Dynamic Service Deployment Through Consensus Negotiation in Programmable Ad Hoc Networks

There has recently been considerable interest in the provision of mechanisms for establishing communication between ad hoc groups of devices. The types of device forming these groups range from simple sensor devices to more complex hand held and portable computing devices. This thesis targets this new area and specifically addresses the need for dynamic, “on the fly” configuration of these systems.

A particular complexity in forming impromptu networks or groups is that devices must have compatible software services in order to interoperate. Any inconsistency in this set of services may prevent the network from forming thus inhibiting any collaborative task. The work presented in this thesis provides a novel approach for the discovery, distribution and configuration of the services necessary to achieve an operational ad hoc network.

This thesis contains a discussion of the state of the art technologies and concepts in both Ad Hoc and Programmable Networking. Based on these discussions, an informed design for an ad hoc collaboration network architecture is given followed by an analysis of an implementation of the proposed design. The design and implementation presented herein adopts a programmable networking approach and an innovative distributed consensus resolution algorithm to manage network formation. Finally, evaluation of the architecture and the accompanying prototype implementation shows that it is applicable to the considered problem domain.

Dr Andrew Scott

My current cyber security research interests in several key areas; Cyber Risk Management in Complex Socio-Technical Systems and Cyber Physical Systems, with the latter primarily serving as a key problem domain for the former. The primary driver is to explore cyber security risk management concepts that move away from asset centric approaches to include threat agent and effect based frameworks. In addition, the applied domain of this work has moved to focus more on the financial services sector, with the addition of developing an understanding of the nature of cyber risks that lead to systemic issues.