Muhammad Taqi Raza

An enhanced backbone-assisted reliable framework for wireless sensor networks.

An extremely reliable source to sink communication is required for most of the contemporary WSN applications especially pertaining to military, healthcare and disaster-recovery. However, due to their intrinsic energy, bandwidth and computational constraints, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) encounter several challenges in reliable source to sink communication. In this paper, we present a novel reliable topology that uses reliable hotlines between sensor gateways to boost the reliability of end-to-end transmissions. This reliable and efficient routing alternative reduces the number of average hops from source to the sink. We prove, with the help of analytical evaluation, that communication using hotlines is considerably more reliable than traditional WSN routing. We use reliability theory to analyze the cost and benefit of adding gateway nodes to a backbone-assisted WSN. However, in hotline assisted routing some scenarios where source and the sink are just a couple of hops away might bring more latency, therefore, we present a Signature Based Routing (SBR) scheme. SBR enables the gateways to make intelligent routing decisions, based upon the derived signature, hence providing lesser end-to-end delay between source to the sink communication. Finally, we evaluate our proposed hotline based topology with the help of a simulation tool and show that the proposed topology provides manifold increase in end-to-end reliability.

ENUM Based Service Discovery Architecture for 6LoWPAN

Service discovery in Ubiquitous Sensor Networks has been targeted mostly for services available within certain proximity, but the service availability only in close vicinity is no longer feasible in the pervasive and ubiquitous era. In order to address the ubiquity in service discovery, we have proposed a framework that makes use of the Electronic Number Mapping (ENUM) protocol. Our network architecture consists of sensor nodes associated with few relatively powerful nodes called master nodes. Only master nodes within IPv6 enabled Low power Personal Area Networks (6LoWPANs) are assigned unique E.164 numbers so that the services offered by the network could be accessed globally. Services destined for sensor nodes first reach the master node to which they are associated to, using the E.164 number of the master node. The gateway of the network performs the task of converting attribute-value pair based human readable queries to E.164 numbers. Also the gateway facilitates its network by running ENUM protocol for service sharing like multimedia, mail, web and many other services. Moreover, a significant improvement in service discovery cost in terms of latency and traffic overhead is observed.

Design and implementation of an architectural framework for web portals in a ubiquitous pervasive environment.

Web Portals function as a single point of access to information on the World Wide Web (WWW). The web portal always contacts the portal’s gateway for the information flow that causes network traffic over the Internet. Moreover, it provides real time/dynamic access to the stored information, but not access to the real time information. This inherent functionality of web portals limits their role for resource constrained digital devices in the Ubiquitous era (U-era). This paper presents a framework for the web portal in the U-era. We have introduced the concept of Local Regions in the proposed framework, so that the local queries could be solved locally rather than having to route them over the Internet. Moreover, our framework enables one-to-one device communication for real time information flow. To provide an in-depth analysis, firstly, we provide an analytical model for query processing at the servers for our framework-oriented web portal. At the end, we have deployed a testbed, as one of the world’s largest IP based wireless sensor networks testbed, and real time measurements are observed that prove the efficacy and workability of the proposed framework.

Dead reckoning based target tracking in wireless sensor networks

Target tracking is one of the key applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) that forms basis for numerous other applications. Real situations in tracking, such as an unexpected change in the mobile events direction, failure of event detection, or transmission failure of an error message may result into erroneous tracking information. Thus, in order to prevent and handle errors effectively, it is required that tracking algorithm must incorporate error avoidance and error correction phase. In this paper we present Dead Reckoning (DR) based target tracking protocol. DR determines targets present position by projecting its past positions and speed over elapsed time and known targets path. Moreover, it inherits the functionality of error correction and error avoidance using a position fix technique. The performance of DR based tracking is also discussed, which confirms the efficacy of the algorithm.

Modular Redundancy for Cloud based IMS Robustness

IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) is an emerging architectural framework that delivers a number of multimedia services -- ranging from voice/video over LTE, interactive gaming and many more -- in operational LTE network. Network operators are embracing cloud-based IMS to meet increasing multimedia traffic demand. They can easily and cost-efficiently implement multimedia applications while ensuring superior end-user experiences through always-on services and real-time engagement. In this paper, we reveal that cloud-based IMS cannot provide session-level resilience under faults and becomes the bottleneck to high service availability. The root cause lies upon the weak failure recovery mechanisms at both IMS protocol and cloud platform that terminate the on-going IMS control-plane procedure. To address this, we propose a design that provides fault-tolerance to IMS control-plane operations. Our design provides modular redundancy to perform real time failure recovery. As the system operates, the control-plane operations are logged at redundant IMS NFs modules. These logs are replayed from the failed operation to resume IMS working after failure. We build our system prototype of open source IMS over cloud platform. Our results show that we can achieve session-level resilience by performing fail-over procedure within tens of milliseconds under different combinations of IMS control-plane operations failures.

An Architectural Framework for Web Portal in Ubiquitous Pervasive Environment

Web Portal functions as a single point of access to information on the World Wide Web (WWW). The web portal always contacts portal’s gateway for the information flow that causes network traffic over the Internet. Moreover it provides real time/dynamic access to the stored information, but not access to the real time information. This inherit functionality of web portal limits its role for the resource constrained digital devices in Ubiquitous era (U-era). This paper presents a framework for the web portal in U-era. We have introduced the concept of Portal Locals in the proposed framework, so that the local queries could be solved locally rather than to route them over the Internet. Moreover our framework enables one-to-one device communication for the real time information flow. To provide the in-depth analysis, firstly we have evaluated our approach through mathematical analysis. At the end, we have deployed a test-bed and real time measurements are observed, which proves the efficacy and workability of the proposed framework.

Exposing LTE Security Weaknesses at Protocol Inter-layer, and Inter-radio Interactions

Despite security shields to protect user communication with both the radio access network and the core infrastructure, 4G LTE is still susceptible to a number of security threats. The vulnerabilities mainly exist due to its protocol’s inter-layer communication, and the access technologies (2G/3G) inter-radio interaction. We categorize the uncovered vulnerabilities in three dimensions, i.e., authentication, security association and service availability, and verify these vulnerabilities in operational LTE networks. In order to assess practical impact from these security threats, we convert these threats into active attacks, where an adversary can (a) kick the victim device out of the network, (b) hijack the victim’s location, and (c) silently drain the victim’s battery power. Moreover, we have shown that the attacker does not need to communicate with the victim device or reside at the device to launch these attacks (i.e., no Trojan or malware is required). We further propose remedies for the identified attacks.

FESP: Fast and Energy Efficient Service Provisioning in 6LoWPAN

In this paper we propose a fast and energy efficient service provisioning approach. In our work, we focus towards the management of already discovered services. We assert that if the sensor nodes share the important service information among each other, then the service re-discovery can be reduced at greater extent. Hence a significant amount of Service Discover (SD) time and the network energy cost can be saved. We propose the threshold-based technique by devising the formula that determines the importance of the service, and a mechanism of sharing that service through the proposed scheme. We also discuss the performance of different SD protocols with and without implementation of proposed Fast and Energy Efficient Service Provisioning (FESP).