M. Jamal Zemerly

Indoor Localization and Guidance Using Portable Smartphones

Indoor guidance is becoming a significant issue with the increasing number of buildings. This paper describes an Android based indoor map guidance system that assists and guides visitors inside public buildings (e.g. schools, shopping malls, airports, museums, exhibition centers). It utilizes NFC (Near Field Communication) technology and QR (Quick Response) Codes, which are low cost, to determine the location as well as to provide navigation within the buildings. Also, it provides a variety of helpful features such as finding destination, calculating shortest path, storing car parking location, giving feedback to building management, entering surveys for restaurants and coffee shops, finding nearest toilet and making donation. In addition, the system is bilingual and available in both English and Arabic versions. The developed system relies on a server that contains its web server, map server and spatial database. For wide accessibility, the whole system is developed using open source and freely-available software. For example, (a) the Android SDK is used to develop the client interface, (b) the Apache server is used for the web server, (c) Google sketch up and Quantum GIS are used to draw the floor plans, (d) Postgre SQL/PostGIS is used for spatial database to store the drawn floor plans, and (e) MapServer (MS4W) is used for map server to retrieve and draw the stored floor plans from the spatial database. Thus far, the developed mobile application has been fully evaluated and validated for use in a smart campus environment, which has been encapsulated in a test case study delineated herein.

CAViAR: Context Aware Visual Indoor Augmented Reality for a University Campus

CAViAR is a mobile software system for indoor environments that provides to the mobile user equipped with a smartphone indoor localization, augmented reality (AR), visual interaction, and indoor navigation. These capabilities are possible with the availability of state of the art AR technologies. The mobile application includes additional features, such as indoor maps, shortest path, inertial navigation, places of interest, location sharing and voice-commanded search. CAViAR was tested in a University Campus as one of the technologies to be used later in an intelligent Campus environment.

iARBook: An Immersive Augmented Reality system for education

The advancement in technology nowadays has improved learning methods that are beginning to override the traditional methods. Augmented Reality (AR) is one such technology that has seen many applications in education. This paper describes how an Immersive Augmented Reality (iAR) application in conjunction with a book, can act as a new smart learning method by engaging as many of the users senses and human functions as possible. In addition, a survey was conducted on students and educators who have tested the application. The purpose of the survey is to study the effectiveness of the application in enhancing the users learning experience and help to devise plans to improve the system.

Indoor localization and navigation using smartphones augmented reality and inertial tracking

Over the last years, indoor localization and navigation is becoming a hot topic. With the increasing number of buildings, indoor positioning and navigation has turned out to be more important than outdoors. In the literature, many papers discuss wireless based indoor positioning systems. Essentially based on Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi), Bluetooth, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) or existing solutions that imply the measurement of radio signals. In this paper, we evaluate an indoor image-based positioning system that takes advantage of smartphones augmented reality (AR) and inertial tracking. The excellent computing capabilities in todays highend phones or smartphones in combination with its resources of sensors, such as Global Positioning System (GPS), inertial sensors, camera, wireless receivers, are powering the mobile application sector to the extent of becoming the fastest growing one in data communication technologies. AR as an emerging technology has the potential of creating new types of indoor location based services for the near future. Here, we show some of the AR capabilities combined with inertial tracking for localization and navigation.

New secure healthcare system using cloud of things

Modern healthcare services are serving patients needs by using new technologies such as wearable devices or cloud of things. The new technology provides more facilities and enhancements to the existing healthcare services as it allows more flexibility in terms of monitoring patients records and remotely connecting with the patients via cloud of things. However, there are many security issues such as privacy and security of healthcare data which need to be considered once we introduce wearable devices to the healthcare service. Although some of the security issues were addressed by some researchers in the literature, they mainly addressed cloud of things security or healthcare security separately and their work still suffers from limited security protection and vulnerabilities to some security attacks. The proposed new healthcare system combines security of both healthcare and cloud of things technologies. It also addresses most of the security challenges that might face the healthcare services such as the man in the middle (MITM), eavesdropping, replay, repudiation, and modification attacks. Scyther verification tool was also used to verify the robustness and correctness of the proposed system.

The evolution of distributed systems towards microservices architecture

Applications developed to fulfil distributed systems needs have been growing rapidly. Major evolutions have happened beginning with basic architecture relying on initiated request by a client to a processing side referred to as the server. Such architectures were not enough to cope up with the fast ever-increasing number of requests and need to utilize network bandwidth. Mobile agents attempted to overcome such drawbacks but did cope up for so long with the growing technology platforms. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) then evolved to be one of the most successful representations of the client-server architecture with an added business value that provides reusable and loosely coupled services. SOA did not meet customers and business expectations as it was still relying on monolithic systems. Resilience, scalability, fast software delivery and the use of fewer resources are highly desirable features. Microservices architecture came to fulfil those expectations of system development, yet it comes with many challenges. This paper illustrates how distributed systems evolved from the traditional client-server model to the recently proposed microservices architecture. All architectures are reviewed containing brief definitions, some related work and reasoning of why they had to evolve. A feature comparison of all architectures is also provided.

BROSMAP: A Novel Broadcast Based Secure Mobile Agent Protocol for Distributed Service Applications

Mobile agents are smart programs that migrate from one platform to another to perform the user task. Mobile agents offer flexibility and performance enhancements to systems and service real-time applications. However, security in mobile agent systems is a great concern. In this paper, we propose a novel Broadcast based Secure Mobile Agent Protocol (BROSMAP) for distributed service applications that provides mutual authentication, authorization, accountability, nonrepudiation, integrity, and confidentiality. The proposed system also provides protection from man in the middle, replay, repudiation, and modification attacks. We proved the efficiency of the proposed protocol through formal verification with Scyther verification tool.

A secure mobile agent protocol for vehicular communication systems

A Mobile agent (MA) is an intelligent software that performs tasks on behalf of its owner. MAs collect results migrating from one node to another. MAs have a small size and a low requirement of network bandwidth, they also reduce the load of the network making a Mobile Agent System (MAS) a preferred solution in distributed applications. Intelligent Vehicular Communication Systems are an excellent exemplary candidate for such applications. Although MAs flexibility is a great add on to application however, ensuring their security is considered a challenging task due to its network openness. In this paper, a novel Secure Mobile Agent Protocol (SMAP) dedicated for Vehicular Communication Systems is proposed. SMAP provides the essential security requirements e.g. mutual authentication, confidentiality, integrity, accountability, non repudiation and authorization. Using SMAP owner vehicles receive results as soon as they are requested and therefore, providing fast information retrieval process. Moreover, another important feature of SMAP is that unlike other protocols the loss of the MA does not necessary mean the loss of all the collected data. Furthermore, SMAP guarantees protection from many security attacks such as, Man In The Middle (MITM), replay, masquerade, modification and unauthorized access attacks. Verified using the well known formal verification tool Scyther, SMAP is proven to be a suitable protocol for securing vehicular communication links from malicious actions.

Queuing theory algorithm to find the minimal number of VMs to satisfy SLO response time

This paper presents a queuing algorithm to find the minimal number of VMs to satisfy Service Level Object (SLO) response time. Using queuing theory, the model guarantees SLO for cloud-hosted applications or services by using minimal number of resources with its maximum capacity. Our proposed algorithm reduces cost for both clients and service providers. Clients pay for the usable resources and the service providers provide minimum needed resources.

Network-aware resource allocation for cloud elastic applications

To provide elasticity for cloud-hosted applications, there is a need to specify the appropriate location of the resources (computing and storage resources) while meeting SLA promises. This paper presents literature review, problem statement and research methodology.