John Mellor

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A study was made to identify the reasons for the apparent low uptake of Internet banking or e-banking in the Kingdom of Bahrain compared to other similar countries. It was found that perceptions of security or trust of the Internet banking system were a barrier across a wide demographic range of customers. After extensive consideration of biometric...

This document summarises my research and consultancy activity over a thirty year period in the top universities in the UK.

This is a Word version of the other list with a new thesis title added.

Energy efficiency is considered to be a key issue in designing WSN applications. Clustering has emerged as a useful mechanism for trade-off between certain design goal conflicts; the network life time, and the amount of data obtained. In addition, although clustering has shown greater advantage in utilising scarce energy resources, different sourc...

A study was made to identify the reasons for the apparent low uptake of Internet banking or e-banking in the Kingdom of Bahrain compared to other similar countries. It was found that perceptions of security or trust of the Internet banking system were a barrier across a wide demographic range of customers. After extensive consideration of biometric...

An in-depth investigation of Internet banking in Bahrain examined the factors affecting the adoption of this service through surveys and case studies involving both traditional and Islamic banking customers. It was found, in keeping with international literature, that there were five main factors affecting the uptake of Internet banking: lack of kn...

Cluster based routing protocols are widely used in sensor networks. The need to increase network life time or data throughput has led to the development of new protocols. This paper describes the combination of two novel protocols in an attempt to increase the network lifetime or data throughput as required by the network application

An incomplete list of PhD completions and thesis titles for research work directed by John Mellor. This list gives an overview of the research topics that have been actively supervised or directed by John Mellor and it gives the names of most of his PhD graduates, many of whom are now professors at universities around the world leading research gro...

Performance evaluation of Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) has been carried out to identify its limitations in high speed environment. This has been done by employing evasive and avoidance strategies simulating real-life normal and attack traffic flows on a sophisticated Test-Bench. Snort, an open source Intrusion Detection System, has be...

Handover management is one of the most critical issues that mobility management protocols are concerned with. This process becomes even more critical in the case of Micro-mobility where the Mobile host is expected to encounter frequent handovers. Several IP micro-mobility protocols have been proposed to enhance the performance of Mobile IP in an en...

Energy efficiency is considered to be a key issue in designing WSN applications. Clustering has emerged as a useful mechanism for trade-off between certain design goal conflicts; the network life time, and the amount of data obtained. In addition, although clustering has shown greater advantage in utilising scarce energy resources, different sourc...

FMIPv6 always fails to perform predictive handoff procedure and results in reactive handoff when integrated with the IEEE 802.11-based standard. It is because of the protocol nature of IEEE 802.11 and the weak relationship between IEEE 802.11 and FMIPv6. Furthermore, a Mobile Node (MN) can not receive packets destined to it as it sends the Fast Bin...

Cluster technology has witnessed a tremendous inception in computing world. The technique integrates the standard computing resources to generate more processing power and other hardware strengths. The collection of interconnected stand-alone computers ensures high availability, increased throughput, scalability and improved performance. We have de...

This research work has focussed on analysing the efficacy of the virtualization concept for Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) in the high-speed environment. We have selected an open source NIDS, Snort for evaluation. Snort has been evaluated on virtual systems built on Windows XP SP2, Linux 2.6 and Free BSD 7.1 platforms. Our results have...

Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) have gained substantial importance in today’s network security infrastructure. The performance of these devices in modern day traffic conditions is however found limited. It has been observed that the systems could hardly stand effective for the bandwidth of few hundred mega bits per second. Packet drop ha...

The virtualization concept was developed a few decades back to facilitate the sharing of expensive and robust main-frame hardware among different applications. In the current scenario, virtualization has gone through a conceptual transformation from cost effectiveness to resource sharing. The research community has found virtualization to be reliab...

This is an eGISE network article. It is motivated by a concern about the extent to which trust issues inhibit a citizen’s take-up of online public sector services or engagement with public decision and policy making. A citizen’s decision to use online systems is influenced by their willingness to trust the environment and agency involved. This proj...

With the growing demands for computer network communication, it becomes increasingly important to secure the data flow path. The existing research related to security mechanisms only focuses on securing the flow of information in the communication networks. There is a lack of work on improving the performance of networks to meet quality of service...

A number of transition mechanisms have been developed to support the interoperability between IPv4 and IPv6 during the time of migration from the existing IP version (IPv4) to the new IP version (IPv6). BDMS is one of the IPv4/IPv6 transition mechanisms that has been designed to enable IPv4-only hosts to communicate with IPv6-only hosts and vice ve...

The current research on privacy assurance in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) by pseudonym generation and network accountability through revocation has not achieved the desired results. Our research has identified the problems associated with the current techniques. We have revisited the pseudonym generation concept to address the privacy need of...

TCP (transmission control protocol) is one of the most used transport protocol in the Internet. Many widely used applications use TCP for sending data like the file transfer protocol (FTP), Telnet and Web-HTTP connections. TCP was found to be performing poorly over lossy links when transmission (non-congestion) errors existed. This is due to the fa...

The recent era has witnessed tremendous increase in the usage of computer network applications. Users of any type and requirement are compelled to be on a network. Today, the computer has become a network machine rather than a standalone system. This has generated challenges to the network security devices in terms of accuracy and reliability.Intru...

E-Learning is an emerging tool that uses advanced technology to provide training and development in higher education and within industry. Its rapid growth has been facilitated by the Internet and the massive opportunities in global education. The aim of this research is to gain an understanding of how NILE is used by tutors and students and how its...

There is a strong need for a new Internet Protocol to beused in the future networks rather than the existing Internet protocol (IPv4). So, IPv6 is coming with new features and improvements for the devices that will be connected to the network. Therefore, some transition mechanisms are required during the time of migration from IPv4 to IPv6 networks...

Unfortunately, IPv4 and IPv6 are incompatible with each other. So, a transition mechanism is required during the time of migration from IPv4 to IPv6 networks. Bi-directional mapping system (BDMS) is one of the mechanisms reported in the literature to perform IPv4/IPv6 conversion whereas the dual stack transition mechanism (DSTM) is designed to perf...

Frequent handoffs in mobile IP scheme increase latency and loss of packets. Hierarchical mobility management has been introduced to reduce the impact of mobility by handling local movements locally and hiding them from Home Agent. In this paper we propose a low Latency handoff scheme using location information that can reduce the handoff latency an...

A new Internet protocol (IPv6) is being deployed with new features and improvements for the devices that are connected to the network. Unfortunately, the current Internet Protocol (IPv4) and the new Internet Protocol (IPv6) are incompatible with each other. During the time of migration from IPv4 to IPv6 networks, when both versions are available an...

The wide spread acceptance of IEEE WLANs is a result of industrial standardization to ensure product compatibility and reliability among various manufacturers. Several WLANs solutions are available with varying characteristics and interoperability. The IEEE Standard 802.11 is one of the most widely adopted mechanisms for wireless LANs. It defines b...

With the wide-spreading use of e-transactions in enterprises, information security risk management (ISRM) is becoming essential for establishing a safe environment for their activities. This paper is concerned with introducing a new and comprehensive ISRM framework that enables the effective establishment of the target safe environment. The framewo...

Frequent handoffs in mobile IP scheme increase latency and loss of packets. Hierarchical mobility management has been introduced to reduce the impact of mobility by handling local movements locally and hiding them from Home Agent. In this paper we propose a low Latency handoff scheme using location information that can reduce the handoff latency an...

The need for security is obviously growing very fast with the dramatic development in computer network communication. It is a fact, that sending information over any public network can be exposed to possible unauthorized access or malicious attacks. It becomes increasingly important to secure the data flow path. IPSec is a suite of protocols that a...

Explicit Congestion Notifications are used to notify TCP when imminent congestion is about to happen. In this work we use this feature to design an error discriminator that can be added to a TCP sender to differentiate between congestion drops and drops because of wireless link failure. By distinguishing between error types, TCP can avoid unnecessa...

Handover management is one of the most critical issues that mobility management protocols are concerned with. This process becomes even more critical in the case of Micro-mobility where the Mobile host is expected to encounter frequent handovers. Several IP micro-mobility protocols have been proposed to enhance the performance of Mobile IP in an en...

Technology-enhanced or Computer Aided Learning (e-learning) can be institutionally integrated and supported by learning management systems or Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) to offer efficiency gains, effectiveness and scalability of the e-leaning paradigm. However this can only be achieved through integration of pedagogically intelligent appr...

There is an increase in the interaction of different organizations at the internal Intranet, business Extranet, and the public Internet level. The need to conduct business or exchange confidential information across heterogeneous networks raises the issue of com-pliance with international information security management standards. It is becoming of...

Executive Summary This is an eGISE network paper. It is motivated by a concern about the extent to which trust issues inhibit a citizen's take-up of online public sector services or engagement with public decision and policy making. A citizen's decision to use online systems is influenced by their willingness to trust the environment and agency inv...

Modeling and performance analysis of MAC protocols for WLANs have attracted lots of research efforts because they could help to discover the inherent cause of many problems, give insight into the parameter settings and may even suggest potential novel solutions. Although many analytical models for IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF)...

Distributed contention-based Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols are the fundamental components for IEEE 802.11 type Wireless LANs (WLAN). The deficiency of these types of MAC protocols mainly comes from the idle slots used to contend the channel and from the transmission collisions due to the same backoff slot value being generated. Assigning th...

The design of a network architecture that can efficiently integrate WLAN and cellular networks is a challenging task, particularly when the objective is to make the interoperation between the two networks as seamless and as efficient as possible. To provide end-to-end quality of service (QoS) support is one of the key stages towards such a goal. Du...

Providing a high bandwidth connection for end users anywhere and at anytime is the ultimate goal for the wireless community. Integrating different access technologies is a major step towards such a goal. In a companion paper [Wang et al., 2004], a generic reservation-based QoS framework has been proposed and discussed for integrated cellular and WL...

Voice over IP (VoIP) is a crucial service in the wireless local area network (WLAN) system. The primary medium access control (MAC) technique of the WLAN is IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF). Under the situations of various packet sizes, the deficiency of existing MAC protocols mainly comes from the idle slots used to contend the...

To provide end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) support for the integrated WLAN and cellular networks is a challenging task, due to the various constraints, such as the unbalanced capacity of two systems, handoff from users' mobility and unreliable wireless media. In this paper, we propose a generic reservation- based QoS model for the integrated ce...

The Trilogy project is a collaborative research project between the Universities of Durham and Strathclyde and Queen Mary College London. The project aims to demonstrate the feasibility of pooling the resources and expertise of research groups at the three institutions in a 'virtual laboratory'. The laboratory will be used to support research train...

Self-similar traffic models have been found to be more appropriate for the representation of bursty telecommunication traffic. The fractional Brownian motion (FBM) processes is one of the two most commonly used traffic models to interpret self-similarity. The discrete fractional Gaussian noise (dFGN) and random midpoint displacement (RMD) algorithm...

In a two-stage queueing network the state space is very large such that the exact analytic solution is very hard to obtain. The concept of the IPP overflow stream is a good method to decompose the two-cascade-stage network into two independent queueing systems. The transition matrix will reduce from the size with all the states in the state space o...

A large-scale, collaborative, industrial research project has recently implemented a state-of-the-art distributed platform to support the integration of supervisory control systems for the process and manufacturing industries. This platform is distinct in that its internals are entirely object based and provide a complete abstract specification for...

The need for high speed simulation to allow the modelling of broadband integrated services digital network systems has lead to the development of various parallel simulation engines which require synchronisation schemes. The fast rate of hardware and software developments, the mode of production of large systems and the need to compare synchronisat...

An array of transputers has been used as the simulation engine in the modelling of broadband ATM networks. A message passing system has been developed for the control and operation of the simulation. The proposed system, called ATM Network Emulator Simulator Hybrid System, can be used by network developers as a flexible verification tool for testin...

The paper presents a description of work in progress at the University of Durham, UK, on the performance evaluation of industrial data networks. Communications for CIM have aroused a great deal of interest in recent years, and there has been much speculation about the ideal strategy for industrial networking. Completely integrated approaches such a...

The design of a network architecture that efficiently integrates WLAN and cellular networks is a challenging task, particularly when the objective is to make the interoperation between the two networks as seamless and as efficient as possible. To provide end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) support is one of the key issues towards such a goal, due t...

In this paper we present a new TCP congestion window cut algorithm for transmission (non-congestion) errors. TCP cuts its congestion window to half after receiving 3 duplicate acknowledgments which decreases TCP performance unnecessar-ily if the drops were not an indication of congestion. Instead of cutting the congestion window after receiving 3 d...

In this paper we present a new TCP retransmission algorithm to recover from multiple non-congestion(transmission) packet drops from the same TCP window. This algorithm will help end-to-end error discriminators to improve TCP perfor-mance over lossy and heterogeneous networks. The simulation results shows that the proposed algorithm has increased TC...

with the increasing demand for computer communications the need for security is growing dramatically. The existing research related to security mechanisms focuses on security of the data transmission in the communication networks only. Our developed specific Secure Call admission control (SCAC) is a set of technologies and solutions to enforce secu...

Handover management is one of the most critical issues that mobility management protocols are concerned with. This process becomes even more critical in the case of Micro-mobility where the Mobile host is expected to encounter frequent handovers. Several IP micro-mobility protocols have been proposed to enhance the performance of Mobile IP in an en...

With the growing demands for computer network communication, it becomes increasingly important to secure the data flow path. IPSec is a suite of protocols that adds security to communications at the IP level. Protocols within the IPSec suite make extensive use of cryptographic algorithms. Since these algorithms are computationally sophisticated, so...

Widely accepted WLAN technology and the deploying UMTS system are two major wireless networks in the future. Much of interests have been involved in integrating these networks to take the advantage of both high data rate of WLAN and wide coverage area of cellular networks and supporting end to end QoS is an inevitable topic towards such a goal. In...

Handover management is one of the most critical issues that mobility management protocols are concerned with. This process becomes even more critical in the case of Micro-mobility where the Mobile host is expected to encounter frequent handovers. Several IP micro-mobility protocols have been proposed to enhance the performance of Mobile IP in an en...

Many previous attempts to improve TCP performance over lossy links especially error discriminators did not propose a comprehen-sive response in case of non-congestion drops. In this paper we propose a new algorithm to control TCP congestion window reaction to transmission (non-congestion) drops. This algorithm will be the first step for more compre...

Some of the promising End-To-End solutions to improve TCP performance over networks suffering from wireless transmission errors are error discriminators. An error discriminator is any technique that tries to differentiate between error types and deal with each type differently. By distinguishing between error types, TCP can avoid unnecessary cuts o...