Σκοπός της μελέτης ήταν η ανάπτυξη και αξιολόγηση ενός προγράμματος πολυμέσων για την εκμάθηση των φυσικών αρχών της μαγνητικής τομογραφίας από μεταπτυχιακούς φοιτητές της Ιατρικής Φυσικής του Πανεπιστημίου της Πάτρας. Η ανάπτυξη του εκπαιδευτικού προγράμματος έγινε με την χρήση κατάλληλου προγράμματος συγγραφής πολυμέσων. Δεκαοχτώ μεταπτυχιακοί φοιτητές της Ιατρικής Φυσικής κατατάχτηκαν τυχαία σε δύο ομάδες, την ομάδα των υπολογιστών και την ομάδα του βιβλίου. Όλοι οι συμμετέχοντες αξιολογήθηκαν με ένα τεστ με ερωτήσεις πολλαπλής επιλογής 2 εβδομάδες πριν την αρχή των παραδόσεων, στο τέλος των παραδόσεων και ένα μήνα μετά το τέλος των παραδόσεων. Επιπλέον συμπλήρωσαν ερωτηματολόγια για την αξιολόγηση των στάσεων και πεποιθήσεων τους σχετικά με την χρήση υπολογιστών στην εκπαίδευση. Οι βαθμολογίες των δύο ομάδων συγκρίθηκαν με την βοήθεια της στατιστικής δοκιμασίας ANOVA. Το εκπαιδευτικό πρόγραμμα που αναπτύχτηκε αποτελείται από 6 ενότητες για την διδασκαλία πολύπλοκων φυσικών αρχών MRI με την βοήθεια animation. Κάθε ενότητα περιλαμβάνει ένα τεστ και οι επιδόσεις των χρηστών μπορούν να καταγραφούν και να αναλυθούν με ένα ξεχωριστό πρόγραμμα. Στην ενότητα που χρησιμοποιήθηκε για την αξιολόγηση οι φοιτητές της ομάδας με τους υπολογιστές πέτυχαν στατιστικά υψηλότερους βαθμούς (Μ=80.5, SD=9.4) από τους σπουδαστές με το βιβλίο (M=61.3, SD=12.5, p=.003). Επιπλέον οι φοιτητές των υπολογιστών φαίνεται να εκτιμούν περισσότερο την εκμάθηση μέσω της χρήσης υπολογιστών συγκριτικά με τους σπουδαστές της ομάδας του βιβλίου (p=.230). Οι απόψεις των φοιτητών για την επέκταση της χρήσης των πολυμέσων στην ιατρική φυσική εστιάζονται σε θέματα σχετικά με τα κίνητρα, τις εκπαιδευτικές δυνατότητες και την αξία του περιεχομένου. Τα αναφερθέντα μειονεκτήματα ήταν ελάχιστα, και ήταν επικεντρωμένα κυρίως σε τεχνικά θέματα και σε μαθησιακές δυσκολίες. Η εκπαίδευση με χρήση πολυμέσων είναι χρήσιμη και επικουρική μέθοδος για την εκμάθηση των φυσικών αρχών MRI από μεταπτυχιακούς φοιτητές. Η παρούσα μελέτη έδειξε ότι η χρήση κατάλληλων προγραμμάτων πολυμέσων βελτιώνει την κατανόηση πολύ περισσότερο συγκριτικά με παραδοσιακές μεθόδους μάθησης. / The objectives of this study were to develop and evaluate an interactive multimedia computer based instructional package in MRI physics and to provide first year medical physics postgraduate students of University of Patras with an interactive means of self-study and self-evaluation. An authoring system was used to develop the courseware package. Eighteen postgraduate medical physics students were prospectively, randomly assigned to receive instruction on the same topic from a textbook and an interactive computer module. Participants were evaluated by a multiple choice test 2 weeks before the lectures, at the end of the lectures and by a retention test 1 month after the end. They also completed questionnaires to elicit their attitudes toward the two instructional methods. Mean test scores of the textbook and computer groups were compared by means of analysis of variance. The developed MRI program is a suite of 6 interactive modules designed to dynamically teach complex MRI concepts using media-rich animations. All modules include a quiz and since patterns of use by student can be recorded a Log Decryption utility and a Log Reader utility was also developed. The tested module demonstrated that students in the computer group (M=80.5, SD=9.4) scored significantly higher on their post-test when compared with the textbook group (M=61.3, SD=12.5, p=.003). Furthermore students in the computer group seem to appreciate multimedia modules more compared to textbook students (p=.003). There were no differences noted between method of instruction and learner satisfaction (p=.230). Students’ rationale for expanding the use of multimedia in physics education seemed to focus on issues concerning motivation, instructional capabilities and content value. The disadvantages reported were few, their prevalence considerably small, especially after the intervention and were mostly focused on technical issues and some difficulties in learning. Computer aided instruction is a useful and effective aid for teaching MRI principles to postgraduate students. The study demonstrated that the inclusion of properly designed multimedia modules enhance conceptual understanding far more than do traditional methods.

Pessoas e organizações ao redor do globo utilizam aplicações multimídia para interação e comunicação. Existe notável crescimento de tráfego característico dessas aplicações, uma vez que há convergência de voz e dados para um modelo único de transporte. As redes de computadores, por suportar tais aplicações cadenciam desafios e oportunidades de negócios que os operadores têm aproveitado. Por outro lado, os usuários experimentam serviços com qualidades cada vez mais refinados, mesmo assim, existem aspectos que devem ser tratados para elevar a qualidade de experiência percebida pelos usuários ao consumir serviços ofertados sobre a internet. Métricas de QoS usualmente são baseadas nos usuários ou na rede, por isso, conceitos como NFV e SDN permitem aprimorar e expandir a perspectiva de oferta de uma camada de abstração para desenvolvimento de soluções flexíveis, que visam lidar com aplicações multimídia ofertadas em nuvem. Não obstante, a construção dessas soluções deve ser calcada em aspectos intrínsecos ao conceito de Internet do Futuro que preconiza soluções virtualizadas, flexíveis, convergentes, escaláveis, orientadas a contexto, seguras e melhor gerenciadas. Este trabalho propõe uma abordagem para mitigar a distância das aplicações com os recursos de rede e computação. Usualmente as aplicações desconhecem características de hardware sobre o qual elas operam; quanto a rede, mesmo com esforços em vários níveis da pilha de protocolos, desconhece especificidades das aplicações em execução. Há também dificuldade de gerenciamento global de recursos, integração de políticas e acordos de serviço entre operadores. O trabalho visa adicionar uma camada de gerenciamento para elevar os níveis de QoS para aplicações multimídia baseadas em NFV. Para realizar isso, é proposto uma entidade que atua no plano de dados e controle, capaz de orquestrar recursos de rede e de computação simultaneamente para aprimorar QoS em aplicações multimídia. A incorporação dessa entidade conquista melhoramento de QoS por meio da oferta de resiliência na comunicação fim-a-fim de entidades consumidoras dessas aplicações, provê um balanceamento de carga adequado a fim de não comprometer parâmetros de QoS como tempo de resposta, provê escalabilidade sob demanda, promove o conceito de inspeção de pacotes para segmentação de políticas de rede orientada à aplicação, finalmente realiza a separação de plano de dados e controle. A construção e experimentação da solução permitiu diminuir tempos de resposta nas aplicações multimídia; a solução reagiu adequadamente frente a cargas de trabalho heterogêneas no sentido de prover confiabilidade para garantia de QoS; também, o conceito de inspeção de pacotes foi capaz de atuar para diminuir a distância que as aplicações possuem da rede e o hardware sobre o qual elas operam. / People and organizations around the globe use multimedia applications for interaction and communication. There is notable traffic growth characteristic of these applications since there is a convergence of voice and data for a single transport model. Computer networks, because they support such applications, meet the challenges and business opportunities that operators have taken advantage of. On the other hand, users use services with increasingly refined qualities, nevertheless, there are aspects that must be addressed to raise the quality of experience for users when consuming services offered over the internet. QoS metrics are usually user-based or network-based, hence concepts such as NFV and SDN allow to improve and expand the perspective of offering an abstraction layer for the development of flexible solutions that deal with multimedia applications offered in the cloud. Nevertheless, the construction of these solutions must be based on intrinsic aspects to the Future Internet concept that advocates virtualized solutions, flexible, convergent, scalable, context-aware, secure and better managed. This dissertation proposes an approach to mitigate the distance of the applications with the resources of compute and network. Usually, the applications are unaware of the hardware characteristics on which they operate, as for the network, even with several efforts at various levels of the protocol stack, the specificities of running applications are unknown. There is also challenges of managing global resources, integrating policies and service agreements between operators. This work aims to add a management layer to raise the levels of QoS for multimedia applications based on NFV. To accomplish this, an entity that acts on the data and control plane is proposed, capable of orchestrating network and computing resources simultaneously to enhance QoS in multimedia applications. The incorporation of this entity achieves QoS improvement through resiliency in the end-to-end communication of the consumer entity of these applications, provides adequate load balancing in order to avoid compromising QoS parameters such as response time, provides on-demand scalability, improves the concept of package inspection for the segmentation of application-oriented network policies, and finally performs the separation of data and control plane. The construction and experimentation of the solution allowed to reduce response times in the multimedia applications. The solution reacted adequately to heterogeneous workloads in order to provide reliability for QoS guarantee. Furthermore, the concept of packet inspection was able to act to decrease the distance that the applications have from the network and the hardware on which they operate. / Dissertação (Mestrado)

In order to efficiently utilize the scarce wireless resource as well as keep up with the ever-increasing demand for Quality-of-Service (QoS) of multimedia applications, wireless networks are undergoing rapid development and dramatic changes in the underlying technologies and protocols. The Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol, which coordinates the channel access and data transmission of wireless stations, plays a pivotal role in wireless networks. Performance modelling and analysis has been and continues to be of great theoretical and practical importance in the design and development of wireless networks. This research is devoted to developing efficient and cost-effective analytical tools for the performance analysis and enhancement of MAC protocols in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) under heterogeneous multimedia traffic. To support the MAC-layer QoS in WLANs, the IEEE 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) protocol has proposed three QoS differentiation schemes in terms of Arbitrary Inter-Frame Space (AIFS), Contention Window (CW), and Transmission Opportunity (TXOP). This research starts with the development of new analytical models for the TXOP scheme specified in the EDCA protocol under Poisson traffic. A dynamic TXOP scheme is then proposed to adjust the TXOP limits according to the status of the transmission queue. Theoretical analysis and simulation experiments show that the proposed dynamic scheme largely improves the performance of TXOP. To evaluate the TXOP scheme in the presence of ii heterogeneous traffic, a versatile analytical model is developed to capture the traffic heterogeneity and model the features of burst transmission. The performance results highlight the importance of taking into account the heterogeneous traffic for the accurate evaluation of the TXOP scheme in wireless multimedia networks. To obtain a thorough and deep understanding of the performance attributes of the EDCA protocol, a comprehensive analytical model is then proposed to accommodate the integration of the three QoS schemes of EDCA in terms of AIFS, CW, and TXOP under Poisson traffic. The performance results show that the TXOP scheme can not only support service differentiation but also improve the network performance, whereas the AIFS and CW schemes provide QoS differentiation only. Moreover, the results demonstrate that the MAC buffer size has considerable impact on the QoS performance of EDCA under Poisson traffic. To investigate the performance of EDCA in wireless multimedia networks, an analytical model is further developed for EDCA under heterogeneous traffic. The performance results demonstrate the significant effects of heterogeneous traffic on the total delay and frame losses of EDCA with different buffer sizes. Finally, an efficient admission control scheme is presented for the IEEE 802.11e WLANs based on analytical modelling and a game-theoretical approach. The admission control scheme can maintain the system operation at an optimal point where the utility of the Access Point (AP) is maximized with the QoS constraints of various users.

In the world of high mobility, there is a growing need for people to communicate with each other and have timely access to information regardless of the location of the individuals or the information. This need is supported by the advances in the technologies of networking, wireless communications, and portable computing devices with reduction in the physical size of computers, lead to the rapid development in mobile communication infrastructure. Hence, mobile and wireless networks present many challenges to application, hardware, software and network designers and implementers. One of the biggest challenge is to provide a secure mobile environment. Security plays a more important role in mobile communication systems than in systems that use wired communication. This is mainly because of the ubiquitous nature of the wireless medium that makes it more susceptible to security attacks than wired communications. The aim of the thesis is to develop an integrated dynamic security and authentication system for mobile transactions. The proposed system operates at the transactions-level of a mobile application, by intelligently selecting the suitable security technique and authentication protocol for ongoing transaction. To do this, we have designed two schemes: the transactions-based security selection scheme and the transactions-based authentication selection scheme. These schemes use transactions sensitivity levels and the usage context, which includes users behaviors, network used, device used, and so on, to decide the required security and authentication levels. Based on this analysis, requisite security technique, and authentication protocols are applied for the trans-action in process. The Behaviors-Observations-Beliefs (BOB) model is developed using cognitive agents to supplement the working of the security and authentication selection schemes. A transaction classification model is proposed to classify the transactions into various sensitivity levels. The BOB model The BOB model is a cognitive theory based model, to generate beliefs over a user, by observing various behaviors exhibited by a user during transactions. The BOB model uses two types of Cognitive Agents (CAs), the mobile CAs (MCAs) and the static CAs (SCAs). The MCAs are deployed over the client devices to formulate beliefs by observing various behaviors of a user during the transaction execution. The SCA performs belief analysis, and identifies the belief deviations w.r.t. established beliefs. We have developed four constructs to implement the BOB model, namely: behaviors identifier, observations generator, beliefs formulator, and beliefs analyser. The BOB model is developed by giving emphasis on using the minimum computation and minimum code size, by keeping the resource restrictiveness of the mobile devices and infrastructure. The knowledge organisation using cognitive factors, helps in selecting the rational approach for deciding the legitimacy of a user or a session. It also reduces the solution search space by consolidating the user behaviors into an high-level data such as beliefs, as a result the decision making time reduces considerably. The transactions classification model This model is proposed to classify the given set of transactions of an application service into four sensitivity levels. The grouping of transactions is based on the operations they perform, and the amount of risk/loss involved if they are misused. The four levels are namely, transactions who’s execution may cause no-damage (level-0), minor-damage (level-1), significant-damage (level-2) and substantial-damage (level-3). A policy-based transaction classifier is developed and incorporated in the SCA to decide the transaction sensitivity level of a given transaction. Transactions-based security selection scheme (TBSS-Scheme) The traditional security schemes at application-level are either session or transaction or event based. They secure the application-data with prefixed security techniques on mobile transactions or events. Generally mobile transactions possesses different security risk profiles, so, empirically we may find that there is a need for various levels of data security schemes for the mobile communications environment, which face the resource insufficiency in terms of bandwidth, energy, and computation capabilities. We have proposed an intelligent security techniques selection scheme at the application-level, which dynamically decides the security technique to be used for a given transaction in real-time. The TBSS-Scheme uses the BOB model and transactions classification model, while deciding the required security technique. The selection is purely based on the transaction sensitivity level, and user behaviors. The Security techniques repository is used in the proposed scheme, organised under three levels based on the complexity of security techniques. The complexities are decided based on time and space complexities, and the strength of the security technique against some of the latest security attacks. The credibility factors are computed using the credibility module, over transaction network, and transaction device are also used while choosing the security technique from a particular level of security repository. Analytical models are presented on beliefs analysis, security threat analysis, and average security cost incurred during the transactions session. The results of this scheme are compared with regular schemes, and advantageous and limitations of the proposed scheme are discussed. A case study on application of the proposed security selection scheme is conducted over mobile banking application, and results are presented. Transactions-based authentication selection scheme (TBAS-Scheme) The authentication protocols/schemes are used at the application-level to authenticate the genuine users/parties and devices used in the application. Most of these protocols challenges the user/device to get the authentication information, rather than deploying the methods to identify the validity of a user/device. Therefore, there is a need for an authentication scheme, which intelligently authenticates a user by continuously monitoring the genuinity of the activities/events/ behaviors/transactions through out the session. Transactions-based authentication selection scheme provides a new dimension in authenticating users of services. It enables strong authentication at the transaction level, based on sensitivity level of the given transaction, and user behaviors. The proposed approach intensifies the procedure of authentication by selecting authentication schemes by using the BOB-model and transactions classification models. It provides effective authentication solution, by relieving the conventional authentication systems, from being dependent only on the strength of authentication identifiers. We have made a performance comparison between transactions-based authentication selection scheme with session-based authentication scheme in terms of identification of various active attacks, and average authentication delay and average authentication costs are analysed. We have also shown the working of the proposed scheme in inter-domain and intra-domain hand-off scenarios, and discussed the merits of the scheme comparing it with mobile IP authentication scheme. A case study on application of the proposed authentication selection scheme for authenticating personalized multimedia services is presented. Implementation of the TBSS and the TBAS schemes for mobile commerce application We have implemented the integrated working of both the TBSS and TBAS schemes for a mo-bile commerce application. The details on identifying vendor selection, day of purchase, time of purchase, transaction value, frequency of purchase behaviors are given. A sample list of mobile commerce transactions is presented along with their classification into various sensitivity levels. The working of the system is discussed using three cases of purchases, and the results on trans-actions distribution, deviation factor generation, security technique selection, and authentication challenge generation are presented. In summary, we have developed an integrated dynamic security and authentication system using, the above mentioned selection schemes for mobile transactions, and by incorporating the BOB model, transactions classification model, and credibility modules. We have successfully implemented the proposed schemes using cognitive agents based middleware. The results of experiments suggest that incorporating user behaviors, and transaction sensitivity levels will bring dynamism and adaptiveness to security and authentication system. Through which the mobile communication security could be made more robust to attacks, and resource savvy in terms of reduced bandwidth and computation requirements by using an appropriate security and authentication technique/protocol.