K-12 school districts are on the frontlines of cyber warfare, with many districts across America to become victims of phishing, social engineering, malware, and ransomware attacks. As a result, many districts have been forced to cease operations for extended periods of time, pay costly ransoms, and endure the embarrassment of having highly…

Internet of Things ("IoT") systems are complex, asynchronous solutions often comprised of various software and hardware components developed in isolation of each other. These components function with different degrees of reliability and performance over an inherently unreliable network, the Internet. Many IoT systems are developed within…

Sensor systems are becoming pervasive in many domains, and are recently being generalized by the Internet of Things (IoT). This wide deployment, however, presents significant security issues. We develop security techniques for sensor systems and IoT, addressing all security management phases. Prior to deployment, the nodes need to be hardened. We…

The speed and availability of Internet-capable devices, such as computers, smartphones, gaming consoles, TVs, and tablets have made it possible for our society to be connected, and stay connected to the Internet 24 hours a day. The Internet of Things (IoT) describes a new environment where common objects are uniquely identifiable and accessible…

This dissertation investigates how the emergence of the Internet of Things and the embeddedness of sensors and networked connectivity onto things, physical spaces and biological bodies rearticulates embodied spaces, devises practices of self-making and forms of power in the governance of the self and society. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.).…

In this dissertation, we discuss the problem of enabling cooperative query execution in a multi-cloud environment where the data is owned and managed by multiple enterprises. Each enterprise maintains its own relational database using a private cloud. In order to implement desired business services, parties need to share selected portion of their…

Virtualization enables the ability to consolidate multiple servers on a single physical machine, increasing the infrastructure utilization. Maximizing the ratio of server virtual machines (VMs) to physical machines, namely the consolidation ratio, becomes an important goal toward infrastructure cost saving in a cloud. However, the consolidation…

In this dissertation, the author examined the capabilities of Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) in regard to replacing Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) as the internetworking technology for Medium-sized Businesses (MBs) in the Information Systems (IS) field. Transition to IPv6 is inevitable, and, thus, organizations are adopting this protocol…

Video streaming has recently grown dramatically in popularity over the Internet, Cable TV, and wire-less networks. Because of the resource demanding nature of video streaming applications, maximizing resource utilization in any video streaming system is a key factor to increase the scalability and decrease the cost of the system. Resources to…

Location technologies constitute an essential component of systems design for autonomous operations and control. The Global Positioning System (GPS) works well in outdoor areas, but the satellite signals are not strong enough to penetrate inside most indoor environments. As a result, a new strain of indoor positioning technologies that make use of…

Content-centric networking (CCN) has emerged as a dominant paradigm for future Internet architecture design due to its efficient support for content dissemination, which currently dominates Internet use. This dissertation shows how economic and social welfare analysis can be used to inform the design of a CCN architecture that provides network…

The World Wide Web Consortium defines a Web Service as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network." Web Services have become increasingly important both within and across organizational boundaries. With the recent advent of the Semantic Web, web services have evolved into semantic…

The Internet as a networked system has been rendered more complex than ever before as human endpoints are grafted into the system via increasingly pervasive and personalized networked devices. According to the United Nations, the Internet is a transnational enabler of a number of human rights, and as such, access to the Internet has been…

The purpose of this study was to determine the availability of Internet access for students attending East Tennessee State University during the fall semester 2013. It has been unknown to what degree broadband access is available in the East Tennessee State University service area that includes counties in East Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, and…

Computer networks that brought unprecedented growth in global communication have been using Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) as a standard for routing. The exponential increase in the use of the networks caused an acute shortage of available identification numbers (IP addresses). The shortage and other network communication issues are…