Subscription Management Research Articles

Framework for building a low-cost, scalable, and secured platform for Web-delivered business services

Many business services are now being delivered over the Web. This method of delivery is attracting the attention of both small- and medium-sized businesses and providers of application-based services because of its easier access, more affordable fees, and greater efficiency in delivering services to massive numbers of receivers. However, it requires the resolution of several key technical challenges. Data security is of top priority for most users because their data reside on remote servers whose resources are shared among tenants. In addition, such a platform needs to meticulously control the operational and delivery costs so that it remains competitive compared with traditional approaches. We have been developing a low-cost, scalable, and secured platform for Web-delivered business services. The platform enables the delivery of business services over the Web with a set of common business and operational support services, including subscription management, massive multitenancy, federated identity management, Web application security protection, and more. For instance, massive multitenancy deals with the isolation of data and service performance for subscribers. In this paper, we discuss the framework for such a platform, the key challenges for realizing the framework, and the approaches for dealing with the challenges.

Web Services Specifications on Eventing and Coordination

The WS-Events specification consists of ‘a set of processing rules for advertising, subscribing, producing and consuming Web services Events’. All authors of this specification are based at Hewlett-Packard. Further development of WS-Events is not on the agenda anymore. Therefore we only give a brief overview of this specification.WS-Events defines an event as a change in the state of a resource or request for processing. The specification describes three main entities. The event producer is an entity which generates notifications. These notifications are received by the event consumers. The event broker is responsible for routing the notifications. Brokers typically aggregate and publish events from several producers. An event broker can also apply some transformation to the notifications it processes. The precise role of the broker remains unclear in WS-events. Subscription requests and notifications are described as (direct) messages between the event producer and the event consumer.The specification does not provide descriptions of entities responsible for subscription or subscription management tasks (such as the subscriber and subscription manager in WS-Notification and WS-Eventing) nor does it distinguish between publisher and producer roles (as in WS-Brokered Notification).The WS-Eventing specification describes a protocol that allows Web services to subscribe to or accept subscriptions for event notification messages. The specification defines four entities in the event notification architecture

IPTV 환경에서 스마트카드 복제에 강건한 다중 셋톱박스 인증기법

IPTV 시스템에서 콘텐츠 및 서비스 제공자의 권익보호는 수신제한시스템(CAS, Conditional Access System) 및 디지털저작권관리(DRM, Digital Right Management)를 통해서 이루어진다. 특히 CAS의 경우, 계층화된 인증키를 사용하여 권한이 있는 사용자에게만 암호화된 콘텐츠를 복호화할 수 있도록 한다. 하지만 CAS가 콘텐츠 제공자와 스마트카드(SC, Smart Card) 사이 구간만의 보안을 제공하기 때문에 셋톱박스(STB, Set-Top Box)와 SC 간 보호 받지 못하는 채널을 도청하는 McCormac Hack 공격이나 SC 복제 공격으로부터 시스템을 보호할 수 없다. 본 논문에서는 McCormac Hack 공격뿐 만 아니라 SC 복제 공격에도 강건하면서 다중 STB를 지원할 수 있는 SC / STB 인증 기법을 제안한다. SC 복제 공격을 막기위해 SC등록 단계에서 STB와 SC를 바인딩하였던 기존 기법은 다중 STB환경을 지원하지 못한다. 제안하는 시스템은 가입자관리시스템에서 STB 정보를 IPTV의 양방향 채널 특성을 이용하여 동적으로 갱신함으로서 사용자의 다중 STB를 효과적으로 지원한다. In an IPTV system, the rights of the content and service provider can be protected by using Conditional Access System (CAS) and Digital Right Management (DRM). In case of the CAS, only the authorized user who has structured authentication keys can decrypt the encrypted content. However, since the CAS establishes a secure channel only between content provider and Smart Card (SC), it cannot protect the system against McCormac Hack attack which eavesdrops on unsecure channel between SC and Set-Top Box (STB) and SC cloning attack. In this paper, we propose a robust multi-STB assisted SC / STB authentication protocol which can protect the IPTV system against not only McCormac Hack attack, but also SC cloning attack. The previous works which bind a STB and a SC during the SC registration phase against the SC cloning attack does not support multi-STB environments. The proposed system which dynamically updates the STB information in subscriber management system using the bi-directional channel characteristic of IPTV system can support the user's multi-STB device effectively.

Scalable distribution of XML content with XNet

The XNET XML content network was designed to implement efficient and reliable distribution of structured XML content to very large populations of consumers. For that purpose, our system integrates several technologies: the routing protocol XROUTE makes extensive use of subscription aggregation to limit the size of routing tables while ensuring perfect routing (that is, an event is forwarded to a link only if it leads to an interested consumer). The filtering engine XTRIE uses a sophisticated algorithm to match incoming XML documents against large populations of tree-structured subscriptions, whereas the XSEARCH subscription management algorithm enables the system to efficiently manage large and highly dynamic consumer populations. Finally, our XNET system integrates reliability mechanisms to guarantee that its state is consistent with the consumer population and implements several approaches to fault tolerance to recover from various types of router and link failures. We have analyzed the efficiency of our techniques with various simulations, and to assess the performance of our system in realistic settings and show that it is perfectly suitable for large-scale distributed environments, we have performed a large-scale experimental deployment on the PlanetLab testbed.

Literature of Acquisitions in Review, 2004–7

This review covers the literature of acquisitions from 2004 through 2007. The purchase of electronic resources continued to grow, especially for e-journals. E-books gained more attention with a variety of pricing models emerging, many of which were similar to print purchase plans or a modification of e-serial plans. The electronic resource management (ERM) of subscriptions and licensing became a major concern as the acquisition of these items continued to grow. Many libraries developed local ERM applications while vendors began developing commercial ERM systems. The Digital Library Federation (DLF) Electronic Resources Management Initiative (ERMI) emerged as a major step in the development for ERM system standards. Many libraries expressed dissatisfaction with some of the new pricing models for e-journals, especially the Big Deal packages, as libraries were caught between budget reductions, price increases, and complex license agreement terms. Budget and the allocation of funds remained a frequent topic in the literature. With the transition from print to electronic versions, acquisitions staff required more support and new resources. Workflows changed as acquisition units and technical services departments reorganized to accommodate the growth of electronic resources.

‘Improving little by little, every day’: the road to Operational Excellence

ABSTRACTLean Six Sigma is a business methodology that is rapidly attracting followers across production and service industries. This includes the publishing world, with several companies now implementing the program. The subscription agent Swets is also implementing Lean Six Sigma for its processes. This article describes the challenges and benefits of implementing Lean Six Sigma at Swets, highlighting the applicability of the program to the area of subscription management and illustrating how beneficial the initiative can be for publishers, customers, and Swets alike.

Lightweight Secure Roaming Mechanism Between GPRS/UMTS and Wireless LANs

The third generation partner project (3GPP) has standardized general packet radio service (GPRS) and the universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) to provide cell phone communications and wireless Internet services. Although the data transmission rate is lower than that of wireless local area networks (WLANs), GPRS/UMTS covers larger areas. Hence, to achieve higher speed ubiquitous access, we propose a lightweight secure roaming mechanism (LSRM) that integrates GPRS/UMTS and WLAN. Taking advantage of these two technologies, LSRM offers anonymous roaming and friendly subscriber management. Besides, we give a formal security analysis to LSRM based on BAN authentication logic.

We Did It Our Way

We Did It Our Way

Tumbling Dice: Publishers, Aggregators, and ERM

ABSTRACT This session emphasized the importance of standards in a world of constant data exchange. Librarians rely upon rapid and accurate exchange of information with and between publishers, aggregators, and PAMS (public access management services) to assist with effective management of collections and meeting fiduciary responsibilities. Loading various types of data into ERM systems is central to this exchange of information. Standards should be embraced and promoted by the parties involved in this exchange as accurate metadata facilitates the management of subscriptions and collections and promotes access, linking, searching, and discovery.

Design of Content-Based Publish/Subscribe Systems over Structured Overlay Networks

The management of subscriptions and events is an important task in the content-based publish/subscribe system. A good management mechanism can not only produce lower matching costs to speed up the delivery of matched events to the interested subscribers but can also induce good load balancing for subscription storage. In this paper, we consider the construction of this kind of system over a peer-to-peer overlay network and propose two message-to-node mapping schemes for system management. We both analyze and simulate the performance of the proposed schemes. The simulation results show the superiority of our schemes over existing ones.

Scalable Distribution of XML Content with XNet

The XNET XML content network was designed to implement efficient and reliable distribution of structured XML content to very large populations of consumers. For that purpose, our system integrates several technologies: the routing protocol XROUTE makes extensive use of subscription aggregation to limit the size of routing tables while ensuring perfect routing (that is, an event is forwarded to a link only if it leads to an interested consumer). The filtering engine XTRIE uses a sophisticated algorithm to match incoming XML documents against large populations of tree-structured subscriptions, whereas the XSEARCH subscription management algorithm enables the system to efficiently manage large and highly dynamic consumer populations. Finally, our XNET system integrates reliability mechanisms to guarantee that its state is consistent with the consumer population and implements several approaches to fault tolerance to recover from various types of router and link failures. We have analyzed the efficiency of our techniques with various simulations, and to assess the performance of our system in realistic settings and show that it is perfectly suitable for large-scale distributed environments, we have performed a large-scale experimental deployment on the PlanetLab testbed.

An efficient and scalable framework for content-based publish/subscribe systems

Challenges for content-based publish/sub scribe systems include efficient subscription management and event matching, load balancing, and efficient and scalable event delivery. This paper presents an efficient and scalable framework for content-based publish/subscribe systems. We propose using K-D trees to dynamically partition and organize subscriptions, thereby preserving subscription locality, minimizing event matching load and ensuring load balance across nodes. We propose an efficient event delivery mechanism that cleverly exploits embedded trees in distributed hash tables to disseminate events. We show that the latency of event publication and delivery is low. The event delivery mechanism can deliver events to a large number of subscribers at low latency and overhead, consuming modest bandwidth.

Service-oriented Subscription Management of Medical Decision Data in the Intensive Care Unit

This paper addresses the design of a platform for the management of medical decision data in the ICU. Whenever new medical data from laboratories or monitors is available or at fixed times, the appropriate medical support services are activated and generate a medical alert or suggestion to the bedside terminal, the physician's PDA, smart phone or mailbox. Since future ICU systems will rely ever more on medical decision support, a generic and flexible subscription platform is of high importance. Our platform is designed based on the principles of service-oriented architectures, and is fundamental for service deployment since the medical support services only need to implement their algorithm and can rely on the platform for general functionalities. A secure communication and execution environment are also provided. A prototype, where medical support services can be easily plugged in, has been implemented using Web service technology and is currently being evaluated by the Department of Intensive Care of the Ghent University Hospital. To illustrate the platform operation and performance, two prototype medical support services are used, showing that the extra response time introduced by the platform is less than 150 ms. The platform allows for easy integration with hospital information systems. The platform is generic and offers user-friendly patient/service subscription, transparent data and service resource management and priority-based filtering of messages. The performance has been evaluated and it was shown that the response time of platform components is negligible compared to the execution time of the medical support services.

EBSCONET® Solidifies Its Place as the Most Useful, Intuitive Subscription Management System Worldwide

Serials: The Journal for the Serials Community has been digitised and can be accessed in full on this website. All content is freely available on an open-access basis. Serials was published between 1988 and 2011. In 2012, the journal was retitled and is now published as Insights: the UKSG journal.

PeerCast: Churn-resilient end system multicast on heterogeneous overlay networks

The lack of wide deployment of IP multicast in the Internet has prompted researchers to propose end system multicast or application-level multicast as an alternate approach. However, end system multicast, by its very nature, suffers from several performance limitations, including, high communication overheads due to duplicate data transfers over same physical links, uneven load distribution caused by widely varying resource availabilities at nodes, and highly failure-prone nature of end-hosts. This paper presents a self-configuring, efficient and churn-resilient end-system multicast system called PeerCast. Three unique features distinguish PeerCast from existing approaches to application-level multicasting. First, with the aim of exploiting network proximity of end-system nodes for efficient multicast subscription management and fast information dissemination, we propose a novel Internet-landmark signature technique to cluster the end-hosts of the overlay network. Second, we propose a capacity aware overlay construction technique to balance the multicast workload among heterogeneous end-system nodes. Third, we develop a dynamic passive replication scheme to provide reliable end system multicast services in an inherently dynamic environment of unreliable peers. We also present a set of experiments showing the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed mechanisms and techniques.

Mobile subscriber management

SIM management and Mobile Device Management have, in the past, been two distinctly separate technology types often run by different departments within the mobile operator environment. However, there is now an understanding that both work in harmony with each other to better manage the user experience and ultimately deliver more profitable subscribers. How do the two technologies combine to deliver a holistic approach to ‘mobile subscriber management’?

IPTV service assurance

This article discusses service assurance aspects specific to IPTV services and video quality. Classic network monitoring generally ensures that each network element, network segment, and subnetwork is functioning reliably, and may also encompass routing and reachability across different network domains. IPTV service assurance can encompass much more, including subscriber management and authorization, capacity management, perceived video picture quality, and error correction and concealment; accomplished through integrated test and monitoring for rapid resolution of customer complaints. This is all needed to ensure that the customer has an overall video quality of experience (QoE) at least as enjoyable as current TV delivery methods

Library/Vendor Relations

ABSTRACT Communication with customers (libraries) is vital to the overall success of academic publishers. Ongoing interaction and involvement with the library community through conference participation, institution of focus groups and other such means allow publishers to better serve the evolving needs of libraries. With foresight and direction, the acquisition of smaller publishing entities by larger organizations can result in a mutually beneficial situation for all parties. Through partnerships with online full-text database aggregators, academic publishers can increase their overall range of exposure and gain more name recognition in areas of the world where, previously, access to that publisher's content was not easily attainable. The use of online pre-publica-tion services allows academic publishers to make the latest articles available to researchers even before the article is made available in print. By assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to every article made available through a pre-publication service, researchers are able to fully cite such articles and thus make full use of the information provided in their own studies. Comprehensive online support services provide libraries with a variety of essential subscription management services and help to increase the overall level of interaction between library and publisher. The Open Access (OA) issue is multi-dimensional in nature and has often been misconstrued by many in the publisher and library communities. As the Open Access concept is still being defined, academic publishers must pay close attention to its development and attempt to incorporate such access into their offerings so as to best serve the needs of their subscribers.

A Novel Approach to Adaptive Content-based Subscription Management in DHT-based Overlay Networks

Content-based Publish/Subscribe (CBPS) interaction paradigm is suitable for a variety of large scale dynamic applications: News delivery, stock quoting, air and metropolitan traffic control, on-line games, dissemination of multimedia contents, dissemination of auction bids, services and resources discovery, remote control of critical infrastructures and management of large scale systems. In contrast to their flexibility and expressiveness scalable CBPS systems are difficult to implement and the proposed solutions are not again mature. In this paper we propose a novel adaptive content-based subscription management system, relying on a Distributed Hash Table routing infrastructure. We define a model for the event space guaranteeing the expressiveness for any application domain. Also we provide mechanism to dynamically identify groups of users with similar preferences (multicast group). Two different approaches for multicast group identification are proposed and discussed: A dummy regular Grid partitioning of the event space and a more complex clustering of users preferences. When system evolves (e.g. joining and leaving of publisher and subscriber and/or nodes failure) multicast groups are reconfigured to maintain the desired level of system efficiency. System adaptation is supported by a scalable and dynamic application-level multicast infrastructure, and by a run time performance measurement mechanism. The paper gives a formal description of our solution and the main design guidelines. Also we discuss advantages and disadvantages of our proposal, compared with the existing solutions.

A Robust Authentication Protocol with Non-Repudiation Service for Integrating WLAN and 3G Network

The third-generation cellular systems provide great coverage, complete subscriber management and nearly universal roaming. Nevertheless, 3G systems suffer the high installation cost and low bandwidth. Though WLAN provides hot spot coverage with high data rates, it lacks roaming and mobility support. From users' points of views, the integration of WLAN and 3G systems is an attractive way that will provide them a convenient access to network. When integrating WLAN and 3G, there are still some problems should be concerned in terms of authentication and security, such as authentication efficiency and repudiation problem. In this paper, we review the authentication scheme for WLAN and 3G/UMTS interworking which is specified by 3GPP and propose a robust localized fast authentication protocol with non-repudiation service for integrating WLAN and 3G network. The localized re-authentication protocol can shorten the authentication time delay. On the other hand, with the non-repudiation service, the assumption, that subscriber has to fully trust 3G home operator, can be deleted and the trust management between the independent WLAN operator, 3G visited operator and 3G home operator can be eliminated. In other words, our proposed protocol provides legal evidences to prevent the 3G home operator from overcharge toward the subscriber and also prevent the WLAN operator and 3G visited operator from overcharge toward the 3G home operator. The authentication protocol employs HMAC, hash-chaining techniques, and public-key digital signature to achieve localized fast re-authentication and non-repudiation service.