Hamid Harroud

Emerging wireless technologies in e-health trends, challenges, and framework design issues

In healthcare the importance of obtaining the right information, at the right time, irrespective of time and location dependency is very critical. Healthcare personnel need to access real-time medical data such as patient clinical histories, laboratory results, treatments, chronic diseases, medication, and insurance information. Therefore, healthcare is the most apt domain for the application of ubiquitous technologies. Ubiquitous healthcare aims at creating an environment where healthcare is available to everyone, everywhere through the use of technologies that would not only be pervasive but also be assimilated flawlessly in the daily lives. With large-scale wireless networks and mobile computing solutions, such as cellular 3G, Wi-Fi mesh, WiMAX, Bluetooth, RFID, and Wireless Sensor Networks, healthcare personnel can tap into vital information anywhere and at any time within the healthcare networks. Ubiquitous healthcare, although promising, there are myriad challenges associated with realizing its vision. This paper highlights some snapshots of current uses and future trends of various wireless communications in the healthcare domains, addresses their applications for e-health, states the challenges faced in a ubiquitous healthcare environment equipped with different wireless technologies, and how the resulting issues might be addressed by developing a framework that provides a flexible and convenient medical monitoring, consultation, and healthcare.

A Policy Based Event Management Middleware for Implementing RFID Applications

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has become a popular identification technology in a number of application areas such as supply chain management. A dedicated middleware solution is required to achieve the maximum benefits of RFID technology. The middleware components serve to abstract the communication between the middleware and the different types of sensing devices on one hand, and the middleware and backend applications on the other hand. FlexRFID is a simple and smart RFID middleware which provides device management and monitoring, data processing, filtering, and aggregation, rapid application development, as well as a policy based business rules layer which helps applying rules for accessing and configuring the services provided by the middleware. This layer serves to process some business intelligence rules locally so that the host system is offloaded from those mundane tasks. The paper shows that FlexRFID is a highly scalable and easily deployable middleware in the heterogeneous sites based on different standards and consisting of different hardware. Apart from these, FlexRFID incorporates the mechanisms for supervision, testing, and control of its components, plus handles the security and privacy issues that inhibit the adoption of RFID technology by applying the privacy policies in the business rules layer. FlexRFID middleware is controlling the data flows in and out as well as locally controlling some intelligence.

Precision agriculture monitoring framework based on WSN

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are nowadays widely used in building decision support systems for better monitoring. One of the most interesting fields having an increasing need in decision support systems is agriculture. Inefficient and wasteful methods of agricultural monitoring lead to extra time and cost loss for farmers. This paper presents the iFarm framework system, an easy-to-use and expandable agricultural monitoring solution to enhance land productivity by better managing water, improving the socio-economic factor of farmers and their awareness, predicting and planning the crop yields. The iFarm system proposes WSNs as a promising mechanism to agricultural resources optimization, decision making, and land monitoring. WSNs make it possible to know at any time information about the land and crop conditions, so that farmers can be assisted with various notifications and suggestions during their farming tasks. It addresses the advantage of the precision agriculture approach to help making valuable decisions which could not only improve the land productivity but also optimize the use of resources. The paper gives a description of the precision agriculture monitoring approach that provides meaningful services to farmers.

Traffic analysis for GSM networks

When GSM was introduced in the early 90s, it was considered an over specified system. Nowadays, it is obvious that the whole range of services is widely in use. In addition, performance is degrading due to the rapidly increasing number of mobile subscribers, numbering over 2.9 billion subscribers around the world. The performance of cellular networks is the most important issue concerning their operators. The main goal is to keep subscribers satisfied with the delivered quality of service (QoS). In order to achieve the best performance, service providers have to monitor and optimize their network continuously. A Network Management System (NMS) with an online database is responsible for the collection of data on live networks. For greater effectiveness, operators install systems that do a lot more than collect and store raw data. These systems are easier to use and take advantage of all the data provided by the NMS. In this paper, we summarize measurements that were carried out on an operative GSM-1900 network to evaluate the performance of the GSMs Air-Interface (Um), during eight months. In this paper we have established statistically the following facts: (i) The peak hour in North America is between 4:00 and 5:00 PM. (ii) During week days the duration of calls increases from Monday through Friday. (iii) Weekend traffic is different from week-days traffic. Using a regression analysis we forecast traffic over time. The presented KPIs along with the derived statistical facts are crucial for operators who are concerned with maintaining a reliable and stable network, while maintaining an acceptable QoS.

A policy based context-aware agent framework to support users mobility

Recent advances in portable computing devices and wireless technology make it possible to provide seamless and pervasive services for mobile users. As users move from one location to another, there is a greater need to automatically provide an office-like environment that normally has to be configured and setup on an individual basis by each user at each visited location. Due to occasional disconnections, device capabilities and network heterogeneity, mobility places a considerable burden on mobile applications. On the other hand, it receives little assistance from existing infrastructure and Internet protocols. The paper describes a set of policy-based agents composing a framework that assists services and applications in dealing with mobility challenges and capable of providing a policy-based context-aware mobile working environment. We propose an approach that uses policies at different levels, where contextual information characterizing the mobile users environment is also translated to a set of context policies.

Building Policy-Based Context Aware Applications for Mobile Environments

Advances in portable devices and wireless technology eased the seamless service provisioning to mobile users in pervasive environments.However, the limited capabilities of portable devices, network heterogeneity, and the spontaneous interactions due to users and devices mobility placed significant burdens on applications deployed in these environments. This paper describes an innovative approach for supporting mobile users with context-aware services wherever they go and with whatever devices they use. This approach is based on a novel framework that provides necessary features and services to facilitate building context-aware mobile applications. The framework uses semantically modeled policies to adapt the application behavior dynamically based on the situation of its users. The framework negotiates contexts and sets levels of agreements needed to translate automatically these contexts to a set of semantic policies.

RFID Middleware Design and Architecture

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a form of Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC) technique (Ishikawa et al., 2003). RFID is recently being used in a wide range of areas such as Supply Chain Management (SCM), health care, traffic monitoring, retail, and access control (Polniak, 2007). The ability to store large amounts of data and identify items which are not in the line of sight has given RFID technology an edge over other automatic identification approaches such as the barcode based systems (Ishikawa et al., 2003) and optical character recognition systems (OCR) (Phoenix Software International, 2006). As an example, RFID technology integration in SCM systems has resulted in the reduced losses and improved visibility in various stages of supply chaining (Sheng et al., 2008), reduced numbers of data entry errors, efficient inventory management, and lower human labor costs in distribution centers (Tutorial-Reports, 2007). A binary code comprising a field of bars and gaps arranged in parallel configuration is used by the barcode based identification systems. The analysis of the reflected beam on the bar gaps, allows the numerical and alphanumerical interpretation of the barcode sequence made up of narrow and wide bars. The interpreted value obtained specifies a unique code that is used for object identification. The disadvantage of the barcode system is that the barcode needs to be aligned in order to be read by the laser scanner (Ishikawa et al., 2003). The OCR based systems consist of optical machine readers used to recognize alphanumeric codes which are placed on the objects to be uniquely identified. The drawbacks of this system consist of the cost of operation, and the complexity of the OCR readers (Phoenix Software International, 2006). The RFID systems basically consist of three elements: a tag/transponder, a reader and a middleware deployed at a host computer. The RFID tag is a data carrier part of the RFID system which is placed on the objects to be uniquely identified. The RFID reader is a device that transmits and receives data through radio waves using the connected antennas. Its functions include powering the tag, and reading/writing data to the tag. As shown Fig. 1, the signals sent by the reader‘s antennas form an interrogation zone made up of an electromagnetic field. When a tag enters this zone, it gets activated to exchange data with the reader (Al-Mousawi, 2004). Later, the identification data read by the RFID reader is processed by the software system, known as the RFID middleware. The RFID middleware manages readers, as well as filters and formats the RFID raw tag data so that they can be

Context-based services discovery in mobile environments

Mobile and Ubiquitous computing have increased the need for mobile users to expect accessing preferred services, whenever they want and wherever they are. Users do not have to explicitly specify and configure their working environment each time they move from one location to another. The necessary adaptation to cope with the changing environment should be initiated by services rather than by users. This paper presents a context-aware platform for supporting mobile users with personalized services. The platform is capable of handling different types of context sources (i.e. sensors, readers, agents), offers sophisticated mechanisms in matching the mobile users preferences with services that are enabled at the visited location, and provides these services in personalized and adaptive manner to the user conditions. As a proof of concept, we present an context sensitive instant messaging prototype where a user is provided with services and information of interest based on location and time. The platform monitors a set of policies to dynamically adapt each application behavior to the situation of its use.

Classification of Security Issues and Solutions in Cloud Environments

Cloud computing is, nowadays, one of the most interesting topics in computer science. Also, in research, a lot of effort is concentrated on cloud computing security issues. In this paper, we classify different security issues into the different levels that exist in cloud environments. We also present different solutions to the security issues in the cloud according to the type of security they provide with. Privacy, integrity, accountability, and integrity are major topics that are raised when companies start considering the cloud as an alternative to having their IT internally managed. Therefore, it is important to have a broad view of the different security problems present in the cloud and the different solutions that researchers are working on.

A lightweight middleware for an e-health WSN based system using Android technology

With the rapid development of Wireless Sensors Network (WSN) technology, together with its growing market due to the variety of applications in which this technology can be used, sensors are now available at very cheap prices, and relatively high quality. The medical field among other fields is one of the most promising fields in which sensors technology is undergoing great improvements. With the constant and continuing advances on the wireless sensor networks and applications, lots of medical applications that use sensors are emerging. Varying from pre-hospital, in-hospital applications to post-hospital and rehabilitation applications, sensors are used in a wide range of applications such as patients drug administration to elderly remote supervision. With the lake of standardization, a framework that would govern the interaction between the applications and the network is a must to be capable of sensing, processing, and communicating vital health signs. In this research we proposed layered approach architecture for a lightweight portable middleware with the Android technology. Our system takes into consideration the design principles and issues related to medical applications. A prototype of the lightweight middleware for an e-Health WSN based System was designed and tested and we showed that the results are very promising.