Adil Al-Yasiri

Cloud Security Threats and Techniques to Strengthen Cloud Computing Adoption Framework

Cloud Computing allows firms to outsource their entire information technology IT process, allowing them to concentrate more on their core business to enhance their productivity and innovation in offering services to customers. It allows businesses to cut down heavy cost incurred over IT infrastructure without losing focus on customer needs. However, to a certain limit adopting Cloud computing has struggled to grow among many established and growing organizations due to several security and privacy related issues. Throughout the course of this study several interviews were conducted, with cloud developers and security experts, and the literature was reviewed. This study enabled us to understand, current and future, security and privacy challenges with cloud computing by providing suitable solutions to identified challenges. The outcome of this study led to identification of total 18, current and future, security issues affecting several attributes of cloud computing. In this process of identification, the author also found mitigation techniques to avert these security issues. A security guide is formulated which enables organizations to be aware of security challenges, vulnerabilities and techniques to evade them.

Data aggregation in wireless sensor networks using the SOAP protocol

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) offer an increasingly attractive method of data gathering in distributed system architectures and dynamic access via wireless connectivity. Wireless sensor networks have physical and resource limitations, this leads to increased complexity for application developers and often results in applications that are closely coupled with network protocols. In this paper, a data aggregation framework using SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) on wireless sensor networks is presented. The framework works as a middleware for aggregating data measured by a number of nodes within a network. The aim of the study is to assess the suitability of the protocol in such environments where resources are limited compared to traditional networks.

Framework for cloud computing adoption: A road map for Smes to cloud migration.

Small and Medium size Enterprises (SME) are considered as a backbone of many developing and developed economies of the world; they are the driving force to any major economy across the globe. Through Cloud Computing firms outsource their entire information technology (IT) process while concentrating more on their core business. It allows businesses to cut down heavy cost incurred over IT infrastructure without losing focus on customer needs. However, Cloud industry to an extent has struggled to grow among SMEs due to the reluctance and concerns expressed by them. Throughout the course of this study several interviews were conducted and the literature was reviewed to understand how cloud providers offer services and what challenges SMEs are facing. The study identified issues like cloud knowledge, interoperability, security and contractual concerns to be hindering SMEs adoption of cloud services. From the interviews common practices followed by cloud vendors and what concerns SMEs have were identified as a basis for a cloud framework which will bridge gaps between cloud vendors and SMEs. A stepwise framework for cloud adoption is formulated which identifies and provides recommendation to four most predominant challenges which are hurting cloud industry and taking SMEs away from cloud computing, as well as guide SMEs aiding in successful cloud adoption. Moreover, this framework streamlines the cloud adoption process for SMEs by removing ambiguity in regards to fundamentals associated with their organisation and cloud adoption process.

GECAF: a framework for developing context-aware pervasive systems

Context-aware systems differ in the way they interact with users, the way they interpret the context of their entities and the actions they take. Each system (or system type) is developed in its own way with no common architecture currently available. This fact makes the development of every context aware system a challenge. To address this issue, a generic and extensible framework is needed so that it can be used for developing various systems. This paper proposes a generic framework that uses the Pipe-and-Filter software architectural style, which is a well-known style, allowing developers to create new systems by arranging existing components into various arrangements to meet the system’s requirements. The paper also analyses the state of the art architectures to study their functionality and architectural organisation. The analysis was then used as a basis for comparing and evaluating the proposed framework.

MonSLAR: a middleware for monitoring SLA for RESTFUL services in cloud computing

Measuring the quality of cloud computing provision from the clients point of view is important in order to ensure that the service conforms to the level specified in the service level agreement (SLA). With a view to avoid SLA violation, the main parameters should be determined in the agreement and then used to evaluate the fulfillment of the SLA terms at the clients side. Current studies in cloud monitoring only handle monitoring the provider resources with little or no consideration to the clients side. This paper presents MonSLAR, a User-centric middleware for Monitoring SLA for Restful services in SaaS cloud computing environments. MonSLAR uses a distributed architecture that allows SLA parameters and the monitored data to be embedded in the requests and responses of the REST protocol.

Identifying Cloud Security Threats to Strengthen Cloud Computing Adoption Framework

Cloud Computing allows firms to outsource their entire information technology (IT) process, allowing them to concentrate more on their core business to enhance their productivity and innovation in offering services to customers. It allows businesses to cut down heavy cost incurred over IT infrastructure without losing focus on customer needs. However, to a certain limit adopting Cloud computing has struggled to grow among many established and growing organizations due to several security and privacy related issues. Throughout the course of this study several interviews were conducted, with cloud developers and security experts, and the literature was reviewed. This study enabled us to understand, current and future, security and privacy challenges with cloud computing. The outcome of this study led to identification of total 18, current and future, security issues affecting several attributes of cloud computing.

Formulating A Global Identifier Based on Actor Relationship for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) promising a new generation of services been offered to a human being through a world of interconnected objects (called “things”) that may use different communication technologies. Objects, in IoT, are seamlessly connected on its owner/user behalf. To offer services, the service providers need to truly identify the effective actor/user rather than the communicated devices. Currently, users have relationships with multiple objects that can also be used to determine their user. These relationships between actors are changeable or may even vanish; however, they are important to distinguish the actual requester of the service. Hence, it is important to consider them when identifying the effective actor of the communicated object. This paper models these relationships, representing them in a general form, and proposes a new semantic identifier format that allows service providers to identify the service requester identity across domains based on those relationships.

A New Processing Approach for Reducing Computational Complexity in Cloud-RAN Mobile Networks

Cloud computing is considered as one of the key drivers for the next generation of mobile networks (e.g., 5G). This is combined with the dramatic expansion in mobile networks, involving millions (or even billions) of subscribers with a greater number of current and future mobile applications (e.g., IoT). Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) architecture has been proposed as a novel concept to gain the benefits of cloud computing as an efficient computing resource, to meet the requirements of future cellular networks. However, the computational complexity of obtaining the channel state information in the full-centralized C-RAN increases as the size of the network is scaled up, as a result of enlargement in channel information matrices. To tackle this problem of complexity and latency, MapReduce framework and fast matrix algorithms are proposed. This paper presents two levels of complexity reduction in the process of estimating the channel information in cellular networks. The results illustrate that complexity can be minimized from O(N3) to O((N/k)3), where N is the total number of RRHs and k is the number of RRHs per group, by dividing the processing of RRHs into parallel groups and harnessing the MapReduce parallel algorithm in order to process them. The second approach reduces the computation complexity from O((N/k)3) to O((N/k)2.807) using the algorithms of fast matrix inversion. The reduction in complexity and latency leads to a significant improvement in both the estimation time and in the scalability of C-RAN networks.

Scalable Processing in 5G Cloud-RAN Networks Using MapReduce Framework

Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) was introduced as a revolutionary architecture to meet the exponential expansion in data traffic for the current and future mobile networks. However, the centralized configuration of C-RAN brings many challenges. One of the key questions to address is how the channel state information (CSI) is acquired accurately in C-RAN for numerous access points and users. For the purpose of reducing the time of acquiring CSI in C-RAN, the MapReduce framework is proposed in this paper as a novel approach to minimize the overhead of acquiring CSI in the full centralized C-RAN architecture. The main contribution of this paper is employing parallel processing to improve the scalability of mobile networks using C-RAN. The results, which have been obtained through simulation, illustrate that it can maintain the scalability as well as save a significant amount of acquisition time without affecting the performance of network.

An approach for energy efficient service oriented architecture for sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks offer an increasingly attractive method for data gathering in distributed system architectures and dynamic access via wireless connectivity. However, wireless sensor networks have limitations with respect to resources and energy consumption, which lead to increased complexity for application developers and often results in applications that are closely coupled with network protocols. One solution for de-coupling applications from the underlying protocols is to use a service-oriented Middleware. However, the limitations make the use of such an approach a challenge due to the overhead of the SOAP protocol. This overhead becomes more significant if the size of the transmitted data is small in comparison to the tagging text, causing nodes with limited power to waste valuable energy. In this paper we discuss the overhead issues associated with using SOAP in wireless sensor networks. We then present two methods for minimizing the effect of the overhead to help in the design of efficient service oriented architectures. Our study shows significant savings in transmission time and message size may be achieved which may be as high as 60% of transmission time or 75% of size in special situations.