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Security features are getting a growing interest in microelectronics. Not only entities have to authenticate in the context of a high secure communication but also the hardware employed has to be trusted. Silicon Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) or Physical Random Functions, which exploits manufacturing process variations in integrated circuits, have been used to authenticate the hardware in which they are included and, based on them, several cryptographic protocols have been reported. This paper describes the hardware implementation of a symmetric-key authentication protocol in which a PUF is one of the relevant blocks. The second relevant block is a SHA-3 2nd round candidate, a Secure Hash Algorithm (in particular Keccak), which has been proposed to replace the SHA-2 functions that have been broken no long time ago. Implementation details are discussed in the case of Xilinx FPGAs. Junta de Andalucía P08-TIC-03674 Comunidad Europea FP7-INFSO-ICT-248858 Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TEC2008-04920 y DPI2008-03847

Radio frequency identification technology is becoming ubiquitous and, as an unfortunate side effect, more and more authentication solutions come to light that have plenty of security issues to deal with. In our former contribution, we introduced a solely hash-based secure authentication algorithm that is capable of providing protection against most of the well-known attacks and performs exceptionally well even in very large systems. We gave a theoretical analysis of the SLAP protocol from the point of view of security and performance. In this paper, we define the attacker model and we summarize the major security aspects in case of small computational capacity systems; furthermore we give a comparative table about some lightweight protocols' security features. Finally, we fully prove the correctness of the SLAP protocol with GNY logics.

Radio frequency identification technology is becoming ubiquitous and as an unfortunate side effect, more and more authentication solutions come to light that have plenty of security issues to deal with.In our former contribution we introduced a solely hash-based secure authentication algorithm that is capable of providing protection against most of the well-known attacks and performs exceptionally well even in very large systems. We gave a theoretical analysis of the SLAP protocol in the point of view of security and performance.In this paper we illustrate the proposed protocol's performance characteristics with measurements carried out in a simulation environment and compare with the theoretical results. We show the effects of numerous attacks and the system's different parameters on the authentication time. Finally, we examine the performance of two other protocols chosen from the literature in order to compare with SLAP algorithm and give proper explanation for the differences between them.

With increase in applicability of RFID technology, there is ever growing demand for security. The popularity of RFID applicability lies in its ability for automatic identification and low-cost of RFID tags. Most of the recent security protocols for RFID technology are based on cryptographic hash-based function which currently cannot be implemented on low-cost RFID tags. In this paper, we present a lightweight protocol based on key transportation and authentication using threshold secret sharing scheme which provides strong security on low-cost RFID tags without the need to connect to the backend server. Our solution is based on an asymmetric computation strategy allocating mathematical operations such as modular addition and XOR on passive RFID tags and move the computational complexity to the RFID interrogators. We believe a secure protocol on low-cost RFID tags would make RFID technology ubiquitous.

We propose Streamline, a two-layered architecture designed for media streaming in overlay networks. The first layer is a generic, customizable and lightweight protocol which is able to construct and maintain different types of meshes, exhibiting different properties. We discuss two types of overlay networks and explain how the first layer protocol builds these networks in a distributed manner. The second layer is responsible for data propagation to the nodes in the mesh by constructing an optimized diffusion tree. In order to cover the vulnerabilities of the diffusion tree, we propose a masking mechanism which enables the nodes to instantly switch to alternative data paths when necessary. Our simulations reveal that, the structure and properties of the underlying mesh are key to the performance of the system and Streamline can tolerate high node churn without degrading delivery rate.

A lightweight MAC and network layer protocol suite for underwater acoustic communication has been developed. The protocol suite covers the MAC layer, hop-by-hop acknowledgement, multi-hop routing and transmission and includes a network discovery and route generation module.The protocols are currently implemented in a simulator for verification and performance evaluation. By summer 2009 the protocols will be implemented in real underwater modems aspart of a project demonstrator. A lightweight protocol suite for underwater communication

We implement and test four RFID security protocols: strong private authentication protocol, efficient mutual-authentication protocol, Dimitriou's lightweight protocol, and advanced semi-randomized access control, by emulating the RFID system. Then, we analyze the results to provide an evaluation of each protocol. RFID tags are very limited in terms of processing power, and cannot perform complex computations. Two types of analysis are thus performed: security and performance. The security analysis examines the following security issues: cloning prevention, man-in-the-middle attack prevention, forward secrecy, tag anonymity, user data confidentiality, replay attack prevention, and compromising resistance. In the performance evaluation, we analyze the following: computation overhead, storage requirements, and communication overhead. As a result, enhancements are added to these protocols to strengthen their security and eliminate their weaknesses.

This paper presents a secure and lightweight protocol for reliable data transfer through moderate bandwidth covert channels. Though data transfer through covert channels is not unprecedented, existing covert channels have been restricted to covert transmission of only small amounts of data. This paper demonstrates that it is possible to transmit large amounts of data covertly with sophisticated support such as security and reliability. The proposed protocol exploits ICMP echo request as covert medium, and uses OS finger-printing techniques to simulate real TCP/IP stack behavior for further security enhancements.

As RFID technology is becoming ubiquitous, the security of these systems gets - as it should - much attention. Its fields of usage include personal identification, supply-chain management systems, and many more. Many kinds of RFID tags are available on the market which differ both in storage, and computational capacity. Since by standard IT means all the tags have small capacities, the security mechanisms which are in use in computer networks are not suitable. For expensive tags with relatively large computational capacities many secure communication protocols were developed, for cheap low-end tags, only a few lightweight protocols exist. In this paper we introduce our solution, which is based on the least computation demanding operator, the exclusive or function. By introducing two tags instead of one in the RFID system, our scheme provides security solutions which are comparable with those provided by the lightweight protocols. In the meantime, our scheme does not demand any computational steps to be made by the tag.

A radio frequency identification (RFID) is an important part in mobile and ubiquitous domain, and brings enormous productivity benefits in applications where objects require automatic identification. However, this pervasive use of RFID tags opens up the possibility of various attacks that violate user privacy and authentication. Security mechanisms for RFID systems are therefore of the utmost important. In this paper, the RFID security protocols (HB++[first] and HB++[second]) presented in Bringer et al. are shown to be vulnerable to active attacks and a modified solution is presented. Some of the security violations that may occur and possible remedies that were provided in the literature are discussed. Finally, the modifications to HB++, a recent variant of HB is proposed.

Since the introduction at Crypto'05 by Juels and Weis of the protocol HB+, a lightweight protocol secure against active attacks but only in a detection based-model, many works have tried to enhance its security. We propose here a new approach to achieve resistance against Man-in-The-Middle attacks. Our requirements - in terms of extra communications and hardware - are surprisingly low., submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

RFID technology is widely used worldwide in a broad range of applications. Such technology however raises security concerns about the protection of the information stored in the RFID tags and exchanged during the wireless communication with the readers. In this work we propose an efficient protocol for tag identification which improves on previous proposals and provides an increased level of security, allowing dynamic addition or remotion of tags from the set of recognized tags. The protocol relies on the use of skip lists, authenticated data structures previously used in other fields of application.

Wireless multi-hop networks are particularly susceptible to attacks based on flooding and the interception, tampering with, and forging of packets. Thus, reliable communication in such networks quintessentially depends on mechanisms to verify the authenticity of network traffic and the identity of communicating peers. A major challenge to achieve this functionality are the tight resource constraints of such devices as smartphones, mesh- and sensor nodes with regard to CPU, memory, and energy. Since existing approaches suffer from significant drawbacks related to functionality and efficiency, we present in this paper ALPHA, an Adaptive and Lightweight Protocol for Hop-by-hop Authentication. ALPHA establishes a verifiable notion of identity for network traffic, based on computationally cheap hash functions, enabling end-to-end as well as hop-by-hop integrity protection for unicast traffic. Our evaluation shows that ALPHA is a generic security mechanism that makes full traffic authentication and secure middlebox signaling viable in resource-constrainted multi-hop networks.

As low-cost RFIDs with limited resources will dominate most of the RFID market, it is imperative to design lightweight RFID authentication protocols for these low-cost RFIDs. However, most of existing RFID authentication protocols either suffer from some security weaknesses or require costly operations that are not available on low-cost tags. In this paper, we analyze the security vulnerabilities of a lightweight authentication protocol recently proposed by Li et al. [4], and then propose a new lightweight protocol to improve the security.

Lots of protocols have been proposed to make sensor networks more reliable, efficient and applicable. However, a vitally important problem has been neglected, that is the feasibility to implement the protocol and compatibility with other protocols. In this paper, a layered architecture was designed to organize the sensor network protocols in a light way, with detailed description on the interactive interfaces between layers. In accordance with the architecture, a suite of lightweight protocols were designed and implemented as prototypes. Our proposed protocols are featured by their low requirements on the node resources, and high possibility to be deployed in the real world. All these protocols were implemented and evaluated in a unified simulation environment. Simulation results verified our expectation on the performance of the protocols.

We propose adaptive coordination protocol ACP, a lightweight protocol for distributed formation of a backbone over Heterogeneous Wireless Networks. ACP does not require any neighborhood information and consequently scales well with the number of nodes and network size. We present an analytical framework to study the performance of ACP. By making the nodes rotate the role of backbone nodes, we extend the life of the network.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are best suited for perceiving a phenomenon, which in turn forms the basis for controlling an actuator in a corrective plane. However, before the corrective action can be invoked, it is necessary to validate that the data was not injected with a malicious intent. To this end we propose CADA (cellular automata based data authentication mechanism), a lightweight protocol to authenticate data from valid nodes. Unlike its predecessors, it is designed to assume scarcity of multiple resources viz power, processing, storage, bandwidth and radio range.CADA takes advantage of the concurrent operations in cellular automata components and is therefore not only fast but also easily realizable in hardware.

In the logistics sector, commercial incentives and homeland security measures are creating a growing demand for solutions that monitor the status of containers as they are passed on through a transport chain. In this paper, we analyse the security requirements of this particular application and propose a lightweight protocol for transmitting sensitive information gathered from sensors in the container to a trusted third party that controls access to this information. We also report on initial results from implementing the protocol on a sensor node.

In this work we propose a solution to the RFID privacy problem that has the potential to guarantee user privacy without requiring changes to existing infrastructure or reducing business value from the use of RFID technology. We give emphasis to the development of a lightweight protocol that does not incur costly overheads with respect to computation, storage as well as time and effort needed for deployment configuration. For RFID technology to be widely used, security should ship as a "default" and require no significant effort to configure. We demonstrate the security and efficiency properties of our protocol and we offer some interesting time/space tradeoffs that may lead to further improvements.

Sensor networks enable a wide range of applications in both military and civilian domains. However, the deployment scenarios, the functionality requirements, and the limited capabilities of these networks expose them to a wide-range of attacks against control traffic (such as wormholes, Sybil attacks, rushing attacks, etc). In this paper we propose a lightweight protocol called DICAS that mitigates these attacks by detecting, diagnosing, and isolating the malicious nodes. DICAS uses as a fundamental building block the ability of a node to oversee its neighboring nodes’ communication. On top of DICAS, we build a secure routing protocol, LSR, which in addition supports multiple node-disjoint paths. We analyze the security guarantees of DICAS and use ns-2 simulations to show its effectiveness against three representative attacks. Overhead analysis is conducted to prove the lightweight nature of DICAS.

We propose a method to verify the result of attacks detected by signature-based network intrusion detection systems using lightweight protocol analysis. The observation is that network protocols often have short meaningful status codes saved at the beginning of server responses upon client requests. A successful intrusion that alters the behavior of a network application server often results in an unexpected server response, which does not contain the valid protocol status code. This can be used to verify the result of the intrusion attempt. We then extend this method to verify the result of attacks that still generate valid protocol status code in the server responses. We evaluate this approach by augmenting Snort signatures and testing on real world data. We show that some simple changes to Snort signatures can effectively verify the result of attacks against the application servers, thus significantly improve the quality of alerts

In this paper we present clustering protocol (CP) for sensor networks. Clustering techniques are used by different protocols and applications to increase scalability and reduce delays in sensor networks. Examples include routing protocols, and applications requiring efficient data aggregation. Our approach which is based on the covering problem that aims at covering an area with minimum possible circular disks assuming ideal conditions. CP is a lightweight protocol that does not require any neighborhood information and imposes lesser communication overhead. We present simulation results to show the efficiency of CP in both ideal cases and randomly distributed networks. Moreover, CP is scalable with respect to density and network size t.

Ethernet is becoming increasingly popular in metro and carrier-grade networks because of its cost-effectiveness, simplicity and scalability. Nevertheless, Ethernet was originally designed as a LAN technology, therefore, it lacks some features, such as fast fault-protection and sophisticated management, which are very important in the new carrier-grade application areas. We propose a simple failure protection mechanism for Ethernet networks that can recover from node and link failures under 50 milliseconds, which is also provided by SDH/Sonet rings. The mechanism relies on a lightweight distributed protocol that runs on IP routers at the edges of the network and works with commodity off-the-shelf Ethernet switches. This paper describes the protocol design and implementation as well as the network testbed implementation for assessing the performance and the robustness of the mechanism. The results collected in the testbed are shown and discussed in the paper.

In this paper, we propose a security model that deal with the authentication and authorization problems for home networks. First, we examine existing researches for home network security and summarize their shortcomings, such as bottleneck, single point of failure, and inconvenience of configuration. Then, we introduce a new security model making up the previous works' defects. In the proposed model, we classify the services into three groups based on their security sensitivity level, and provide different security mechanism to each security level service to make a difference among the protection levels of each service (i.e. to provide more secure mechanisms to more important services.) In addition to this, we distribute the computational cost for security function to each service device while centralize the policy configuration function to central device by using authority delegation scheme. Finally, we describe how the security and convenience are enforced by using our security model. Proposed security protocols in our model are based on the SPKI/SDSI (Simple Public Key Infrastructure / Simple Distributed Security Infrastructure.) and a lightweight protocol similar to SPKI.

The IV (Initial Vector) used in CBC mode must be varied per message, must not be used arbitrarily by attackers, and must be created randomly. To meet these requirements, IV encrypted before a message is sent. Note, however, that this method requires additional steps for IV encryption before sending a message and decryption by the receiver. This paper proposed the method that does not require IV encryption/decryption and developed the lightweight protocol and security API specification based on the proposed method. As a result of the experiment, system performance improvement can be achieved. In an environment with small-sized packet data, in particular, greater system performance improvement can be achieved. Moreover, since small-sized random numbers are sent without the entire IV, sending overhead can be reduced considerably compared to the existing methods.

This paper addresses the problem of securely communicating between a resource limited mobile device and a remote content provider server in mobile commerce applications over IP-based mobile networks. We present a communication protocol, based on the IPsec protocol, that provides confidentiality and authentication of the packets exchanged. We propose to use a key distribution center (KDC), which can be easily deployed in the target network, to securely establish a shared secret between two parties before the IPsec key exchange step. This approach limits the number of expensive public key based operations to a minimum and thus improves the overall performance of the protocol. To make the protocol lightweight while not sacrificing the protection power of the original IPsec, we carefully select a set of necessary features. We demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed protocol by implementing the protocol in Java and showing some reasonable performance data.

Digital video broadcasting (DVB) technology can be used for providing Internet protocol (IP) based services along with audio and video broadcasting. A new protocol, called unidirectional lightweight protocol (ULE) has been defined by the IETF for the transport of IP datagrams over DVB. ULE provides several benefits over the existing mechanisms used in DVB for transporting IP data. This paper describes an extension to the ULE protocol to provide security for IP services over DVB. The different security requirements for IP over DVB services are discussed. The mechanisms and security extensions for ULE to satisfy these requirements are described. Simulation results are also presented to show the impact of these security mechanisms on the IP traffic.

This paper discusses the design of a customizable component that encapsulates a raw baseline communication architecture and a set of lightweight protocols. These protocols can act in specific points of the baseline architecture's algorithm in order tailor communication or provide new services according to the requirements of specific classes of applications. An implementation of the described component is currently being used by the application-oriented parallel programming environment SNOW, which provides specially tailored run-time systems for parallel applications running on dedicated clusters.

In this paper we address the challenges associated with the verification of correctness of communication between agents in Multi-Agent Systems. Our approach applies model-checking techniques to protocols which express interactions between a group of agents in the form of a dialogue. We define a lightweight protocol language which can express a wide range of dialogue types, and we use the SPIN model checker to verify properties of this language. Our early results show this approach has a high success rate in the detection of failures in agent dialogues.

In this paper, we present adaptive clustering protocol (ACP) for sensor networks. Clustering techniques are used by different protocols and applications to increase scalability and reduce delays in sensor networks. Examples include routing protocols, and applications requiring efficient data aggregation. Our approach which is based on The Covering Problem that aims at covering an area with minimum possible circular disks assuming ideal conditions. ACP is a lightweight protocol that does not require any neighborhood information and imposes lesser communication overhead. We present simulation results to show the efficiency of ACP in both ideal cases and randomly distributed networks. Moreover, ACP is scalable with respect to density and network size

The Network Processing Forum (NPF) is delivering specifications for programmable network elements that reduce equipment time-to-market, while increasing time-in-market. ForCES (Forwarding and Control Element Separation) aims to define framework and associated mechanisms for standardizing the exchange of information between the logically separate functionality of the control plane and the forwarding plane. To make good use of the efforts of NPF and TCP reliability, this paper presents a TCP-based lightweight protocol for control plane and forwarding plane communication. This protocol meets many requirements of the ForCES working group charter for a protocol. We provide an evaluation of its applicability for a ForCES protocol. One advantage of this protocol is that it can provide good support for Common Programming Interface (CPI) of NPF. Also it can be easily extended to support new services or new functions. The current version of this protocol has been implemented in our IPv6 core router.

A circuit and an associated lightweight protocol have been developed to secure communication between a control console and remote programmable network devices. The circuit provides encryption, data integrity checking and sequence number verification to ensure confidentiality, integrity and authentication of control messages sent over the public Internet. All of these functions are performed directly in FPGA hardware to provide high throughput and near-zero latency. The circuit has been used to control and configure remote firewalls and intrusion detection systems. The circuit could also be used to control and configure other distributed network applications.

This paper deals with the distributed controller area network (CAN) based control system design for experimental autonomous locomotion robot (ALR) VUTBOT-2. It also features a system of aviation modules (SAM) description for airborne applications. Distributed control system of the ALR is generated by microprocessor units, which are linked by the CAN. As a higher layer protocol (HLP) the CANAerospace protocol was chosen. CANAerospace is an extremely lightweight protocol/data format definition, which was designed for highly reliable communication with microprocessor-based systems in airborne applications via CAN. It is successfully implemented with the SAM.

Radio configuration (R-CFG) files for software defined radio (SDR) devices can be downloaded over the air, allowing these devices to support multi-mode functionality using a single transceiver. SDR device manufacturers are likely to provide the R-CFGs, which may contain proprietary information. In such cases, it is necessary to secure the server/SDR device connection during the R-CFG download. Therefore, a protocol to securely connect manufacturer's server and SDR devices, called LSSL, is proposed. The LSSL is a lightweight protocol based on the SSL protocol, but it takes up less bandwidth, thus, it is more suitable for SDR handheld devices operating under low-capabilities, low-bandwidth and error-prone wireless links. However, securing the R-CFG download connection does not guarantee that a valid R-CFG, that is, an R-CFG that has been approved by the regulatory agency, has been downloaded. In order to install only valid R-CFGs, a secure download protocol is presented. The secure protocol includes, besides the LSSL, steps of mutual authentication, public/private key mechanisms for data encryption and decryption, and fingerprint calculations to check data integrity. Finally, the secure protocol is analyzed and shown to be deadlock and livelock-free, and to properly terminate. Experiments using Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) are performed to compare the LSSL and the SSL, and to demonstrate the feasibility of the secure protocol.

In Gigabit class networks, the physical transmission time is small compared to the time required to process the TCP/IP protocol stack. Thus, the usefulness of lightweight protocols that reduce the communication software overhead is even higher, as the performance demands shift to the network interface hardware and/or software. The communication protocol CLIC has recently been proposed for efficient communication in clusters using the Linux operating system. It uses an approach to optimize the communication performance in a cluster of computers different from that of providing a user-level interface that removes the operating system (OS) mediation in the communication path. Thus, besides reducing the latencies and increasing the bandwidth figures even for short messages, CLIC meets other requirements such as multiprogramming, portability, protection against corrupted programs, reliable message delivery, direct access to the network for all applications, etc., by providing an optimized OS support to reliable and efficient network software, that avoids the TCP/IP protocol stack. In this paper we show how new facilities and improved performance of network interface cards (NICs) have been incorporated to CLIC in order to take advantage of the gigabit network technology.

A capture protection server protects a cryptographic key on a device that may be captured by authenticating the user of the device (e.g., by password) before permitting the key to be used. Delegation from one capture protection server to another enables the new server to perform this capture protection function for the device. Delegation, however, opens the system to new vulnerabilities, including difficulties in limiting online password-guessing attacks and in disabling a device that has been stolen by an attacker who knows the password. Here we propose a lightweight protocol for coordinating capture protection servers that eliminates these vulnerabilities. We also report on the implementation of our protocol in a JCA-compliant cryptographic service provider, and ramifications of the JCA interfaces for our approach.

Wireless sensor networks are widely used in data acquisition frameworks. Unlike conventional networked devices, wireless sensors run on low power energy sources, and have limited memory buffers, minimal computational complexity, and low processing speeds. As such, the complexities involved with conventional network protocols cannot be realized in wireless sensors. A data dissemination protocol for wireless sensor network should be well aware of sensor limitations. In addition, it should also take into consideration, the unique aspects of applications running over wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a new network protocol, Simple Wireless Sensor Protocol (SWSP) for wireless sensors which provides a reliable data communication between wireless sensors with minimum resource overhead.

A reasonable end-to-end reliability guarantee for three-tier systems, called e-Transaction (exactly-once Transaction), has been recently proposed. This work presents a lightweight e-Transaction protocol for centralized back-end database. Our protocol does not require coordination among the replicas of the application server and does not rely on any assumption for what concerns the processing order of messages exchanged among processes, as instead required by some existing solution.

We present a novel lightweight protocol for data integrity in wireless sensor networks. Our protocol is based on a leapfrog strategy in which each cluster head verifies if its previous node has preserved the integrity of the packet using the secret key it shares with the two hop uptree node. The proposed protocol is simple. The analysis and simulation results show that the protocol needs very few header bits, as low as three bits, thus resulting in negligible bandwidth overhead; the protocol poses very low computational overhead, it needs to compute just a hash as compared to multiple complex operations required by any cryptographic implementation for verifying authenticity.

Mobitex, first emerged from Ericsson, is a cost effective and efficient packet-switched network. Its worldwide deployment and pure data network nature makes it a suitable infrastructure for wireless Internet access. Since the Internet is predominated by Internet communication protocol stack (e.g. TCP/IP, UDP/IP), these protocols should be used extensively in wireless environment to achieve wireless Internet access. Unfortunately, most of the wireless terminals in the real world, especially resource-constrained wireless terminals are unable to comprehend any existent Internet communication protocol. Due to the lack of the universal APIs and protocol standards, the challenge is how to integrate these wireless terminals into global Internet. A virtual socket architecture (VSA), which is a client gate-way-server oriented approach for wireless Internet access in wireless WAN (Mobitex) environment, is proposed. This approach uses gateway to separate the management of the behaviorally different wired and wireless worlds and to provide the wireless terminal with an access point to the Internet. It also allows the use of a lightweight protocol stack with a set of virtual socket interface on the wireless terminal, and keeps the entire Internet communication infrastructure within gateway. A specially designed protocol is applied for the wireless link to manage the bi-directional transmission of the socket operation requests and results. Based on this idea, this approach could eventually achieve the goals of making resource-constrained wireless terminals access Internet and seamless integration wireless terminals into Internet without changing the existent Internet communication protocol stack implementations and applications in the wired networks.

In this work we investigate the feasibility of using a cluster of PCs built with mass market networks to deal with the necessities of the CFD community, in particular for unstructured implicit CFD solvers that require a very irregular pattern of communications. We report the initial findings from a series of experiments with some well known benchmarks to determine CFD application sensitivity to machine communication parameters. This is done by running these benchmarks on a cluster in which the communication network has been modified to allow an increase of the bandwidth by adding multiple channels and a reduction on the latency by using a lightweight protocol like the M-Via.

Two rapidly evolving and merging technologies are the Internet and wireless data communications. Another trend is the increased use of real-time multimedia applications for audio and video communication. The most popular transport protocol among these delay sensitive applications is UDP (user datagram protocol), which is a lightweight protocol that provides multiplexing among user processes and has low protocol processing overhead. UDP's checksum policy is to protect either an entire packet including UDP and IP headers or nothing in the packet at all. This conforms badly with applications that prefers errors in the payload to the loss of whole packets. Many real-time applications fall into this category. We present a new protocol, UDP Lite, that provides the kind of protection often needed by these real time applications especially when they are run over wireless networks. UDP Lite increases the flexibility of UDP by providing an optionally partial checksum. Each packet can be optionally divided into a sensitive and an insensitive part by the sender. Errors in the sensitive part will cause packets to be discarded by the UDP Lite receiver, while errors in the insensitive part are ignored by UDP Lite. We show how UDP Lite uses a wireless network more efficiently for two different scenarios. By combining UDP Lite with compressed RTP, the gain can be even higher. Simulations show that the error rate of the network can increase by almost an order of magnitude without increasing the packet loss ratio. This enables cheaper network solutions for applications such as IP telephony.

In the near future people will be able to move freely and still have seamless network and Internet connectivity. One implication of this new style of interaction is an increased diversity in the types of devices which will be used to maintain connectivity. While many of the Internet protocols have proven successful and long-lived in traditional networks: we believe they will be inappropriate for use in communicating among limited-capability devices. We introduce a new network layer protocol for intra-network communication in clouds containing devices with varying processing and communication capabilities. Our proposed protocol, called Pseudo-IP, is designed to operate among devices in the farthest branches/leaves of an intranet while providing inter-network connectivity with other clouds and with the existing IP-based Internet infrastructure. Pseudo-IP will accommodate a wide range of devices with varying power processing, and communication capabilities, while supporting a variety of applications.

In this paper we present a discussion of the design and implementation of a new transport protocol specifically developed for mobile ad hoc networks. The protocol allows applications complete control in deciding the level of reliability and the quality of service (QoS) desired for different portions of a data stream. Unlike TCP, however, ATP is a lightweight protocol and unlike UDP, it provides feedback to the application regarding the status of the connection(s). We have implemented ATP in the FreeBSD kernel (a version of Unix) and tested its performance. We show that the design of ATP provides the right balance between network transparency and application flexibility.

This paper presents a lightweight transport protocol called TEMPO which is intended to satisfy the requirements of advanced applications and high-speed network properties. The versatile transport service of TEMPO allows transport users to define their appropriate transport service by composing elementary message streams. The arrangement of the streams is defined by interaction patterns which contain the transport addresses of the corresponding transport users and their relations. The pattern-directed addressing scheme allows TEMPO to support different service forms, e.g. a notification form to transmit single messages, a transaction form to exchange request and reply messages or a connection form to transfer uni- or bidirectionally an unlimited number of messages. Independent of the service form, TEMPO offers a multicasting and relaying function which can be used repeatedly and in various combinations. Based on network properties such as low error rate and high bandwidth, TEMPO was designed as a lightweight protocol: The instruction path and the number of network packet exchanges are minimized for an error free communication. >

Service advertisement and discovery are important components for computing in mobile ad hoc network (MANET). In this paper, a lightweight protocol of service advertisement and discovery has been implemented, which is based on a MANET multicast protocol ODMRP (On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol). In this protocol, service advertisement and discovery information is piggybacked in ODMRP routing control packets. Simulation results of the implementation prove that the implementation workload and resource consumption of the protocol are lightweight.

The Xpress Transfer Protocol (XTP), a full-featured lightweight protocol with mechanisms and functionality specifically design for high-speed network environments, is examined. XTP can provide the full range of services needed to support distributed processing systems. A software implementation of XTP has been completed to run over the BERKOM broadband ISDN network. The performances of XTP over the BERKOM network and an Ethernet are reported and compared to those of TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). XTP has been found to perform about as well as and in some situations better than TCP/IP. A tentative conclusion is that as a full-featured protocol XTP does not gain its performance advantage at the cost of functionality or the other way round. >

The Computer Networks Laboratory at the University of Virginia has implemented the SAFENET lightweight protocol suite on the Navy's Desktop Tactical Computer (DTC-2). One of the research questions was whether to embed XTP in the DTC-2's UNIX kernel or run XTP on an attached processor on the DTC-2's VMEbus. Both strategies were implemented and the attached processor approach proved to have somewhat higher performance. The hardware and software system environment is surveyed, the performance achieved at the media access controller (MAC), transport, and user levels is reported, and an analytic model for predicting throughput and latency as a functon of vendor-provided or easily measured system parameters is developed. The authors' conclusions identify both the advantages and performance concerns inherent to off-host protocol execution.

The current generation of transport systems best represented by the de facto standard TCP/IP has been designed for file transfer, virtual terminal and remote job entry applications. The protocols have been intended for networks with low bandwidth and high error rate compared to today's networks. Now, due to the emergence of sophisticated distributed systems and high-speed networks, some insufficiencies have become apparent concerning the currently provided service capability and service performance of traditional transport systems. This paper presents a new transport system called TIP (Transport and Internetworking Package) which provides improved service capabilities and performance by introducing a new lightweight protocol family and, with regard to this, a well-adjusted protocol processing environment. Additionally, TIP is downwardly compatible to TCP/IP systems, so that applications may communicate independently of their selected transport system: TCP/IP or TIP. >