Khandakar Ahmed

Integrating Wireless Sensor Networks with Cloud Computing

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has been a focus for research for several years. WSN enables novel and attractive solutions for information gathering across the spectrum of endeavour including transportation, business, health-care, industrial automation, and environmental monitoring. Despite these advances, the exponentially increasing data extracted from WSN is not getting adequate use due to the lack of expertise, time and money with which the data might be better explored and stored for future use. The next generation of WSN will benefit when sensor data is added to blogs, virtual communities, and social network applications. This transformation of data derived from sensor networks into a valuable resource for information hungry applications will benefit from techniques being developed for the emerging Cloud Computing technologies. Traditional High Performance Computing approaches may be replaced or find a place in data manipulation prior to the data being moved into the Cloud. In this paper, a novel framework is proposed to integrate the Cloud Computing model with WSN. Deployed WSN will be connected to the proposed infrastructure. Users request will be served via three service layers (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) either from the archive, archive is made by collecting data periodically from WSN to Data Centres (DC), or by generating live query to corresponding sensor network.

Techniques and Challenges of Data Centric Storage Scheme in Wireless Sensor Network

Storing, collecting and querying data across miniaturized battery powered Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is a key research focus today. Distributed Data-Centric Storage (DCS), an alternate to External Storage (ES) and Local Storage (LS), is thought to be a promising and efficient storage and search mechanism. There has been a growing interest in understanding and optimizing WSN DCS schemes in recent years, where the range query mechanism, similarity search, load balancing, multi-dimensional data search, as well as limited and constrained resources have driven this line of research. In this paper, an extensive state-of-the-art study is provided including the prime WSN DCS schemes, challenges that inspired these schemes, as well as drawbacks and shortcomings of existing solutions. In contrast to previous surveys that briefly discuss the contribution of a few WSN DCS mechanisms, we provide a thematic taxonomy in which schemes are classified according to the problems dealt with including range query, similarity search, data aggregation, sensor network field non-uniformity, multi-replication, load balancing and routing algorithm.

A survey of smart grid architectures, applications, benefits and standardization

The successful transformation of conventional power grids into Smart Grids (SG) will require robust and scalable communication network infrastructure. The SGs will facilitate bidirectional electricity flow, advanced load management, a self-healing protection mechanism and advanced monitoring capabilities to make the power system more energy efficient and reliable. In this paper SG communication network architectures, standardization efforts and details of potential SG applications are identified. The future deployment of real-time or near-real-time SG applications is dependent on the introduction of a SG compatible communication system that includes a communication protocol for cross-domain traffic flows within the SG. This paper identifies the challenges within the cross-functional domains of the power and communication systems that current research aims to overcome. The status of SG related machine to machine communication system design is described and recommendations are provided for diverse new and innovative traffic features.

Multi-domain Software Defined Networking

A key focus of the transition to next generation computer networking is to improve management of network services thereby enhancing traffic control and flows while simplifying higher-level functionality. Software-defined networking (SDN) is an approach that is being developed to facilitate next generation computer networking by decoupling the traffic control system from the underlying traffic transmission system. SDN offers programmability in network services by separating the control plane from the data plane within network devices and providing programmability for network services. Enhanced connectivity services across the global digital network require a multi-domain capability. This paper presents a review of the current research status in SDN and multi-domain SDN, focusing on OpenFlow protocol, and its future related challenges.

Software Defined Networking for Communication and Control of Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) combine human-machine interaction, the physical world around us, and software aspects by integrating physical systems with communication networks. Opportunities and research challenges are largely interconnected with the three core sub-domains of CPS — computation, communication and control. The current state of the art of the legacy communication technology is one of the major hindrances limiting the evolution of CPS. Most specifically, innovation in communication is restricted with existing routing and switching technologies leaving no practical methods for researchers to test their new ideas. Software Defined Networking (SDN), through the realization of OpenFlow, separates network control logic from the underlying physical routers and switches. This phenomenon allows researchers to write high-level control programs specifying the behavior of the core networks used to implement CPS and thus, enable innovation in next generation communication architectures for CPS. In this paper, we propose a SDN architecture for industrial automation. Network design requirements are extracted from formal component specifications which support the generation of automatic network configurations. The proposed SDN architecture aims to leverage Industry 4.0 and Smart Factories, to bring together industrial automation installations with networking and Internet technologies.

Identity and Access Management in Cloud Computing

With Cloud computing, the latest addition in system architecture, consumers and companies can scale up to massive capacities in an instant without having any investment in new infrastructure or they can even shrink to a desktop within a second. But this service-oriented computing is becoming controversial due to the lack of privacy and security issues. In a recent survey conducted by International Data Corporation (IDC), 87.5% of the participants suggested security as the main reason for reluctance on the part of enterprise IT to aggressively adopt Cloud computing in future system deployments. This chapter discusses a possible solution for Identity and Access Management (IAM) to help enterprise IT organizations and Cloud providers to improve their services. Managing access control and governance within IAM, to meet today’s business needs in the Cloud environment, remains one of the major hurdles for enterprises’ adoption of Cloud services. Today’s aggressive adoption of immature Cloud computing services by enterprises creates extreme thrust to have a strong Cloud-based IAM system which provides support for business needs ranging from secure collaborations with global partners to secure access for global employees consuming sensitive information, from any location and using any device at any time. The motive of this chapter is to show readers a standard possible way to develop an IAM system. This idea can work as seed for someone or a development/research group to come up with a complete full solution.

Wireless Sensor Network Data Centric Storage routing using Castalia

In this paper, a Sector Based Clustered Routing (SBCR) protocol for distributed Data-Centric Storage (DCS) in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is proposed. The research identified an optimally synchronized routing algorithm that can achieve high power efficiency whilst reducing updates and query traffic, end-to-end delay, and collisions. To achieve this objective, SBCR is cross pollinated with medium access control (MAC) layer (SMAC and/or TMAC) building a cross-layer optimization model. Based on the network-wide cluster flow distribution, each sector member is assigned a non-overlapping TDMA slot by their sector head for member-head collision free communication while a stateless location based multi-hop routing scheme is used for inter-sector communications. The paper also provides a description of the implementation of SBCR in open-source Castalia simulator. Simulation results show that SBCR yields significant efficiency improvements for DCS and data queries compared to existing approaches such as LEACH and GPSR.

Optimized TDMA based distance routing for Data Centric Storage

The Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) Data Centric Storage (DCS) scheme is a promising alternative to External Storage (ES) and Local Storage (LS) schemes because the ES and LS schemes may lead to high overhead and latency. The DCS scheme, however, might incur high update traffic due to the lack of an optimally synchronized routing algorithm. This paper presents a new distributed Sector Based Distance (SBD) routing algorithm that has been designed for a low power DCS implementation. In order to guarantee reliability and minimizing end-to-end latency, a simple Grid Coloring Algorithm (GCA) is used to derive the time division multiple access (TDMA) schedules. The GCA uses a slot reuse concept to achieve minimum TDMA frame length. Extensive simulations demonstrate that SBD yields significant improvement in achieving high reliability and low latency while providing optimal energy consumption.

Software defined neighborhood area network for smart grid applications

Abstract Information gathered from the Smart Grid (SG) devices located in end user premises provides a valuable resource that can be used to modify the behavior of SG applications. Decentralized and distributed deployment of neighborhood area network (NAN) devices makes it a challenge to manage SG efficiently. The NAN communication network architecture should be designed to aggregate and disseminate information among different SG domains. In this paper, we present a communication framework for NAN based on wireless sensor networks using the software defined networking paradigm. The data plane devices, such as smart meters, intelligent electronic devices, sensors, and switches are controlled via an optimized controller hierarchy deployed using a separate control plane. An analytical model is developed to determine the number of switches and controllers required for the NAN and the results of several test scenarios are presented. A Castalia based simulation model was used to analyze the performance of modified NAN performance.

Enhanced Distributed Dynamic Skyline Query for Wireless Sensor Networks

Dynamic skyline query is one of the most popular and significant variants of skyline query in the field of multi-criteria decision-making. However, designing a distributed dynamic skyline query possesses greater challenge, especially for the distributed data centric storage within wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, a novel Enhanced Distributed Dynamic Skyline (EDDS) approach is proposed and implemented in Disk Based Data Centric Storage (DBDCS) architecture. DBDCS is an adaptation of magnetic disk storage platter consisting tracks and sectors. In DBDCS, the disc track and sector analogy is used to map data locations. A distance based indexing method is used for storing and querying multi-dimensional similar data. EDDS applies a threshold based hierarchical approach, which uses temporal correlation among sectors and sector segments to calculate a dynamic skyline. The efficiency and effectiveness of EDDS has been evaluated in terms of latency, energy consumption and accuracy through a simulation model developed in Castalia.