss and signaling overhead experienced during handoff. This support also includes both the call admission and the subsequent scheduling of packet transmissions. In this thesis, we will first survey the work done on issues related to QoS provisioning for wireless network and then will address bandwidth allocation problem in packet radio network with special emphasis on wireline to wireless internetworking zone. The main aim of the thesis is to evolve a strategy to reduce the call dropping probability by negotiating the QoS in those conditions when we do not have the sufficient resources (mainly bandwidth) to allocate. In order to achieve the QoS we have investigated the behaviour of the Real-time Voice traffic on a wireless link and its relation to the associated quality of service. This investigation opens a way for QoS negotiation, in a condition like during handoff, when the network is not able to sustain the negotiated bandwidth. The main results of this work are, that even with reduced bandwidth, quality for speech can be maintained at a reasonable level and this way the call dropping can be reduced. Such a scheme is useful in those conditions when we do not have the sufficient bandwidth to allocate like during a handoff of a mobile host from one cell to another. Moreover the bandwidth is a scarce resource in wireless domain so there should be an efficient call admission control policy. Many call admission control policies are proposed in the literature; here we propose a simple scheme for real-time traffic, specially speech, in a base station which increases the system throughput. In addition to above, we have also experimented with Cellular IP, one of the implementations of proposed micro-mobility architecture to provide faster handoff and seamless mobility in wired and wireless network.

In this thesis, by being motivated from the challenges in perinatal networks, we address design, evaluation and flow control of a stochastic healthcare network where there exist multiple levels of hospitals and different types of patients. Patients are supposed urgent; thus they can be rejected and overflow to another facility in the same network if no service capacity is available at their arrival. Rejection of patients due to the lack of service capacity is the common phenomenon in overflow networks. We approach the problem from both strategic and operational perspectives. In strategic part, we address a location & capacity planning problem for adjusting the network to better meet demographic changes. In operational part, we study the optimal patient admission control policies to increase flexibility in allocation of resources and improve the control of patient flow in the network. Finally, in order to evaluate the performance of the network, we develop new approximation methodologies that estimate the rejection probabilities in each hospital for each arriving patient group, thus the overflow probabilities among hospitals. Furthermore, an agent-based discrete-event simulation model is constructed to adequately represent our main applicationarea: Nord Hauts-de-Seine Perinatal Network. The simulation model is used to evaluate the performance of the complex network and more importantly evaluate the strength of the optimal results of our analytical models. The developed methodologies in this thesis are combined in a decision support tool, foreseen under the project "COVER", which aims to assist health system managers to effectively plan strategic and operational decisions of a healthcare network and evaluate the performance of their decisions.

This thesis presents a comparative study of four Network Access Control (NAC) technologies; Trusted Network Connect by the Trusted Computing group, Juniper Networks, Inc.’s Unified Access Control, Microsoft Corp.’s Network Access Protection, and Cisco Systems Inc.’s Network Admission Control. NAC is a vision, which utilizes existing solutions and new technologies to provide assurance that any device connecting to a network policy domain is authenticated and is subject to the network’s policy enforcement. Non-compliant devices are isolated until they have been brought back to a complaint status. We compare the NAC technologies in terms of architectural and functional features they provide. There is a race of NAC solutions in the marketplace, each claiming their own definition and terminology, making it difficult for customers to adopt such a solution, resulting in much uncertainty. The NAC paradigm can be classified into two categories: the first category embraces open standards; the second follows proprietary standards. By selecting these architectures, we cover a representative set of proprietary and open standards-based NAC technologies. This study concludes that there is a great need for standardization and interoperability of NAC components and that the four major solution proposals that we studied fall short of the desired interoperability. With standards, customers have the choice to adopt solution components from different vendors, selecting, what is commonly referred to as the best of breed. One example for a standard technology that all four NAC technologies that we studied did adopt is the IEEE’s 802.1X port-based access control technology. It is used to control endpoint device access to the network. One shortcoming that most NAC architectures (with the exception of Trusted Network Connect) have in common, is the lack of a strong root-of-trust. Without it, clients’ compliance measurements cannot be trusted by the policy server whose task is to assess each client’s policy compliance.

Les systèmes de communications mobiles ont considérablement évolué durant ces dernières années. Ce fait a encouragé le déploiement de plusieurs systèmes ou réseaux cellulaires multi technologique. La qualité de service (QoS) offerte aux utilisateurs mobiles s’améliore d’un système à l’autre. Les systèmes de troisième génération (3G), comme l’UMTS, offrent une meilleure qualité de service par rapport à celle offerte par ceux de deuxième génération (2G), comme le GSM. Pour exemple, les systèmes de 3.5G (HSDPA) améliorent le débit du réseau de 3G sur le lien descendant afin de répondre aux exigences des nouveaux services. De plus, les réseaux de quatrième génération (4G), comme le WiMAX (IEEE802.16e) permettent, quant à eux, d’élargir la couverture cellulaire tout en offrant un débit supérieur. Cette nouvelle évolution améliore encore l’accessibilité aux services de l’Internet. La migration des services de l’Internet vers les réseaux mobiles, constitue un enjeu majeur de recherche en télécommunications. La thèse se divise en deux objectifs principaux ; le premier consiste à calculer et à évaluer les performances du système UMTS-WCDMA. Deux approches sont utilisées, l’approche exacte de l’analyse spectrale, et l’approche approximative de la perturbation singulière. Le deuxième objectif propose de nouveaux mécanismes de contrôle d’admission prenant en considération la mobilité intra et inter cellulaires des utilisateurs dans la gestion de la ressource radio. Ces mécanismes d’allocation de ressource concernent plus particulièrement les réseaux HSDPA et WiMAX. Ils se basent principalement sur les schémas de modulation et de codage adaptatif AMC (Adaptive Modulation and Coding) : la zone géographique est subdivisée en plusieurs régions concentriques. Avec nos mécanismes d’allocation des ressources, chaque appel accepté par le système voit son débit initial maintenu, et ce, indépendamment de la position de l’utilisateur dans la cellule / The mobile communication systems evolved considerably in the last few years. This fact encouraged the deployment of several systems or cellular networks in multi technological environment. The Quality of Service (QoS) offered to the mobile users improves from one system to another one. The systems of third generation (3G), like UMTS, offer a better quality of service compared to that offered by those of second generation (2G), like the GSM. For example, the systems of 3.5G (HSDPA) improve the throughput of the network of 3G in the downlink direction according to the requirements of the new services. Moreover, the networks of fourth generation (4G), like WiMax (IEEE802.16e), as for them, make it possible to widen the cover of the base station while offering a very important throughput in which supports the next generation applications or services already offered by the Internet. This new evolution still improves accessibility with the services of the Internet. The migration of the services of the Internet towards the mobile networks, constitutes a major stake of research in telecommunications. The thesis is divided into twomain aims. The first consists to compute the systemcapacity and to evaluate the performances of the UMTS-WCDMA system. Two approaches are used, one is of the spectral analysis, and other one is an approximation of the singular perturbation. The second goal of this thesis is to propose and develop the new mechanisms of call admission control (CAC) for HSDPA and IEEE802.16e networks based on the AMC (Adaptive Modulation and Coding) scheme : the geographical area of the cell is subdivided into several concentric regions. These CAC mechanisms maintain a same QoS (constant bit rate) for all users anywhere in the area of the cell and give priority to migrating or handoff calls by reserving the guard bandwidth than a new call in the intra cell and inter cell mobilities

Wireless personal area networks have emerged as an important communication infrastructure in areas such as at-home healthcare and home automation, independent living and assistive technology, as well as sports and wellness. Wireless personal area networks, including body sensor networks, are becoming more mature and are considered to be a realistic alternative as communication infrastructure for demanding services. However, to transmit data from e.g., an ECG in wireless networks is also a challenge, especially if multiple sensors compete for access. Contention-based networks offer simplicity and utilization advantages, but the drawback is lack of predictable performance. Recipients of data sent in wireless sensor networks need to know whether they can trust the information or not. Performance measurements, monitoring and control is of crucial importance for medical and healthcare applications in wireless sensor networks. This thesis focuses on development, prototype implementation and evaluation of a performance management system with performance and admission control for wireless sensor networks. Furthermore, an implementation of a new method to compensate for clock drift between multiple wireless sensor nodes is also shown. Errors in time synchronization between nodes in Bluetooth networks, resulting in inadequate data fusion, are also analysed. / <p>QC 20120529</p>

Given the current developments and advances in the scientific and technological aspects of human knowledge and introducing new approaches in various fields of telecommunication technologies and industries, there has been an increasing growth in its players¿ plans and a positive change in their outlooks in order to achieve the target of "anywhere and anytime access". Recent developments of WiMAX (Worldwide interoperability for Microwave Access) networks, as a sign of increasing needs and demands for new telecommunication services and capabilities, have led to revolutions in global telecommunication which should be perceived properly in terms of the commercial and technical aspects in order to enjoy the new opportunities. Most experts believe that WiMAX technology is a preliminary step to develop Fourth Generation networks known as 4G technologies. It has not only succeeded in the utilization of several of the latest telecommunication techniques in the form of unique practical standards, but also paved the way for the quantitative and qualitative developments of high-speed broadband access. IEEE 802.16 Standard introduces several advantages, and one of them is the support for Quality of Services (QoS) at the Media Access Control (MAC) level. For these purposes, the standard defines several scheduling classes at MAC layer to treat service flow in a different way, depending on QoS requirements. In this thesis, we have proposed a new QoS framework for Point-to-Multi Point (PMP) 802.16 systems operating in Time Division Duplexing (TDD) mode over a WirelessMAN-OFDM physical layer. The proposed framework consists of a Call Admission Control (CAC) module and a scheduling scheme for the uplink traffic as well as a simple frame allocation scheme. The proposed CAC module interacts with the uplink scheduler status and it makes its decision based on the scheduler queue status; on the other hand, the proposed scheduling scheme for the uplink traffic aims to support realtime flows and adapts the frame-by-frame allocations to the current needs of the connections, with respect to the grants boundaries fixed by the CAC module. Extensive OPNET simulation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed architecture.

The next generation wireless system (NGWS) has been conceived as a ubiquitous wireless environment. It integrates existing heterogeneous access networks, as well as future networks, and will offer high speed data, real-time applications (e.g. Voice over IP, videoconference ) and real-time multimedia (e.g. real-time audio and video) support with a certain Quality of Service (QoS) level to mobile users. It is required that the mobile nodes have the capability of selecting services that are offered by each provider and determining the best path through the various networks. Efficient radio resource management (RRM) is one of the key issues required to support global roaming of the mobile users among different network architectures of the NGWS and a precise call admission control (CAC) scheme satisfies the requirements of high network utilization, cost reduction, minimum handover latency and high-level QoS of all the connections. This thesis is going to describe an adaptive class-based CAC algorithm, which is expected to prioritize the arriving channel resource requests, based on user¿s classification and channel allocation policy. The proposed CAC algorithm couples with Fuzzy Logic (FL) and Pre-emptive Resume (PR) theories to manage and improve the performance of the integrated wireless network system. The novel algorithm is assessed using a mathematical analytic method to measure the performance by evaluating the handover dropping probability and the system utilization.

The support of multimedia traffic over IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) has recently received considerable attention. This dissertation has proposed a new framework that provides efficient channel access, service differentiation and statistical QoS guarantees in the enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) protocol of IEEE 802.11e. In the first part of the dissertation, the new framework to provide QoS support in IEEE 802.11e is presented. The framework uses three independent components, namely, a core MAC layer, a scheduler, and an admission control. The core MAC layer concentrates on the channel access mechanism to improve the overall system efficiency. The scheduler provides service differentiation according to the weights assigned to each Access Category (AC). The admission control provides statistical QoS guarantees. The core MAC layer developed in this dissertation employs a P-Persistent based MAC protocol. A weight-based fair scheduler to obtain throughput service differentiation at each node has been used. In wireless LANs (WLANs), the MAC protocol is the main element that determines the efficiency of sharing the limited communication bandwidth of the wireless channel. In the second part of the dissertation, analytical Markov chain models for the P-Persistent 802.11 MAC protocol under unsaturated load conditions with heterogeneous loads are developed. The Markov models provide closed-form formulas for calculating the packet service time, the packet end-to-end delay, and the channel capacity in the unsaturated load conditions. The accuracy of the models has been validated by extensive NS2 simulation tests and the models are shown to give accurate results. In the final part of the dissertation, the admission control mechanism is developed and evaluated. The analytical model for P-Persistent 802.11 is used to develop a measurement-assisted model-based admission control. The proposed admission control mechanism uses delay as an admission criterion. Both distributed and centralized admission control schemes are developed and the performance results show that both schemes perform very efficiently in providing the QoS guarantees. Since the distributed admission scheme control does not have a complete state information of the WLAN, its performance is generally inferior to the centralized admission control scheme. The detailed performance results using the NS2 simulator have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Compared to 802.11e EDCA, the scheduler consistently achieved the desired throughput differentiation and easy tuning. The core MAC layer achieved better delays in terms of channel access, average packet service time and end-to-end delay. It also achieved higher system throughput than EDCA for any given service differentiation ratio. The admission control provided the desired statistical QoS guarantees.