Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2005. / Supervisor: Simon S. Lam. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2004. / "A dissertation in computer networking and telecommunication networking." Advisor: Deep Medhi. Typescript. Vita. Title from "catalog record" of the print edition Description based on contents viewed Feb. 24, 2006. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 140-147). Online version of the print edition.

Thesis (M.S.)--Wake Forest University. Dept. of Computer Science, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 66-68)

Thesis (M.S. in computer science)--Washington State University, August 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 68-70).

Thesis (M.S. in electrical engineering)--Washington State University, August 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-77).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 1987. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 108-117). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center.

No description available.

Currently, the IEEE 802.11 standard is the leading technology in the Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) market. It provides flexibility and mobility to users, which in turn, increase productivity. Opposed to traditional fixed Local Area Network (LAN) technologies, WLANs are easier to deploy and have lower installation costs. Unfortunately, there are problems inherent within the technology and standard that inhibits its performance. Technological problems can be attributed to the physical medium of a WLAN, the electromagnetic (EM) wave. Standards based problems include security issues and the MAC layer design. However the impact of these problems can be mitigated with proper planning and design of the WLAN. To do this, an understanding of WLAN issues and the use of WLAN software tools are necessary. This thesis discusses WLAN issues such as security and electromagnetic wave propagation and introduces software that can aid the planning, deployment and maintenance of a WLAN. Furthermore the planning, implementation and auditing phases of a WLAN lifecylce are discussed. The aim being to provide an understanding of the complexities involved to deploy and maintain a secure and reliable WLAN.

Systems with delays frequently appear in engineering. The presence of delays makes system analysis and control design much more complicated. Networked control systems where the delays are often random are typical cases of such systems. For one particular category of time-delays systems, integral processes with dead time (IPDTs), the control limits that a PI controller can achieve are discussed in this thesis. These limits include the region of the control parameters to guarantee the system stability, the control parameters to achieve the given gain and/or phase margins (GPMs), the constraint on achievable gain and phase margins, the performance of set point tracking and disturbance rejection. Three types of PI controllers, namely typical PI controller, single tuning-parameter PI controller and PI controller under two-degree-of-freedom (2-DOF) structure, are studied. In control schemes of the modified Smith predictor (MSP) where the controller usually includes a distributed delay, the system implementation is not trivial because of the inherent hidden unstable poles. This thesis provides an estimation of the minimal number of implementation steps for the distributed delay in linear control laws. This is obtained by solving an inequality with respect to the number of implementation steps. A coarse estimation is given as the initial value to solve the inequality using bisection algorithms. A minimization process as well as some other techniques are also introduced to further improve the estimation. In networked control systems, the network-transmission delay and data dropout are combinedly represented by a network-induced delay. By designing a data pre­ processing mechanism, the network-induced delay can be assigned. Such delay as­ signment is applied to networked predictive control schemes, which alleviates systemstability limits on the network-induced delay. Two stability criteria are given for the closed-loop system with random network-induced delay, and a resulting implementation algorithm is also provided. The control and implementation of a magnetic levitation system over the network is studied in this thesis. Firstly, a test-rig which is suitable to implement control over a network is set up. Feedback linearization and direct local linearization methods for the nonlinear MagLev system are presented. In order to improve the control performance, a networked predictive method is employed, where the system model is identified in real-time. Local control and networked control are implemented on this test-rig, including networked predictive control. Model predictive control demonstrates a clear performance advantage over the networked control strategies which does not incorporate compensation for the network-induced delay. In order to quickly implement networked control systems (NCSs) by simulation or practical application, a MATLAB/Simulink based NCS toolbox is developed. This toolbox incorporates basic parts of a general NCS, that is, network simula­tion, network interface, plant interface and typical control schemes. With the NCS toolbox, users can focus on the study of new control schemes.

The concept of Intrusion Detection (ID) and the development of such systems have been a major concern for scientists since the late sixties. In recent computer networks, the use of different types of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) is considered essential and in most cases mandatory. Major improvements have been achieved over the years and a large number of different approaches have been developed and applied in the way these systems perform Intrusion Detection. The purpose of the research is to introduce a novel approach that will enable us to take advantage of the vast amounts of information generated by the large number of different IDSs, in order to identify suspicious traffic, malicious intentions and network attacks in an automated manner. In order to achieve this, the research focuses upon a system capable of identifying malicious activity in near real-time, that is capable of identifying attacks while they are progressing. The thesis addresses the near real-time threat assessment by researching into current state of the art solutions. Based on the literature review, current Intrusion Detection technologies lean towards event correlation systems using different types of detections techniques. Instead of using linear event signatures or rule sets, the thesis suggests a structured description of network attacks based on the abstracted form of the attacker’s activity. For that reason, the design focuses upon the description of network attacks using the development of footprints. Despite the level of knowledge, capabilities and resources of the attacker, the system compares occurring network events against predefined footprints in order to identify potential malicious activity. Furthermore, based on the implementation of the footprints, the research also focuses upon the design of the Threat Assessment Engine (TAE) which is capable of performing detection in near real-time by the use of the above described footprints. The outcome of the research proves that it is possible to have an automated process performing threat assessment despite the number of different ongoing attacks taking place simultaneously. The threat assessment process, taking into consideration the system’s architecture, is capable of acting as the human analyst would do when investigating such network activity. This automation speeds up the time-consuming process of manually analysing and comparing data logs deriving from heterogeneous sources, as it performs the task in near real-time. Effectively, by performing the this task in near real-time, the proposed system is capable of detecting complicated malicious activity which in other cases, as currently performed, it would be difficult, maybe impossible or results would be generated too late.