Broadband service delivery has experienced a great evolution due to significant technological advances, which have favored the appearance of new business models. In this context, multi-play services denote the provisioning of several broadband services over a single broadband connection. In current deployments, there are a concrete number of services available (the same for all the customers), and bandwidth is pre-allocated by each service. This paper proposes a new approach that addresses this topic in a generic way. The new architecture does not impose any restrictions and handles the multi-service delivery with independence of the number of services. The new multi-play approach makes use of Carrier-Grade Ethernet to achieve network convergence, which means that the same network resources are used to carry all the broadband services. Carrier-Grade Ethernet is an umbrella term for a group of initiatives and standards that try to overcome the restrictions of Ethernet as carrier transport technology. Some of these standards such as Provider Bridges, Provider Backbone Bridges, PBB-Traffic Engineering, or Shortest Path Bridging are introduced. Finally, this paper proposes a built-in security scheme, which controls the admission to the network by preventing unauthorized users from accessing services. This approach is based on a modified version of IEEE 802.1X which permits the simultaneous establishment of multiple authentication processes, one per each service that the customer requests.

Advances of diverse wireless access technologies are defining the trends of future wireless networks, named Next Generation Wireless Networks (NGWN), where several access technologies will coexist and devices will be equipped with different network interfaces, in order to take advantage of each access technology. In NGWN communication maintenance is a concept willing to reach. Therefore, strategies to tackle mobility and multihoming issues are required. In this paper we propose an extension of HIP in order to cover challenges that end to end mobility presents in NGWN. Our approach consists on sending access technology related information before handover execution occurs, in order to optimize handover process. Moreover, the extension tackles QoS issues by sending application requirements as well as restrictions or improvements affecting its performance in the new access technology.

This paper presents a multi-agent prototype for an electronic voting system based on optical character recognition technology. This prototype is analyzed and compared to other voting systems. Trade-offs in voter training, ease of use, security and coercion across various systems are considered for the purpose of recognizing achievable improvements. Security improvements and new capabilities are proposed based on the use of N-version programming techniques. This architecture can work with and improve security and reliability on most any algorithmic or architectural security approach. We describe how multiple agent-based technology can be applied to design and implement better voting systems. This case study demonstrates how the voter’s authentication system and vote data transmission could further simplify and improve the electoral process by adding these new capabilities to the electronic voting system using N-version programming.

A Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes that are dynamically and arbitrarily located in such a way that the interconnections between nodes are capable of changing on a continual basis. The nodes of a MANET do not need any pre-existing fixed network infrastructure to exchange information among them. In order to facilitate communication within the network, a routing protocol is used to discover routes between nodes and each node incorporates routing functionality so that it can be used by other nodes in the network to transmit their packets to destinations that are out of their range. In this paper we provide an overview of five of the most frequently used ad hoc routing protocols, underlying their main advantages and drawbacks, and we propose a testbed for the evaluation of their performance in different environments.

Systems based on the use of watermarking techniques are seen in recent times as the most interesting solutions to provide means of protecting Intellectual Property Rights in electronic commerce with digital contents environments. A key aspect of this secure e-commerce environment is security. It is important to be able to evaluate and to know the security level and the risks of die system providing these type of services, specially in open networks like Internet. 'Attack trees' technique has proved valid as a methodology for studying and analyzing the security of these distributed systems, and as a mean to compare the security level of similar schemes.