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LarryM99

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    • Are your devices going wireless, wired, or both? This track at the Embedded Systems Conference keeps you up-to-date on networking embedded devices.

    • When the headlines are filled with everything from Paris Hilton's hacked SideKick to a teenager's unlocking of his iPhone, security in embedded devices has hit the mainstream.

    • Programming for embedded systems has come a long way. The first firmware was typically hand-coded machine language, often created by the same engineer that designed the hardware. This was entirely appropriate, given that this firmware was seen as a cheaper way to replace discrete hardware logic.

    • The IEEE standards sometimes seem like a force of nature. They define how things are to work in meticulous detail that only an engineer could love. This paper will explore The IEEE standards that relate to wireless communication and provide a glimpse at how these standards are created. We will also look at what is in store from IEEE in the future regarding a number of types of wireless computing.

    • Based on the headlines a while back, the title of this talk is something of an oxymoron. The common observer would be led to believe that wireless networks were an open invitation to any evil element from around the world. This was one of the few brakes on the otherwise explosive growth of wireless LANs in corporate environments. This paper will explore the options available to secure wireless LANs and weigh the strengths and weaknesses of each.

    • This paper concentrates on the details of wireless protocol stacks that are useful to engineers that need to dig deeper into the technology than the typical application programmer. The goal is to allow you to use these stacks to their fullest potential in the specialized systems you are designing.

    • New projects are always exciting. The first engineers on the project usually get to make the important design decisions, the ones that will have the most impact on the project through to the end. There is always the promise that this is going to be the Perfect Design, a chance to make a new start and erase the mistakes of the past. At some point in the project that euphoria wears off. The flaws in the design begin to become apparent. Ultimately, is it possible to create and implement a Perfect Design?

    • The advancing complexity in consumer electronics is posing serious challenges for designers and users alike. Key to managing this complexity is the intelligent use of embedded systems.

    • We often take wireless communications for granted, without considering the underlying complexity and technological barriers. It's worth taking a closer look at those aspects.

    • The problem with putting nomadic devices on to the Internet is that the Internet is designed to route packets hierarchically. The Mobile IP protocol was created to address this issue directly.

    • One of the biggest pieces of news on Win8 is ARM support. This should be important to embedded systems folks before it is to PC people. Why is there no mention of ARM on this announcement? Why do the system requirements not have an ARM option? What's the deal here? Larry M.

    • Increasingly the line between a node in the network and a router seems to be blurring. Under IPv4 this was relatively transparent since nodes often used NAT addressing within a network segment, but under IPv6 we are moving to much more transparency. How well does the combination of Mobile IPv6 and NEMO work with optimization technologies like 6LOPAN? And can these and standard routing take the place of specialized MANET protocols? Larry M.

    • Many of the possibilities for network control described for OpenFlow and even for existing technologies open up questions about the motives behind that control. Cable providers and other ISPs are increasingly getting into providing content, and it is very easy to see them tilting the table towards their content and against competitors (i.e. Netflix). It is also questionable that centralized control over all flows works better than a robust distributed control system. Even if you argue that centralized control is necessary to tame rogue data (i.e. P2P) there is still dependence on per-packet inspection. Most of these marking schemes can be spoofed relatively easily. Bottom line, there is still a lot of work to be done in this area. Larry M.

    • Jack, you left out a few categories of things. Cars right now typically have at least half a dozen CPUs in them, which will be connected either directly or indirectly. Your entertainment system also will have a significant number of addressable entities (many cable systems already use IPv6 on their private networks, and DOCSIS 3.0 requires support for it on the public side). Larry M.

    • DHCPv6 is also quite different. Rather than assigning IP addresses it normally just advertises the presence of routers. IPv6 has native protocols for devices to robustly assign themselves valid addresses. Larry M.

    • We will need to adjust a bit to IPv6 for more than just the size of the address space. This type of device will most likely use a link-local scoped address, which is inaccessible outside of the local network. This is the IPv6 equivalent of the 192.168.x.x address space. Larry M.

    • It could be used to adjust to variance more quickly. If the receiver checks the delta time of transfer for each packet and maintains history then it can detect variance on a per-packet basis. That still doesn't tell it deterministically how long it will take for the next one, but it should be as close as you can realistically get. Larry M.

    • One real consideration is your network path. If you are sitting in Starbuck's it's generally more secure to go through your phone that on even a fully up-to-date PC on the open WiFi. On the other hand, if the cell phone does not authenticate access separately (i.e. it's your phone so it must be you) then there are all kinds of opportunities for mischief. Example: Wells-Fargo recently had an access app that stored username and password in cleartext on the phone. That's just sloppy. Larry M.

    • It's not just a question of theft. I heard a talk by an official of Estonia where he described how they had moved to a system such as this. When their country's Internet infrastructure got hit by a series of cyber attacks it literally paralyzed large parts of their economy. They had to shift very quickly back to carrying cash for minor transactions. There are times when it does not pay to be early adopters. Larry M.

    • I am interested in smart meters just from the point of view of being able to measure my own power flow more effectively, but so far I have been unable to get one. They don't appear to be smart enough yet to account for power generation by my solar panels. Until they learn to run backwards it's a moot question to me. Larry M.