• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.193-212
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• 2009

The resilience of a city confronted with a terrorist bomb attack is the background of the paper. The resilience strongly depends on vital infrastructure and the physical protection of people. The protection buildings provide in case of an external explosion is one of the important elements in safety assessment. Besides the aspect of protection, buildings facilitate and enable many functions, e.g., offices, data storage, -handling and -transfer, energy supply, banks, shopping malls etc. When a building is damaged, the loss of functions is directly related to the location, amount of damage and the damage level. At TNO Defence, Security and Safety methods are developed to quantify the resilience of city infrastructure systems (Weerheijm et al. 2007b). In this framework, the dynamic response, damage levels and residual bearing capacity of multi-storey RC buildings is studied. The current paper addresses the aspects of dynamic response and progressive collapse, as well as the proposed method to relate the structural damage to a volume-damage parameter, which can be linked to the loss of functionality. After a general introduction to the research programme and progressive collapse, the study of the dynamic response and damage due to blast loading for a single RC element is described. Shock tube experiments on plates are used as a reference to study the possibilities of engineering methods and an explicit finite element code to quantify the response and residual bearing capacity. Next the dynamic response and progressive collapse of a multi storey RC building is studied numerically, using a number of models. Conclusions are drawn on the ability to predict initial blast damage and progressive collapse. Finally the link between the structural damage of a building and its loss of functionality is described, which is essential input for the envisaged method to quantify the resilience of city infrastructure.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.13 no.5
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• pp.518-524
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• 2011

A high assurance IP encryption (HAIPE) compliant protocol accelerator is proposed for military networks consisting of red (or classified) networks and black (or unclassified) networks. The boundary between red and black sides is assumed to be protected via a HAIPE device. However, the IP layer encryption introduces challenges for bandwidth on demand satellite communication. The problems experienced by transmission control protocol (TCP) over satellites are well understood: While standard modems (on the black side) employ TCP performance enhancing proxy (PEP) which has been shown to work well, the HAIPE encryption of TCP headers renders the onboard modem's PEP ineffective. This is attributed to the fact that under the bandwidth-on-demand environment, PEP must use traditional TCP mechanisms such as slow start to probe for the available bandwidth of the link (which eliminates the usefulness of the PEP). Most implementations recommend disabling the PEP when a HAIPE device is used. In this paper, we propose a novel solution, namely broadband HAIPE-embeddable satellite communications terminal (BHeST), which utilizes dynamic network performance enhancement algorithms for high latency bandwidth-on-demand satellite links protected by HAIPE. By moving the PEP into the red network and exploiting the explicit congestion notification bypass mechanism allowed by the latest HAIPE standard, we have been able to regain PEP's desired network enhancement that was lost due to HAIPE encryption (even though the idea of deploying PEP at the modem side is not new). Our BHeST solution employs direct video broadcast-return channel service (DVB-RCS), an open standard as a means of providing bandwidth-on-demand satellite links. Another issue we address is the estimation of current satellite bandwidth allocated to a remote terminal which is not available in DVBRCS. Simulation results show that the improvement of our solution over FIX PEP is significant and could reach up to 100%. The improvement over the original TCP is even more (up to 500% for certain configurations).