Matthew O. Adigun

Utility Grid Computing and Body Area Network as Enabler for Ubiquitous Rural e-Healthcare Service Provisioning

Body area network (BAN) has the potential to revolutionalize healthcare management by allowing the use of innovative smart sensors for remote diagnosis, treatment and continuous monitoring of a patients body conditions. However, there are many challenges such as low bandwidth, limited computational power and limited functionality for communication with wireless sensor networks. On the other hand, utility grid computing (UGC) is rich in functionality, can be used to provide access to appropriate computational services and can give high-bandwidth to a large collection of distributed time-varying resources. This paper describes an integrated UGC-BAN technology as an enabler for ubiquitous healthcare service provisioning. This would help addressing the challenges of accessibility to quality healthcare services and costs of provisioning to rural communities of developing countries.

Mining Context-based User Preferences for m-Services Applications

Human Computer Interaction (HCI) challenges in mobile computing can be addressed by tailoring access and use of mobile services to user preferences. Our investigation of existent approaches to personalisation in context-aware computing found that user preferences are assumed to be static across different context descriptions, whilst in reality some user preferences are transient and vary with the change in context. Furthermore, existent preference models do not give an intuitive interpretation of a preference and lack user expressiveness. To tackle these issues, this paper presents a user preference model and mining framework for a context-aware m-services environment based on an intuitive quantitative preference measure and a strict partial order preference representation. Experimental evaluation of the user preference mining framework in a simulated m-Commerce environment showed that it is very promising. The preference mining algorithms were found to scale well with increases in the volumes of data.Human Computer Interaction (HCI) challenges in mobile computing can be addressed by tailoring access and use of mobile services to user preferences. Our investigation of existent approaches to personalisation in context-aware computing found that user preferences are assumed to be static across different context descriptions, whilst in reality some user preferences are transient and vary with the change in context. Furthermore, existent preference models do not give an intuitive interpretation of a preference and lack user expressiveness. To tackle these issues, this paper presents a user preference model and mining framework for a context-aware m-services environment based on an intuitive quantitative preference measure and a strict partial order preference representation. Experimental evaluation of the user preference mining framework in a simulated m-Commerce environment showed that it is very promising. The preference mining algorithms were found to scale well with increases in the volumes of data.

Building an Ontology-Based Framework for Tourism Recommendation Services

The tourism product has an intangible nature in that customers cannot physically evaluate the services on offer until practically experienced. This makes having access to credible and authentic information about tourism products before the actual experience very valuable. An Ontology being a formal, explicit specification of concepts of a domain provides a viable platform for the development of credible knowledge-based tourism information services. In this paper, we present an approach aimed at enabling assorted intelligent recommendations services in tourism support systems using ontologies. A suite of tourism ontologies was developed and engaged to enable a prototypical e-tourism system with various knowledge-based recommendation capabilities. A usability evaluation of the system yields encouraging results as a demonstration of the viability of our approach.

Design and implementation of a topology control scheme for Wireless Mesh Networks

The Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) backbone is usually comprised of stationary nodes but the transient nature of wireless links results in changing network topologies. Topology Control (TC) aims to preserve network connectivity in ad hoc and mesh networks and an abundance of theoretical results on the effectiveness of TC exist. Practical evaluations of TC schemes that provide gradual transceiver power adjustments for the WMN backbone are however in their infancy. In this paper we investigate the feasibility of power control in a popular WMN backbone device and design and evaluate an autonomous, light-weight TC scheme called PlainTC. An indoor test-bed evaluation shows that PlainTC is able to maintain network connectivity, achieve significant transceiver power savings and reduce MAC-level contention but that no significant reductions in physical layer interference were realised. The evaluation has also highlighted the danger of associating power savings with network lifetime. Further larger-scale experiments are required to confirm these results.

Insider threat detection model for the cloud

Cloud computing is a revolutionary technology that is changing the way people and organizations conduct business. It promises to help organizations save money on IT expenditure while increasing reliability, efficiency and productivity. However, despite the potential benefits that the cloud promises its users, it is facing some security challenges. Insider threats are some of the growing security concerns that are hindering the adoption of the cloud. Cloud providers are faced with a challenge of monitoring usage patterns of users so as to ensure that malicious insiders do not compromise the security of customer data and applications. Solutions are still needed to ensure that the data stored in the cloud is secure from malicious insiders of the cloud service provider. This paper presents an Insider Threat Detection Model that can be used to detect suspicious insider activities. An experimental system was designed to implement this model. This system uses sequential rule mining to detect malicious users by comparing incoming events against user profiles.

A testbed evaluation of energy-efficiency of routing protocols in battery-powered wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks have been shown to be an appropriate technology for rural areas. However, in most African countries, electricity is scarce in rural areas. A candidate solution to the power-constraint problem in these areas is the use of solar/battery-powered nodes. Different protocols at different layers have varying effects on the energy consumption of the nodes. However, it is not clear how these protocols affect the energy consumption of a battery-powered node in a testbed environment. This paper evaluates the influence of AODV and OLSR on the lifetime of battery-powered nodes when subjected to different transmission power levels and payload sizes. An indoor testbed evaluation indicates that OLSR at maximum transmission power with maximum payload outperform others with regards to packet delivery ratio, average throughput and average energy cost per bit. Whilst AODV at minimum transmission power with maximum payload performs best with regards to the node lifetime.

A comparative analysis of pricing models for enterprise cloud platforms

Research and commercial efforts are currently addressing challenges and providing solutions in cloud computing. Business models are emerging to address different use case scenarios of cloud computing. In this paper, we present the evaluation of a virtual enterprise (VE)-enabled cloud enterprise architecture for small medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs) against EC2 pricing model to prove that our pricing model is more suitable for small medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs). This model is based on the realization that it is not economically viable for SMMEs to acquire their own private cloud infrastructure or even subscribe to public cloud services as a single entity. In our VE-enabled cloud enterprise architecture for SMMEs, temporary co-operations are created to realize the value of a short term business opportunity that the partner SMMEs cannot (or can, but only to a lesser extent) capture on their own. The pricing model obtained from our proposed business model shows the benefits that are derived from using the VE cloud model over subscription to a public cloud as a single business enterprise. The pricing structure of our VE cloud model is up to 17.82 times economical compared to the equivalent Amazon EC2 instance type pricing model.

Evaluating the energy-efficiency of transport layer protocols in a battery-powered wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks have been shown to be an appropriate technology for rural areas. However, in most African countries, electricity is scarce in rural areas. A candidate solution to the power-constraint problem in these areas is the use of solar/battery-powered nodes. Different protocols at different layers have varying effects on the energy consumption of the nodes. However, it is not clear how these protocols affect the energy consumption of a battery-powered node in a testbed environment. This paper evaluates the influence of TCP and UDP on the lifetime of battery-powered nodes when subjected to different transmission power levels and payload sizes. An indoor testbed evaluation shows that UDP at maximum transmission power with minimum payload performs best with regards to the node lifetime, TCP at maximum payload with maximum transmission power performs best with regards to packet delivery ratio and throughput and TCP at maximum transmission power with minimum payload consumes the least transmission energy. (6 pages)

Service Supplier Infrastructure for Location-based M-Commerce

Dynamic development and improvement of mobile devices enforces more attention to the manner in which information is handled (storage and management) among participating components in mobile commerce environment. There are many instances when tourists become strangers in foreign countries and become worried about available services in each and every place they visit. These services which are known as location based services are normally available to only subscribers of those services. This research proposes a dynamic service discovery mechanism whereby every mobile user is capable of service discovery irrespective of being a subscriber or not. The research focuses on the structure of location based service suppliers database and the infrastructure, in which participating components interact to enable mobile users in a given coverage area to easily access available services that are provided by suppliers in an advertising form. Through network operators using Mobile Network Coverage Area (MNCA), mobile devices current location is automatically detected. This mechanism occurs when a user with mobile device registers with local network transmitter through which network operators identify its location and inform Location Based Application Server (LBAS) about the current location of the user.

QoS-aware single service selection mechanism for ad-hoc mobile cloud computing

Mobile technology has made notable progress over the past few years, this is due to the development of new handheld devices, improved wide area cellular coverage and seamless integration of wireless data access into mobile devices. These recent advances in wireless internet technologies have given birth to the Mobile Cloud Computing paradigm. However, intermittent internet disconnection and others lead to the evolution of ad-hoc mobile cloud where mobile devices exposes their computing resources and residence services to other devices. One challenge in the ad-hoc mobile cloud is that of service selection especially in a virtualized ad hoc mobile environment. This is because the best service to be selected might have left after discovery as a result of the dynamic nature of the ad hoc mobile system. To resolve this challenge, we propose a single service selection mechanism where the instances or images pertaining to the information of community members are stored temporarily on centralized virtual node. When a selection is to be done, these images are searched instead of searching individual node. A multi-criteria decision is proposed as our solution approach. Experiment is conducted using Execution time as the QoS parameter. Evaluation and analysis are carried out. We first recorded an increase in execution time as the number of services increases. But at a certain period, the execution time increment is not well noticeable or proportional to service increment. This is attributed to the service images that are already in the virtual leading server thereby reducing the execution time.