Cloud computing is a significant shift of computational paradigm where computing as a utility and storing data remotely have a great potential. Enterprise and businesses are now more interested in outsourcing their data to the cloud to lessen the burden of local data storage and maintenance. However, the outsourced data and the computation outcomes are not continuously trustworthy due to the lack of control and physical possession of the data owners. To better streamline this issue, researchers have now focused on designing remote data auditing (RDA) techniques. The majority of these techniques, however, are only applicable for static archive data and are not subject to audit the dynamically updated outsourced data. We propose an effectual RDA technique based on algebraic signature properties for cloud storage system and also present a new data structure capable of efficiently supporting dynamic data operations like append, insert, modify, and delete. Moreover, this data structure empowers our method to be applicable for large-scale data with minimum computation cost. The comparative analysis with the state-of-the-art RDA schemes shows that the proposed scheme is secure and highly efficient in terms of the computation and communication overhead on the auditor and server.
Cloud computing is currently emerging as an ever-changing, growing paradigm that models "everything-as-a-service." Virtualised physical resources, infrastructure, and applications are supplied by service provisioning in the cloud. The evolution in the adoption of cloud computing is driven by clear and distinct promising features for both cloud users and cloud providers. However, the increasing number of cloud providers and the variety of service offerings have made it difficult for the customers to choose the best services. By employing successful service provisioning, the essential services required by customers, such as agility and availability, pricing, security and trust, and user metrics can be guaranteed by service provisioning. Hence, continuous service provisioning that satisfies the user requirements is a mandatory feature for the cloud user and vitally important in cloud computing service offerings. Therefore, we aim to review the state-of-the-art service provisioning objectives, essential services, topologies, user requirements, necessary metrics, and pricing mechanisms. We synthesize and summarize different provision techniques, approaches, and models through a comprehensive literature review. A thematic taxonomy of cloud service provisioning is presented after the systematic review. Finally, future research directions and open research issues are identified.
Social media has taken an important place in the routine life of people. Every single second, users from all over the world are sharing interests, emotions, and other useful information that leads to the generation of huge volumes of user-generated data. Profiling users by extracting attribute information from social media data has been gaining importance with the increasing user-generated content over social media platforms. Meeting the user's satisfaction level for information collection is becoming more challenging and difficult. This is because of too much noise generated, which affects the process of information collection due to explosively increasing online data. Social profiling is an emerging approach to overcome the challenges faced in meeting user's demands by introducing the concept of personalized search while keeping in consideration user profiles generated using social network data. This study reviews and classifies research inferring users social profile attributes from social media data as individual and group profiling. The existing techniques along with utilized data sources, the limitations, and challenges are highlighted. The prominent approaches adopted include Machine Learning, Ontology, and Fuzzy logic. Social media data from Twitter and Facebook have been used by most of the studies to infer the social attributes of users. The studies show that user social attributes, including age, gender, home location, wellness, emotion, opinion, relation, influence, and so on, still need to be explored. This review gives researchers insights of the current state of literature and challenges for inferring user profile attributes using social media data.
Travel time prediction is essential to intelligent transportation systems directly affecting smart cities and autonomous vehicles. Accurately predicting traffic based on heterogeneous factors is highly beneficial but remains a challenging problem. The literature shows significant performance improvements when traditional machine learning and deep learning models are combined using an ensemble learning approach. This research mainly contributes by proposing an ensemble learning model based on hybridized feature spaces obtained from a bidirectional long short-term memory module and a bidirectional gated recurrent unit, followed by support vector regression to produce the final travel time prediction. The proposed approach consists of three stages-initially, six state-of-the-art deep learning models are applied to traffic data obtained from sensors. Then the feature spaces and decision scores (outputs) of the model with the highest performance are fused to obtain hybridized deep feature spaces. Finally, a support vector regressor is applied to the hybridized feature spaces to get the final travel time prediction. The performance of our proposed heterogeneous ensemble using test data showed significant improvements compared to the baseline techniques in terms of the root mean square error (53.87±3.50), mean absolute error (12.22±1.35) and the coefficient of determination (0.99784±0.00019). The results demonstrated that the hybridized deep feature space concept could produce more stable and superior results than the other baseline techniques.
Because mobile technology and the widespread usage of mobile devices have swiftly and radically evolved, several training centers have started to offer mobile training (m-training) via mobile devices. Thus, designing suitable m-training course content for training employees via mobile device applications has become an important professional development issue to allow employees to obtain knowledge and improve their skills in the rapidly changing mobile environment. Previous studies have identified challenges in this domain. One important challenge is that no solid theoretical framework serves as a foundation to provide instructional design guidelines for interactive m-training course content that motivates and attracts trainees to the training process via mobile devices. This study proposes a framework for designing interactive m-training course content using mobile augmented reality (MAR). A mixed-methods approach was adopted. Key elements were extracted from the literature to create an initial framework. Then, the framework was validated by interviewing experts, and it was tested by trainees. This integration led us to evaluate and prove the validity of the proposed framework. The framework follows a systematic approach guided by six key elements and offers a clear instructional design guideline checklist to ensure the design quality of interactive m-training course content. This study contributes to the knowledge by establishing a framework as a theoretical foundation for designing interactive m-training course content. Additionally, it supports the m-training domain by assisting trainers and designers in creating interactive m-training courses to train employees, thus increasing their engagement in m-training. Recommendations for future studies are proposed.
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are ubiquitous and pervasive, and therefore; highly susceptible to a number of security attacks. Denial of Service (DoS) attack is considered the most dominant and a major threat to WSNs. Moreover, the wormhole attack represents one of the potential forms of the Denial of Service (DoS) attack. Besides, crafting the wormhole attack is comparatively simple; though, its detection is nontrivial. On the contrary, the extant wormhole defense methods need both specialized hardware and strong assumptions to defend against static and dynamic wormhole attack. The ensuing paper introduces a novel scheme to detect wormhole attacks in a geographic routing protocol (DWGRP). The main contribution of this paper is to detect malicious nodes and select the best and the most reliable neighbors based on pairwise key pre-distribution technique and the beacon packet. Moreover, this novel technique is not subject to any specific assumption, requirement, or specialized hardware, such as a precise synchronized clock. The proposed detection method is validated by comparisons with several related techniques in the literature, such as Received Signal Strength (RSS), Authentication of Nodes Scheme (ANS), Wormhole Detection uses Hound Packet (WHOP), and Wormhole Detection with Neighborhood Information (WDI) using the NS-2 simulator. The analysis of the simulations shows promising results with low False Detection Rate (FDR) in the geographic routing protocols.
Big Data has gained much attention from the academia and the IT industry. In the digital and computing world, information is generated and collected at a rate that rapidly exceeds the boundary range. Currently, over 2 billion people worldwide are connected to the Internet, and over 5 billion individuals own mobile phones. By 2020, 50 billion devices are expected to be connected to the Internet. At this point, predicted data production will be 44 times greater than that in 2009. As information is transferred and shared at light speed on optic fiber and wireless networks, the volume of data and the speed of market growth increase. However, the fast growth rate of such large data generates numerous challenges, such as the rapid growth of data, transfer speed, diverse data, and security. Nonetheless, Big Data is still in its infancy stage, and the domain has not been reviewed in general. Hence, this study comprehensively surveys and classifies the various attributes of Big Data, including its nature, definitions, rapid growth rate, volume, management, analysis, and security. This study also proposes a data life cycle that uses the technologies and terminologies of Big Data. Future research directions in this field are determined based on opportunities and several open issues in Big Data domination. These research directions facilitate the exploration of the domain and the development of optimal techniques to address Big Data.
The latest developments in mobile computing technology have enabled intensive applications on the modern Smartphones. However, such applications are still constrained by limitations in processing potentials, storage capacity and battery lifetime of the Smart Mobile Devices (SMDs). Therefore, Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) leverages the application processing services of computational clouds for mitigating resources limitations in SMDs. Currently, a number of computational offloading frameworks are proposed for MCC wherein the intensive components of the application are outsourced to computational clouds. Nevertheless, such frameworks focus on runtime partitioning of the application for computational offloading, which is time consuming and resources intensive. The resource constraint nature of SMDs require lightweight procedures for leveraging computational clouds. Therefore, this paper presents a lightweight framework which focuses on minimizing additional resources utilization in computational offloading for MCC. The framework employs features of centralized monitoring, high availability and on demand access services of computational clouds for computational offloading. As a result, the turnaround time and execution cost of the application are reduced. The framework is evaluated by testing prototype application in the real MCC environment. The lightweight nature of the proposed framework is validated by employing computational offloading for the proposed framework and the latest existing frameworks. Analysis shows that by employing the proposed framework for computational offloading, the size of data transmission is reduced by 91%, energy consumption cost is minimized by 81% and turnaround time of the application is decreased by 83.5% as compared to the existing offloading frameworks. Hence, the proposed framework minimizes additional resources utilization and therefore offers lightweight solution for computational offloading in MCC.
Network forensics enables investigation and identification of network attacks through the retrieved digital content. The proliferation of smartphones and the cost-effective universal data access through cloud has made Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) a congenital target for network attacks. However, confines in carrying out forensics in MCC is interrelated with the autonomous cloud hosting companies and their policies for restricted access to the digital content in the back-end cloud platforms. It implies that existing Network Forensic Frameworks (NFFs) have limited impact in the MCC paradigm. To this end, we qualitatively analyze the adaptability of existing NFFs when applied to the MCC. Explicitly, the fundamental mechanisms of NFFs are highlighted and then analyzed using the most relevant parameters. A classification is proposed to help understand the anatomy of existing NFFs. Subsequently, a comparison is given that explores the functional similarities and deviations among NFFs. The paper concludes by discussing research challenges for progressive network forensics in MCC.
Cloud computing (CC) has recently been receiving tremendous attention from the IT industry and academic researchers. CC leverages its unique services to cloud customers in a pay-as-you-go, anytime, anywhere manner. Cloud services provide dynamically scalable services through the Internet on demand. Therefore, service provisioning plays a key role in CC. The cloud customer must be able to select appropriate services according to his or her needs. Several approaches have been proposed to solve the service selection problem, including multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA). MCDA enables the user to choose from among a number of available choices. In this paper, we analyze the application of MCDA to service selection in CC. We identify and synthesize several MCDA techniques and provide a comprehensive analysis of this technology for general readers. In addition, we present a taxonomy derived from a survey of the current literature. Finally, we highlight several state-of-the-art practical aspects of MCDA implementation in cloud computing service selection. The contributions of this study are four-fold: (a) focusing on the state-of-the-art MCDA techniques, (b) highlighting the comparative analysis and suitability of several MCDA methods, (c) presenting a taxonomy through extensive literature review, and (d) analyzing and summarizing the cloud computing service selections in different scenarios.
In this study the environmental impact of consolidated rice farms (CF) - farms which have been integrated to increase the mechanization index - and traditional farms (TF) - small farms with lower mechanization index - in Guilan Province, Iran, were evaluated and compared using Life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology and adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS). Foreground data were collected from farmers using face-to-face questionnaires and background information about production process and inventory data was taken from the EcoInvent®2.0 database. The system boundary was confined to within the farm gate (cradle to farm gate) and two functional units (land and mass based) were chosen. The study also included a comparison of the input-output energy flows of the farms. The results revealed that the average amount of energy consumed by the CFs was 57 GJ compared to 74.2 GJ for the TFs. The energy ratios for CFs and TFs were 1.6 and 0.9, respectively. The LCA results indicated that CFs produced fewer environmental burdens per ton of produced rice. When compared according to the land-based FU the same results were obtained. This indicates that the differences between the two types of farms were not caused by a difference in their production level, but rather by improved management on the CFs. The analysis also showed that electricity accounted for the greatest share of the impact for both types of farms, followed by P-based and N-based chemical fertilizers. These findings suggest that the CFs had superior overall environmental performance compared to the TFs in the study area. The performance metrics of the model based on ANFIS show that it can be used to predict the environmental burdens of rice production with high accuracy and minimal error.
This paper presents the Hybrid Scalable-Minimized-Butterfly-Fat-Tree (H-SMBFT) topology for on-chip communication. Main aspects of this work are the description of the architectural design and the characteristics as well as a comparative analysis against two established indirect topologies namely Butterfly-Fat-Tree (BFT) and Scalable-Minimized-Butterfly-Fat-Tree (SMBFT). Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed topology outperforms its predecessors in terms of performance, area and power dissipation. Specifically, it improves the link interconnectivity between routing levels, such that the number of required links isreduced. This results into reduced router complexity and shortened routing paths between any pair of communicating nodes in the network. Moreover, simulation results under synthetic as well as real-world embedded applications workloads reveal that H-SMBFT can reduce the average latency by up-to35.63% and 17.36% compared to BFT and SMBFT, respectively. In addition, the power dissipation of the network can be reduced by up-to33.82% and 19.45%, while energy consumption can be improved byup-to32.91% and 16.83% compared to BFT and SMBFT, respectively.
The domain of underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) had received a lot of attention recently due to its significant advanced capabilities in the ocean surveillance, marine monitoring and application deployment for detecting underwater targets. However, the literature have not compiled the state-of-the-art along its direction to discover the recent advancements which were fuelled by the underwater sensor technologies. Hence, this paper offers the newest analysis on the available evidences by reviewing studies in the past five years on various aspects that support network activities and applications in UWSN environments. This work was motivated by the need for robust and flexible solutions that can satisfy the requirements for the rapid development of the underwater wireless sensor networks. This paper identifies the key requirements for achieving essential services as well as common platforms for UWSN. It also contributes a taxonomy of the critical elements in UWSNs by devising a classification on architectural elements, communications, routing protocol and standards, security, and applications of UWSNs. Finally, the major challenges that remain open are presented as a guide for future research directions.
A wireless sensor network (WSN) comprises small sensor nodes with limited energy capabilities. The power constraints of WSNs necessitate efficient energy utilization to extend the overall network lifetime of these networks. We propose a distance-based and low-energy adaptive clustering (DISCPLN) protocol to streamline the green issue of efficient energy utilization in WSNs. We also enhance our proposed protocol into the multi-hop-DISCPLN protocol to increase the lifetime of the network in terms of high throughput with minimum delay time and packet loss. We also propose the mobile-DISCPLN protocol to maintain the stability of the network. The modelling and comparison of these protocols with their corresponding benchmarks exhibit promising results.
Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging promising paradigm for network management because of its centralized network intelligence. However, the centralized control architecture of the software-defined networks (SDNs) brings novel challenges of reliability, scalability, fault tolerance and interoperability. In this paper, we proposed a novel clustered distributed controller architecture in the real setting of SDNs. The distributed cluster implementation comprises of multiple popular SDN controllers. The proposed mechanism is evaluated using a real world network topology running on top of an emulated SDN environment. The result shows that the proposed distributed controller clustering mechanism is able to significantly reduce the average latency from 8.1% to 1.6%, the packet loss from 5.22% to 4.15%, compared to distributed controller without clustering running on HP Virtual Application Network (VAN) SDN and Open Network Operating System (ONOS) controllers respectively. Moreover, proposed method also shows reasonable CPU utilization results. Furthermore, the proposed mechanism makes possible to handle unexpected load fluctuations while maintaining a continuous network operation, even when there is a controller failure. The paper is a potential contribution stepping towards addressing the issues of reliability, scalability, fault tolerance, and inter-operability.
Effective communication in vehicular networks depends on the scheduling of wireless channel resources. There are two types of channel resource scheduling in Release 14 of the 3GPP, i.e., (1) controlled by eNodeB and (2) a distributed scheduling carried out by every vehicle, known as Autonomous Resource Selection (ARS). The most suitable resource scheduling for vehicle safety applications is the ARS mechanism. ARS includes (a) counter selection (i.e., specifying the number of subsequent transmissions) and (b) resource reselection (specifying the reuse of the same resource after counter expiry). ARS is a decentralized approach for resource selection. Therefore, resource collisions can occur during the initial selection, where multiple vehicles might select the same resource, hence resulting in packet loss. ARS is not adaptive towards vehicle density and employs a uniform random selection probability approach for counter selection and reselection. As a result, it can prevent some vehicles from transmitting in a congested vehicular network. To this end, the paper presents Truly Autonomous Resource Selection (TARS) for vehicular networks. TARS considers resource allocation as a problem of locally detecting the selected resources at neighbor vehicles to avoid resource collisions. The paper also models the behavior of counter selection and resource block reselection on resource collisions using the Discrete Time Markov Chain (DTMC). Observation of the model is used to propose a fair policy of counter selection and resource reselection in ARS. The simulation of the proposed TARS mechanism showed better performance in terms of resource collision probability and the packet delivery ratio when compared with the LTE Mode 4 standard and with a competing approach proposed by Jianhua He et al.
Currently, many deep learning models are being used to classify COVID-19 and normal cases from chest X-rays. However, the available data (X-rays) for COVID-19 is limited to train a robust deep-learning model. Researchers have used data augmentation techniques to tackle this issue by increasing the numbers of samples through flipping, translation, and rotation. However, by adopting this strategy, the model compromises for the learning of high-dimensional features for a given problem. Hence, there are high chances of overfitting. In this paper, we used deep-convolutional generative adversarial networks algorithm to address this issue, which generates synthetic images for all the classes (Normal, Pneumonia, and COVID-19). To validate whether the generated images are accurate, we used the k-mean clustering technique with three clusters (Normal, Pneumonia, and COVID-19). We only selected the X-ray images classified in the correct clusters for training. In this way, we formed a synthetic dataset with three classes. The generated dataset was then fed to The EfficientNetB4 for training. The experiments achieved promising results of 95% in terms of area under the curve (AUC). To validate that our network has learned discriminated features associated with lung in the X-rays, we used the Grad-CAM technique to visualize the underlying pattern, which leads the network to its final decision.
The exponentially growing concern of cyber-attacks on extremely dense underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) and the evolution of UWSNs digital threat landscape has brought novel research challenges and issues. Primarily, varied protocol evaluation under advanced persistent threats is now becoming indispensable yet very challenging. This research implements an active attack in the Adaptive Mobility of Courier Nodes in Threshold-optimized Depth-based Routing (AMCTD) protocol. A variety of attacker nodes were employed in diverse scenarios to thoroughly assess the performance of AMCTD protocol. The protocol was exhaustively evaluated both with and without active attacks with benchmark evaluation metrics such as end-to-end delay, throughput, transmission loss, number of active nodes and energy tax. The preliminary research findings show that active attack drastically lowers the AMCTD protocol's performance (i.e., active attack reduces the number of active nodes by up to 10%, reduces throughput by up to 6%, increases transmission loss by 7%, raises energy tax by 25%, and increases end-to-end delay by 20%).
Multivariate data sets are common in various application areas, such as wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and DNA analysis. A robust mechanism is required to compute their similarity indexes regardless of the environment and problem domain. This study describes the usefulness of a non-metric-based approach (i.e., longest common subsequence) in computing similarity indexes. Several non-metric-based algorithms are available in the literature, the most robust and reliable one is the dynamic programming-based technique. However, dynamic programming-based techniques are considered inefficient, particularly in the context of multivariate data sets. Furthermore, the classical approaches are not powerful enough in scenarios with multivariate data sets, sensor data or when the similarity indexes are extremely high or low. To address this issue, we propose an efficient algorithm to measure the similarity indexes of multivariate data sets using a non-metric-based methodology. The proposed algorithm performs exceptionally well on numerous multivariate data sets compared with the classical dynamic programming-based algorithms. The performance of the algorithms is evaluated on the basis of several benchmark data sets and a dynamic multivariate data set, which is obtained from a WSN deployed in the Ghulam Ishaq Khan (GIK) Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology. Our evaluation suggests that the proposed algorithm can be approximately 39.9% more efficient than its counterparts for various data sets in terms of computational time.