Jameela Al-Jaroodi

A Survey of Load Balancing in Cloud Computing: Challenges and Algorithms

Load Balancing is essential for efficient operations indistributed environments. As Cloud Computing is growingrapidly and clients are demanding more services and betterresults, load balancing for the Cloud has become a veryinteresting and important research area. Many algorithms weresuggested to provide efficient mechanisms and algorithms forassigning the clients requests to available Cloud nodes. Theseapproaches aim to enhance the overall performance of the Cloudand provide the user more satisfying and efficient services. Inthis paper, we investigate the different algorithms proposed toresolve the issue of load balancing and task scheduling in CloudComputing. We discuss and compare these algorithms to providean overview of the latest approaches in the field.

Applications of big data to smart cities

Many governments are considering adopting the smart city concept in their cities and implementing big data applications that support smart city components to reach the required level of sustainability and improve the living standards. Smart cities utilize multiple technologies to improve the performance of health, transportation, energy, education, and water services leading to higher levels of comfort of their citizens. This involves reducing costs and resource consumption in addition to more effectively and actively engaging with their citizens. One of the recent technologies that has a huge potential to enhance smart city services is big data analytics. As digitization has become an integral part of everyday life, data collection has resulted in the accumulation of huge amounts of data that can be used in various beneficial application domains. Effective analysis and utilization of big data is a key factor for success in many business and service domains, including the smart city domain. This paper reviews the applications of big data to support smart cities. It discusses and compares different definitions of the smart city and big data and explores the opportunities, challenges and benefits of incorporating big data applications for smart cities. In addition it attempts to identify the requirements that support the implementation of big data applications for smart city services. The review reveals that several opportunities are available for utilizing big data in smart cities; however, there are still many issues and challenges to be addressed to achieve better utilization of this technology.

Middleware for Robotics: A Survey

The field of robotics relies heavily on various technologies such as mechatronics, computing systems, and wireless communication. Given the fast growing technological progress in these fields, robots can offer a wide range of applications. However real world integration and application development for such a distributed system composed of many robotic modules and networked robotic devices is very difficult. Therefore, middleware services provide a novel approach offering many possibilities and drastically enhancing the application development for robots. This paper surveys the current state of middleware approaches in this domain. It discusses middleware challenges in these systems and presents some representative middleware solutions specifically designed for robots. The selection of the studied methods tries to cover most of the middleware platforms, objectives and approaches that have been proposed by researchers in this field.

e-Health Cloud: Opportunities and Challenges

As the costs of healthcare services rise and healthcare professionals are becoming scarce and hard to find, it is imminent that healthcare organizations consider adopting health information technology (HIT) systems. HIT allows health organizations to streamline many of their processes and provide services in a more efficient and cost-effective manner. The latest technological trends such as Cloud Computing (CC) provide a strong infrastructure and offer a true enabler for HIT services over the Internet. This can be achieved on a pay-as-you-use model of the “e-Health Cloud” to help the healthcare industry cope with current and future demands yet keeping their costs to a minimum. Despite its great potential, HIT as a CC model has not been addressed extensively in the literature. There are no apparent frameworks which clearly encompass all viable schemes and interrelationships between HIT and CC. Therefore, analyzing and comparing the effectiveness of such schemes is important. In this paper we introduce the concept of “e-Health Cloud” highlighting many of its constituents and proposing building an e-health environment and elucidating many of the challenges confronting the success of the e-Health Cloud. We will also discuss different possible solutions to address challenges such as security and privacy.

A survey on service-oriented middleware for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are used for many applications such as environmental monitoring, infrastructure security, healthcare applications, and traffic control. The design and development of such applications must address many challenges dictated by WSN characteristics on one hand and the targeted applications on the other. One of the emerging approaches used for relaxing these challenges is using service-oriented middleware (SOM). Service-oriented computing, in general, aims to make services available and easily accessible through standardized models and protocols without having to worry about the underlying infrastructures, development models, or implementation details. SOM could play an important role in facilitating the design, development, and implementation of service-oriented systems. This will help achieve interoperability, loose coupling, and heterogeneity support. Furthermore, SOM approaches will provision non-functional requirements like scalability, reliability, flexibility, and Quality of Service (QoS) assurance. This paper surveys the current work in SOM and the trends and challenges to be addressed when designing and developing these solutions for WSN.

Review: Service-oriented middleware: A survey

Service-oriented computing aims to make services available and easily accessible through standardized models and protocols without having to worry about the underlying infrastructures, development models or implementation details. This helps achieve interoperability and loose coupling among distributed application components and also among user processes. In addition, this model offers users an on-demand usage model where they only use the services needed for the time needed, which relieves them from having to build and maintain a complete system in house. However, the design and implementation of robust and efficient service-oriented applications are still as complex and demanding as any other type of distributed application. Thus middleware can play an important role in facilitating the design, development and implementation of service-oriented systems. Furthermore, middleware approaches will provision non-functional requirements like performance, scalability, reliability, flexibility and quality of service (QoS) assurance. A lot of work has been done in this area and in this paper we survey some of this work in service-oriented middleware (SOM). As we study the different projects we develop a list of the main requirements that SOM should support. We also discuss the main objectives and characteristics of the surveyed approaches, and then we highlight the challenges to be addressed when designing and developing SOM solutions that satisfy the requirements of different application domains.

UAVs for smart cities: Opportunities and challenges

This paper discusses the applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in smart cities, their opportunities and their challenges. UAVs have a wide range of applications in many fields like environmental hazards monitoring, traffic management and pollution monitoring, all of which contributes greatly to the development of any smart city. These opportunities among several others are discussed in this paper. Several challenges and issues such as safety, privacy and ethical uses are of great concern and are also provided in this paper.

Sensor network architectures for monitoring underwater pipelines.

This paper develops and compares different sensor network architecture designs that can be used for monitoring underwater pipeline infrastructures. These architectures are underwater wired sensor networks, underwater acoustic wireless sensor networks, RF (Radio Frequency) wireless sensor networks, integrated wired/acoustic wireless sensor networks, and integrated wired/RF wireless sensor networks. The paper also discusses the reliability challenges and enhancement approaches for these network architectures. The reliability evaluation, characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages among these architectures are discussed and compared. Three reliability factors are used for the discussion and comparison: the network connectivity, the continuity of power supply for the network, and the physical network security. In addition, the paper also develops and evaluates a hierarchical sensor network framework for underwater pipeline monitoring.

A Framework for Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Data Collection in Linear Wireless Sensor Networks

The wireless sensor network (WSN) technology have been evolving very quickly in recent years. Sensors are constantly increasing in sensing, processing, storage, and communication capabilities. In many WSNs that are used in environmental, commercial and military applications, the sensors are lined linearly due to the linear nature of the structure or area that is being monitored making a special class of these networks; We defined these in a previous paper as Linear Sensor Networks (LSNs), and provided a classification of the different types of LSNs. A pure multihop approach to route the data all the way along the linear network (e.g. oil, gas and water pipeline monitoring, border monitoring, road-side monitoring, etc.), which can extend for hundreds or even thousands of kilometers can be very costly from an energy dissipation point of view. In order to significantly reduce the energy consumption used in data transmission and extend the network lifetime, we present a framework for monitoring linear infrastructures using LSNs where data collection and transmission is done using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The system defines four types of nodes, which include: sensor nodes (SNs), relay nodes (RNs), UAVs, and sinks. The SNs use a classic WSN multihop routing approach to transmit their data to the nearest RN, which acts as a cluster head for its surrounding SNs. Then, a UAV moves back and forth along the linear network and transport the data that is collected by the RNs to the sinks located at both ends of the LSN. We name this network architecture a UAV-based LSNs (ULSNs). This approach leads to considerable savings in node energy consumption, due to a significant reduction of the transmission ranges of the SN and RN nodes and the use of a one-hop transmission to communicate the data from the RNs to the UAV. Furthermore, the strategy provides for reduced interference between the RNs that can be caused by hidden terminal and collision problems, that would be expected if a pure multihop approach is used at the RN level. In addition, three different UAV movement approaches are presented, simulated, and analyzed in order to measure system performance under various network conditions.

Middleware issues and approaches for mobile ad hoc networks

Recently, there has been a growing interest on mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) that offer a broad spectrum of new applications. However, application development for mobile ad-hoc networks is not easy. Obviously, solving these issues for each application from scratch is not a feasible approach. Instead, developing middleware services to support the development of such applications is a novel approach that will offer many possibilities, and considerable flexibility for ad hoc networking. This survey shows the current state of the research, in this domain by presenting and discussing some representative middleware for wireless MANET. The selection of the studied methods tries to cover as many views of objective reflections as possible. We concentrate on discovering similarities and differences between the studied approaches by making comparisons, evaluation and appropriateness studies. Then we argue that most of the work is at fledging stage and there is still a long way to go for such middleware to fully meet MANET applications requirements.