The POC Lab presents the following technologies:
In a conventional wireless network, mobile terminals rely on a fixed infrastructure of base stations or access points to route data from one party to another. On their own, mobile terminals have no means of communicating directly among themselves. In contrast, each mobile terminal in a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is able to serve as a router as well, handing off data packets from one terminal to another until they arrive at their intended destination. Instead of drawing from a finite pool of network resources, every terminal added to an ideal, completely infrastructureless MANET actually contributes to its overall capacity, a powerful property that could very well be the answer to the problem of spectrum scarcity.
Although it has been predicted that we are still some ten years away from unlocking the full potential of MANET technology, some of its benefits can be enjoyed today. Software-based MANET solutions that run on standards-based Wi-Fi equipment are already on the market, enabling users to provide Wi-Fi coverage over a large area with fewer or no access points at all.
Network identity management incorporates a set of business processes and the supporting technology infrastructure to manage the lifecycle of identities and their relationships with business applications and information. It is the fusion of directory services, network security and authentication, user provisioning and user management, single sign-on technologies, and web services delivery. A comprehensive network identity infrastructure solution includes identity management and allows companies to create, manage and authenticate online identities and broker services based on those identities, and securely deliver personalized and authorized applications and information.
Network identity management solutions provide the following key benefits:
- Standard and federated identity: enables interoperability among identity systems, sharing authentication and attributes with partners, customers and suppliers
- Lower administration costs: automates authorization tasks, allows policy-driven identity management, delegates administration tasks to users
- Higher return on investment and lower total cost of ownership: presents a consolidated view of customers, enables centralized administration of identities, policies and services, and serves as a reusable foundation for personalized services
Location-based applications use the position of the user to provide useful, localized and personalized information. There are many positioning technologies, ranging from the Global Positioning System (GPS) to the cell-of-origination or triangulation-based approaches used in wireless networks. The positioning technologies used in cellular networks are accurate only up to around 50m to 1000m, depending on the cell radius of the base stations. This may be insufficient for some location-based applications. In contrast, GPS can provide positioning accuracies of less than 20m but unfortunately only works outdoors.
WLAN networks can also be enhanced with positioning capabilities. Compared to cellular networks, indoor WLAN networks use a much smaller cell radius. Therefore, a WLAN network can potentially determine a user's location with higher accuracy and precision. WLAN positioning technologies such as the Ekahua Positioning Engine (EPE) are able to determine the location of PDAs and notebooks in a WLAN network. The EPE, a software-based system that runs over existing and future WLAN networks without requiring any proprietary hardware, uses a probabilistic positioning framework to locate the user up to an accuracy of 2m. Such location-based technologies can be deployed to track people and assets in the distribution logistics, warehousing and healthcare industries, in museums and at public events.
Open standards are documents that outline agreed-upon conventions to enable different programs to work together. They also provide a means of ensuring that compliance to the standards is met, typically through a process or set of tests. There are numerous products in the market that implement protocols and file formats defined by these open standards, allowing consumers to choose among competing vendors without getting locked in to any one of them.
Open source products are characterized by a different kind of openness: They give the user the freedom to use, copy, distribute, examine, change and improve the software. The best known open source projects take advantage of established open standards: Linux is based on UNIX; Sendmail on SMTP; MySQL on SQL; Apache on HTTP; Mozilla on HTML. Proprietary and open source products based on open standards form a diverse software ecosystem, in which they compete on merit rather than market share. By using standards-based Office suites, instant messaging clients, e-mail readers, web browsers and file sharing applications, users are able to benefit from higher levels of interoperability within the office environment.
User authentication plays an important role in any e-business application in ensuring that the right access is granted to a legitimate user. Unfortunately, most organisations continue to rely on weak, easily compromised authentication methods, such as prompting for a user id and password. To overcome this drawback, organisations could go for two-factor authentication, which requires two pieces of information unique to a user and thus provides an additional layer of security. One of the more popular two-factor authentication schemes involves using a hardware token. However such a solution is expensive and cumbersome, as users have to carry a hardware token with them.
A better approach is to use wireless Public Key Infrastructure- (PKI) based SMS for two-factor authentication, whereby your ordinary mobile phone becomes your personal trusted device. This solution not only provides strong authentication for identifying users, but also end-to-end confidentiality, integrity and non-repudiation by digitally signing your transaction via SMS.