Arafatur Rahman

SHERPA: An Air-Ground Wireless Network for Communicating Human and Robots to Improve the Rescuing Activities in Alpine Environments

Robot-based rescue systems are envisioned now-a-days as a promising solution for saving human lives after the avalanche accidents in alpine environments. To this aim, a European project named “Smart collaboration between Humans and ground-aErial Robots for imProving rescuing activities in Alpine environments (SHERPA)” has been launched. Robots with smart sensors and mobility feature are needed for achieving the goal of this project, therefore, the SHERPA networks need to consider two degrees of freedom: one is throughput for transmitting realtime images and videos and another is range for mobility. In this paper, we design a wireless network infrastructure with the objective to communicate human and robots during the rescue mission in alpine environments. Firstly, we study about the network components, scenario and topology according to this environment. Then we design the network infrastructure for communicating among network components by taking account of the two degrees of freedom. Finally, the performance of the network is analyzed by means of numerical simulations. The simulation results reveal the effectiveness of the proposal.

A connection probability model for communications networks under regional failures

Communications networks are often disrupted by human-initiated and natural disasters such as terrorist bombings, aerial bombardment, earthquakes, floods and volcanic eruptions. Estimating the connection probability of a communications network under a regional failure caused by such an event is essential to evaluating network performance. This paper proposes a probabilistic model called the Connection Probability of a Communications Network under Regional Failures. The proposed model estimates the connection probability of each link that connects a pair of nodes under a failure scenario; these probabilities are then used to compute the generalized connection probability metrics for the network of interest. The model is continuous over its failure region, which is considered to be circular with a certain radius. The maximum failure impact occurs at the epicenter and the impact gradually drops to zero beyond the failure circle. The model helps identify the failed network links and their degrees of failure. A case study involving the U.S. backbone communications network with various failure epicenters and radii demonstrates the applicability and utility of the proposed model.

Blockchain Security Hole: Issues and Solutions

Blockchain technology is widely known because it is the underlying technology used by the bitcoin. It became more popular because it also can be used as backbone for various applications in finance, media, security and others. One of the main concerns for this technology is how secure the information that the users distributed over the network. This paper studies and highlights the important security issues concerned and discusses the solutions that proposed by the researchers and theoretical solution proposed to address some of the issues. However, this approach needs to be investigated further if it is to be implemented later in the near future. This paper can give direction for future researchers who are interested of this area.

RFID-based tracing for wine supply chain

Component tracing plays an important role in the wine industry in order to know the product quality during wine supply chain i.e., from grape to glass. It is one of the main applications of radio frequency identification, which is a key technology due to its ever increasing demands. To adopt the feature of component traceability with the wine industry, it is necessary to design a wireless infrastructure along with this technology. In this paper, we design a wireless network infrastructure for such industry with the objective to trace the components e.g., pallet, container and beverage bottle during the wine supply chain process. Firstly, we design a wireless mesh network for both indoor and outdoor scenarios. Then, we incorporate the radio frequency identification technology with the network infrastructure for tracing the components. Finally, the performance of the network is analysed by means of numerical simulations. The simulation results reveal the effectiveness of the proposal.

Automated secure room system

Automated security systems are a useful addition for todays home where safety is essential. Vision-based security systems have the greater advantages over the traditional security systems such as using the lock, observing by the security guard, using alarm signal etc. This paper proposed an integrated dual-level vision-based home security system, which consists of two subsystems - a) movement detection and b) hand verification system. The primary movement detection technique is used to detect any movement first and the system verifies the authorized person for any secured place. It will check the threshold value where if the threshold level exceeds and the verification flag is off, the alarm will be triggered. Otherwise, if verification flag is on, it means the person is authorized and movement detection will be turned off for this person. On an event of a failure in the primary system, the secondary hand geometry verification module can act as a reliable backup to detect authorized person in a restricted area. Several experiment results have shown good performance and feasible implementation in both cases.

A Store-and-Delivery Based MAC Protocol for Air-Ground Collaborative Wireless Networks for Precision Agriculture

Due to rapid population growth, the demand for food is also elevating, which inspires farmers to embrace precision agriculture to increase production by exploiting predictive analytics on relevant real-time data. The exactitude of a prediction is vital to decide the next course of actions to be taken to compensate current demands, which again relies on a competent data acquisition technique. The Media Access Control (MAC) protocols have significant contribution in designing data acquisition technique. In this paper, we propose a new Store-and-Delivery base MAC (SD-MAC) protocol for Air-Ground Collaborative Wireless Networks (AGCWNs) to acquire data efficiently from the sensing devices which are deployed in the agricultural field. Our proposed protocol takes into consideration of the factors of network architecture and transforms them into advantages to attain higher throughput. The performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated using simulations and involving another such protocol, where the proposed protocol outperforms the other protocol.

Crowd Associated Network: Exploiting over a Smart Garbage Management System

Most existing non-real-time applications utilize infrastructure-based or semi-infrastructure-based network architectures. Such a network architecture demands a considerably high installment and maintenance cost. To alleviate the cost, in this article, we propose an efficient infrastructure-less network architecture named CrAN. In CrAN, a set of crowds play significant roles by completing the communication gaps among various associates in the network; hence the name. We show the usability of this proposed architecture to support non-real-time data transmission over an SGMS, where optimum solutions need to be discovered to minimize the management cost. Due to the complexity of the optimization problem, we approximate these optimum solutions using a GA. In the implementation of the GA, we apply new fitness functions to discover a feasible trade-off between distance and waste volume. We then compare the performance of the proposed fitness functions with that of an existing fitness function. The results favorably suggest the necessity of employing the proposed fitness functions to obtain near-optimum solutions.

Comparative Investigation on CSMA/CA-Based MAC Protocols for Scalable Networks

The Backoff mechanism is one of the key factors of Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol which is scheduling to share the medium among the stations in order to transmit data in Wireless Local Area Network networks (WLAN). More in detail, the wireless network allows multiple stations to interact with each other on a same medium. Therefore, if two or more stations transmit at the same time then the collision happens. To avoid or reduce the probability of collision, the Backoff mechanism takes the responsibility by placing the stations in the waiting queue before transmission. Hence, Backoff mechanism is a very critical element and researchers as well as the manufactures are always looking for more efficient Backoff mechanism for WLAN. In particular, it will be more critical while the number of node increases and becomes large network, referred to as scalable network. Scalability is a critical requirement if we want the networking technologies to reach their full potential. In this paper, we investigate this issue by exploiting the existing CSMA/CA-Based MAC protocols in comparatively large networks. The simulation results revile some important issues and challenges in order to provide MAC solutions for scalable networks. The outcome of this research assists to design a new MAC protocol for such networks.

Finding a suitable hop-to-hop busty traffic transmission approach for underwater acoustic networks: handshake-based vs. handshake-free MAC protocols

Any medium access control (MAC) protocol designed for underwater acoustic networks (UANs) must take some unique characteristics of underwater channels into consideration for apt functioning, such as long propagation delay, high bit-error rate, limited bandwidth and so forth. Already, many MAC protocols are designed for UANs, which have fully or partially taken these characteristics into account and could be classified as handshake-free and handshake-based protocols. In this paper, these two classes are investigated through a comprehensive simulation campaign by employing their prominent representative protocols, namely ALOHA, carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) and multiple access with collision avoidance based adaptive packet train (MACA-APT) protocol. The contribution of this paper lies as follows: (i) unearthing the optimum values of various parameters on which the performance of a protocol relies; (ii) investigating the performance of all three protocols through a realistic channel model simulator by varying a couple of network parameters, and iii) discovering their effectiveness on various applications.

Raising fairness issue of vehicle routing problem

Since fairness deals with the quality of distributing the jobs and creates an ambience that is free from any discrimination, any distribution management problem must take fairness issue into consideration. Again, since the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is also a distribution management problem, any VRP solving algorithm must consider the fairness when solutions are explored. However, most of the proposed VRP solving algorithms do not take this issue into consideration. In this paper, we raise this issue with sufficient evidences. In this course of action, following contributions are made in this paper: i) fairness issue is raised analytically, and to support this, an extensive simulation campaign is performed, ii) the VRP is discussed through a practical application, namely Garbage Collection Problem (GCP), and later it is mathematically formulated, iii) a Genetic Algorithm (GA) is employed to explore feasible solutions for the given application (i.e., GCP), and iv) some future research directives are noted, which will help the researchers to extend this work.