Jacques Bou Abdo

Broker-based Cross-Cloud Federation Manager

Cloud federation is the next step in creating a new cloud computing ecosystem. The absence of suitable business models for federation managers is hindering the wide deployment of this critical feature. In this paper we will study existing federation managers, specifically CCFM (Cross-Cloud Federation Manager) and analyze its strengths and limitations. To overcome its limitations and make cloud federation more competitive in the current business trends, we introduce a new node called “broker” which will play a significant role in the enhanced CCFM mechanisms. The discovery and match-making agents in CCFM will be modified to enforce a new business model which is more interesting for private investors. Finally, our new business model will be discussed and possible versions are stated.

EC-AKA2 a revolutionary AKA protocol

Security is increasingly demanding in mobile communication, especially LTE, and the incremental value of transmitted assets over wireless networks pushes risk way above acceptable thresholds. Decision is continuously moving towards the user side, while the need for seamless security is becoming a must. Under all these requirements, 3GPP failed to propose a new Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol that solves the vulnerabilities found in the current AKA, and implement user preferences in network selection, thus 3GPP failed to meet LTEs current security needs. This paper proposes a complete AKA protocol that solve four different LTE-AKA weaknesses. The proposed protocol is backward compatible, needs no additional investment and achieves great QoS performance.

Privacy using mobile cloud computing

Crowdsourcing mobile applications are of increasing importance due to their suitability in providing personalized and better matching replies. Crowdsourcing location based services inherit the querying mechanism from its legacy predecessors and this is where the threat lays. In this paper we are going to prove mathematically that the mechanism with highest privacy level “Footprint” does not satisfy the privacy level needed by crowdsourced location based services and then prove that higher privacy level and lower overhead is achieved when these services are implemented in Operator centric mobile cloud architecture.

Evaluation of mobile cloud architectures

Abstract The progress of mobile cloud computing is currently facing a crossroad on whether to implement user-side tools for job offloading or adopt network-side architecture. Selecting the best mobile cloud architecture is vital for having clear decisions on the future of mobile cloud computing. This work will survey mobile cloud architectures and compare their performance against existing resource demanding applications. The comparison will be performed using physical implementation. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first published work numerically comparing mobile cloud architectures across various mobile cloud applications.

A new software-based service provision approach for vehicular cloud

Vehicles belonging to a Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork (VANET) can form an ad hoc vehicular cloud in order to provide and to share services between the vehicles. These services may be divided into two categories: (1) Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) describing physical resources shared as services such as data storage, sensor data, network and computing services; and (2) Software as a Service (SaaS) describing applications that can be run as services in the network. In this paper, a SaaS is an infotainment application requiring multiple infrastructural services such as sensor data. In this context, we propose a service provision mechanism well adapted for VANET. The mechanism aims to select convenient service provider vehicles taking into account the mobility of the vehicles. The mechanism is evaluated by a series of experimentations on OMNeT++ network simulator. The results show a high service delivery ratio representing a satisfactory result for the simulated case study.

Investigating low level protocols for Wireless Body Sensor Networks

The rapid development of medical sensors has increased the interest in Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) applications where physiological data from the human body and its environment is gathered, monitored, and analyzed to take the proper measures. In WBANs, it is essential to design MAC protocols that ensure adequate Quality of Service (QoS) such as low delay and high scalability. This paper investigates Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols used in WBAN, and compares their performance in a high traffic environment. Such scenario can be induced in case of emergency for example, where physiological data collected from all sensors on human body should be sent simultaneously to take appropriate action. This study can also be extended to cover collaborative WBAN systems where information from different bodies is sent simultaneously leading to high traffic. OPNET simulations are performed to compare the delay and scalability performance of the different MAC protocols under the same experimental conditions and to draw conclusions about the best protocol to be used in a high traffic environment.

Security in Emerging 4G Networks

This chapter presents emerging wireless technologies applied to the domain of healthcare, which has been identified as a very important domain of increasing interest to researchers. The chapter also provides an overview of the security issues related to these emerging technologies and networks.

Authentication proxy as a service

5G, fog computing and the majority of the latest technological trends have minimized latency as a top priority. These initiatives are focusing on physical layer methods to decrease latency, thus keeping the changes transparent to users. Physical layer changes are expensive and in many cases incompatible with the original solution which results in lower adoption rate and higher capital investment. In this paper, we propose a transport/application layer method to decrease latency in mobile cloud environments.

Efficient Hybrid Emergency Aware MAC Protocol for Wireless Body Sensor Networks

In Body Sensor Networks (BSNs), two types of events should be addressed: periodic and emergency events. Traffic rate is usually low during periodic observation, and becomes very high upon emergency. One of the main and challenging requirements of BSNs is to design Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols that guarantee immediate and reliable transmission of data in emergency situations, while maintaining high energy efficiency in non-emergency conditions. In this paper, we propose a new emergency aware hybrid DTDMA/DS-CDMA protocol that can accommodate BSN traffic variations by addressing emergency and periodic traffic requirements. It takes advantage of the high delay efficiency of DS-CDMA in traffic burst, and the high energy efficiency of DTDMA in periodic traffic. The proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of delay, packet drop percentage, and energy consumption. Different OPNET simulations are performed for various number of nodes carrying emergency data, and for various payload sizes. The protocol performance is compared to other existing hybrid protocols. Results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the others in terms of delay and packet drop percentage for different number of nodes carrying emergency data, as well as for different payload sizes. It also offers the highest energy efficiency during periodic observation, while adjusting the energy consumption during emergency by assigning spreading codes only to nodes holding emergency data.

Dual channel security

Defying attacks and vulnerabilities has been a challenge since the beginning of modern technology and especially after the gigantic leap of the online market system. Developers tend to aim at protection against theft in a new binary world that opened up a vast field for hacking and breaching personal information. In this study, we propose a dual channel security (DCS) model which is a novel key agreement protocol designed to overcome vulnerabilities and attacks that are arising from well-known protocols. It targets the weaknesses of communication mechanisms commonly used in Diffie-Hellman key exchange (DH), transport layer security (TLS) and near field communication (NFC). Moreover, it eliminates the arduous and costly processes of establishing a secure structure as in public key infrastructure (PKI) and is suitable for two kinds of applications: point of sale terminals (POS) and short-range wireless interconnection of mobile devices (D2D).