Ahmed Shawish

Cloud Computing: Paradigms and Technologies

Cloud Computing has recently emerged as a compelling paradigm for managing and delivering services over the internet. It is rapidly changing the landscape of information technology, and ultimately turning the long-held promise of utility computing into a reality. With such speedy progressing and emerging, it becomes crucial to understand all aspects about this technology. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview on the Cloud’s anatomy, definition, characteristic, affects, architecture, and core technology. It clearly classifies the Cloud’s deployment and service models, providing a full description of the Cloud services vendors. The chapter also addresses the customer-related aspects such as the Service Level Agreement, service cost, and security issues. Finally, it covers detailed comparisons between the Cloud Computing paradigm and other existing ones in addition to its significant challenges. By that, the chapter provides a complete overview on the Cloud Computing and paves the way for further research in this area.

Integrated QoS Utility-Based Model for Cloud Computing Service Provider Selection

Cloud Computing is gaining a considerable attention in the past few years. It changes the way people acquire software and hardware as it provides them as services through internet on-demand following a pay-as-you-go financial model. With the exponential increase of such service, selecting the optimal provider based on predefined Quality of Service (QoS) requirements becomes crucial. The current techniques are just designed for performance evaluation and cost-benefit analysis; yet optimal service provider selection based on a group of QoS requirements is still uncovered as it should be. In this paper we propose a mathematical model addressing the Cloud service provider selection optimization problem based on QoS guarantees. The proposed model efficiently matches with the characteristics of market-oriented platforms covering a wide range of service provider selection problems. The efficiency of the proposed model is validated through simulation studies.

A QoS-Oriented Inter-cloud Federation Framework

Cloud federation allows individual cloud providers dynamically collaborate to offer services to their end-users with the Quality of Service (QoS) targets agreed in the Service Level Agreements (SLA). However, the current federated cloud models are not QoS-oriented or SLA-aware. This paper proposes a QoS-oriented federated cloud computing framework where multiple independent cloud providers can cooperate seamlessly to provide scalable QoS-assured services and discusses a high level architecture of the federation components. The distinct features of the proposed federation framework is its QoS-orientation that can trigger the on-demand resource provisioning across multiple providers, hence helping to maximize QoS targets and resources usage, eliminate SLA violations and enhance SLA formalization.

DNA-based cryptographic methods for data hiding in DNA media

Information security can be achieved using cryptography, steganography or a combination of them, where data is firstly encrypted using any of the available cryptography techniques and then hid into any hiding medium. Recently, the famous genomic DNA has been introduced as a hiding medium, known as DNA steganography, due to its notable ability to hide huge data sets with a high level of randomness and hence security. Despite the numerous cryptography techniques, to our knowledge only the vigenere cipher and the DNA-based playfair cipher have been combined with the DNA steganography, which keeps space for investigation of other techniques and coming up with new improvements. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis between the DNA-based playfair, vigenere, RSA and the AES ciphers, each combined with a DNA hiding technique. The conducted analysis reports the performance diversity of each combined technique in terms of security, speed, hiding capacity in addition to both key size and data size. Moreover, this paper proposes a modification of the current combined DNA-based playfair cipher technique, which makes it not only simple and fast but also provides a significantly higher hiding capacity and security. The conducted extensive experimental studies confirm such outstanding performance in comparison with all the discussed combined techniques.

An Enhanced DNA-based Steganography Technique with a Higher Hiding Capacity

DNA-based Steganography is one of the promising techniques to secure data exchange, where data is hidden into a real DNA sequence. For the sake of security, some steganography techniques encrypt data before hiding it which strengthen the technique’s steganalysis. One of the widely used encryption techniques is the DNAbased playfair cipher. This technique intensively requires a long list of preprocessing steps in addition to extra bits which must be added to guarantee successful decryption. Nevertheless, the succeeding hiding step suffers from a limited capacity, which turns this current DNA-based Steganography technique into a complex, inefficient, and time consuming process. In this paper, we propose a new DNA-based Steganography algorithm to simplify the current technique as well as achieve higher hiding capacity. In the proposed algorithm, we enhance the commonly used playfair cipher by defining a novel short sequence of preprocessing steps and getting rid of the extra overhead bits. We also utilize a more efficient technique to enhance the hiding phase. The proposed approach is not only simple and fast but also provides a significantly higher hiding capacity with a high security. The conducted extensive experimental studies confirm the outstanding performance of the proposed algorithm.

MCACC: New approach for augmenting the computing capabilities of mobile devices with Cloud Computing

Smartphones are becoming increasingly popular with a wide range of capabilities for the purpose of handling heavy applications like gaming, video editing, and face recognition etc. These kinds of applications continuously require intensive computational power, memory, and battery. Many of the early techniques solve this problem by offloading these applications to run on the Cloud due to its famous resources availability. Later, enhanced techniques choosed to offload part of the applications while leaving the rest to be processed on the smartphone based on one or two metrics like power and CPU consumption without any consideration to the communication and network overhead. With the notable development of the smartphones hardware, it becomes crucial to develop a smarter offloading framework that is able to efficiently utilize the available smartphones resources and only offload when necessary based on real-time decision metrics. This paper proposed such framework, which we called Mobile Capabilities Augmentation using Cloud Computing (MCACC). In this framework, any mobile application is divided into a group of services, and then each of them is either executed locally on the mobile or remotely on the Cloud based a novel dynamic offloading decision model. Here, the decision is based on five realtime metrics: total execution time, energy consumption, remaining battery, memory and security. The extensive simulation studies show that both heavy and light applications can benefit from our proposed model while saving energy and improving performance compare to previous techniques. The proposed MCACC turns the smartphones to be more smarter as the offloading decision is taken without any user interaction.

A Generic Framework for Modeling and Simulation of Cloud Computing Services

Cloud Computing is a paradigm in which tasks are assigned to a combination of computing resources, software and services accessed over a network following the pay-as–you-go financial model. It has been also described as on-demand computing. With the continuous increases of cloud service providers, it becomes crucial to develop a simulation tool to reflect the properties of such complex environment to help clients selecting the appropriate providers. Available Cloudbased tools are designed for cloud architectures and resources scheduling, not the problem of provider selection. Even the Grid-based tools who share many features with the Cloud cannot cope with such problem due to the novel characteristics and services of the Cloud. This paper provides a new simulation tool that reflects the nature of clouds embedding all its aspects, as well as its QoS parameters. Such tool is designed to simulate any framework or solution for service provider selection problem. The proposed simulation tool is validated by running a framework developed for service provider selection problem based on QoS and utility functions. The paper also reviews various mathematical approaches that have been used to model cloud services, where most of them are formulations of cloud services that aim to optimize its quality of service, performance or energy efficiency under given constraints.

Libraries: From the Classical to Cloud-Based Era

A Library is an organized collection of resources made accessible to a defined community for reference or borrowing. It provides physical or digital access to material, and may be a physical building, or a virtual space, or both. During the last decays, the Libraries had witnessed a continuous revolution and still do. This paper reviews the main milestone of such revolution starting from the classical up to the current Cloud-based era passing by the intermediate digital transformation period. It reviews the library types, services, problems and drive of changes from the classical form. The paper then tackles the transformation of the library to the digital form. It discusses the characteristics of the digital library, the web-based library, and the library 2.0 through their advantages and limitations. The paper finally focuses on the current Cloud-based ear, where most of the library cloud platforms, services management, innovative products and opened environments are addressed through their features, add values, pros and cons. The paper also provides a comparative study on such solutions coming up with opened research issues. Hereby, the paper provides a comprehensive overview on the development of the library till now.

A Novel Computer Vision Methodology for Intelligent Molecular Modeling and Simulation

Molecular modeling and simulation tools are used to study the structure of the molecules for the purpose of understanding and creating a new generation of technology that works on the nano-scale. The current techniques mainly focus on visualizing the molecule’s structure using many illustrative methods, while they leave the knowledge extraction load on the user that should be aware of many complex sciences. Developing a new innovative method in this perspective becomes crucial to support such fast development in such vital field of sciences. This paper represents a novel computer vision method for molecular modeling and simulation that gives the computer the ability to see and understand the structure of molecules just like the human eyes, and also the ability to analyze its structure without human intervention. The proposed approach is based on using the computer’s memory as a digital representation of the real 3D-physical scaled model of the molecule, and hence accommodates machine learning techniques for an automated analysis job. Moreover, a parallel processing approach has been adopted to speed up the whole process. The realistic case study of a glucose molecule reports the outstanding performance of the proposed approach to model and analyze its structure without human intervention. The proposed methodology makes the developing of an automated molecular expert system a one step away.

A Novel Mobile-Cloud based Healthcare Framework for Diabetes

Healthcare is one of the most important sectors in all countries; consuming an average of 9.5% of their domestic product. Among the widely spread endemic diseases, Diabetes is particularly a non-cured one that consumes medical resources, follow-up efforts, regular set of diverse checkups, continual needs for physicians and medical supplies. The current advanced healthcare systems succeeded to be a reservoir of healthcare records focussing on emergency and medical imaging only. At the same time, most of the currently deployed systems cannot provide a daily follow up to patients as well as not being able to help governments to smartly allocate their medical resources. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive framework that incorporates Mobile and Cloud computing with data mining techniques to efficiently provide a real-time smart healthcare framework for Diabetes. Mobile application is emerged as a widely deployed communication tool between the patients and the proposed system hosted on the Cloud. The Cloud is incorporated to accommodate the system due to its known features that makes it possible to acquire continually fresh data from the field. The data is then processed through smart data mining techniques to extract knowledge and draw conclusions for governments. As discussed in the paper, the proposed framework promises a significant enhancement in the resources allocation and utilization, as well as provides a faster emergency response. The proposed architecture has been simulated using Junosphere, a cloud simulator, and it could represent a significant step towards future smart healthcare systems specialized to cover other endemic diseases.