Yasir Malik

Evaluation of PhonAge: An Adapted Smartphone Interface for Elderly People

Smartphones can play a significant role in maintaining decent Quality of Life for elderly people. Key factor to Smartphones usage success among elderly people depends on the accessibility of phone interface. In this paper, we present preliminary evaluation results of our PhonAge, an accessible and adaptable interface for Smartphones that is customized to the elderly profile. The results of the evaluation show adequacy of the interface to elderly needs. The evaluation feedbacks also helped in improving PhonAge interface design.

Review of Challenges, Requirements, and Approaches of Pervasive Computing System Evaluation

Abstract Performance evaluation process identifies direction for future research and development. Tremendous efforts have been invested in the related research; however, no standard or commonly accepted methodology exists for evaluating and driving future research. In this paper, we review challenges, requirements, and approaches for evaluating pervasive computing systems. To position evaluation efforts presented in literature, we assembled a design and evaluation life cycle. This review is conducted to have a clear understanding of available solutions and their limitations in order to help in establishing strategy for designing comprehensive evaluation framework for pervasive computing systems.

Collaborative Peer to Peer Defense Mechanism for DDoS Attacks

Abstract Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are the most common and easiest attacks to propagate over internet. It causes a high degree of destruction to the network and systems resources. The destructive nature of DDoS attacks force security engineers to design defense solutions which can detect and take counter actions to defend against such attacks. In this paper, we investigated the packet flood attacks and presented a collaborative peer to peer defense mechanism. The proposed solution detects the attack at victim edge router and sends the alert messages to its neighboring nodes which allow them to proactively defend themselves. Simulation results shows the e_ciency of the solution with less false positives at victim edge router and less damage to the network due to proactive defense approach.

PhonAge: Adapted SmartPhone for Aging Population

SmartPhones can play a significant role in maintaining decent a Quality of Life for elderly people. There are numerous solutions available on SmartPhones that can assist the elderly in their activities of daily living, however these solutions are sometimes not welcomed in elderly community due to usability and accessibility factors. In this paper, we present PhonAge, an accessible & adaptable solution for SmartPhones that can host diverse useful services to elderly people. The first stage user evaluation results shows the usability of our solution.

A taxonomy driven approach towards evaluating pervasive computing system

This paper presents taxonomical classification of pervasive computing system that allows characterizing the system and helps to identify most defining performance parameters for evaluation. Tremendous efforts have been put in the related research, but there is no standard or commonly accepted model to benchmark systems and to identify direction for future research. We survey various systems published in the literature and identify their distinctive features to construct a classification scheme, and the outcome is the taxonomy of pervasive computing systems that allows us to devise strategy on how to evaluate a wide variety of these systems.

A Peer-to-Peer Architecture for Remote Service Discovery

Abstract We propose a new service discovery architecture for enabling typical (local) service discovery mechanisms (without the ability of remote service discovery) to discover services remotely. Our architecture does not depend on any particular local discovery protocol and is realized in a fully distributed (namely, peer-to-peer) manner.

Reliable communication protocol for inter-vehicular network

This paper presents the reliable broadcast protocol for Inter-Vehicular networks. Traffic fatalities are one of the leading causes of death in the world. Vehicular communication technology such as (vehicular ad hoc networks) has emerged as one of promising technology in improving the safety of drivers, passengers, and pedestrians on the road. In vehicular ad hoc networks majority of the messages are broadcasted to announce the state of a vehicle to it neighbors (e.g. sending emergency warning messages, transmitting state information, etc.). However broadcast in vehicular ad hoc networks cause a broadcast storm problem. In this paper, we present new broadcast protocol that address the broadcast problem and improves the reliability of receiving broadcast messages in vehicular ad hoc network. Simulation results shows the efficiency of proposed protocol.

Defense and Monitoring Model for Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

Abstract Due to emergence of wireless networks and immense use of hand held devices, wireless networks encounter a great threat of denial of service attack. Traditionally IP-Based Filtering has been used to combat these attacks, however studies shows that thousands of distributed zombies work in cooperation generate huge network traffic that result in distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks and illegitimate access to resources and services. In this paper, first we studied attacks and mitigation scenarios to analyze network wide DDoS security anomalies. This will help us to drive supplementary active measurements to characterize the strength and characteristic of attacks to improve correlation of our log data and with other publicly available network traffic analysis data. Secondly, we presented a monitoring scheme to simulate a variety of attacks on different mobile operating system. This will identify the potential threat of different DDoS attacks for such platform and traffic scanning activity to avoid detection of attacks such as Ping to Death DDoS attack. Third, we followed proceedings of an enduring basis to extort trends in the attack frequency, make-up, and production of extensive DDoS attacks. This longitudinal analysis was necessary for understanding the progression of the threats and vulnerabilities. In conclusion, while analyzing our early results concerning large-scale DDoS attack. We used a hybrid approach to diminish and prevent the attack. Network Simulator 2 (NS-2) is used to imitate the real environment and to create attack traffic with different attack strength. The simulation results are encouraging as we were able to establish, and approximate strength of DDoS attack efficiently

Formal Modeling and Analysis of Context-Aware Medication Management System for Smart Houses

Medication management systems are useful aids in assisting elderly people in compliance with their medication, and reduce the risk of serious health concerns or hospitalization. These system share the characteristics of safety critical systems, thus analysis of such system behavior is important to avoid serious problems. Formal methods are among powerful tools that can be used for modeling and verification of systems components and their behavior. We present in this paper formal modeling of a context-aware medication management system designed to support elderly people in smart house.

Peer-to-Peer Remote Service Discovery in Pervasive Computing

Service discovery is important in realizing the concept of pervasive computing; consequently, service discovery protocols must be able to work in the heterogeneous environment offered by this computing paradigm. Remote service discovery in particular has not been properly achieved so far. In an attempt to remedy this we propose a new architecture for enabling local service discovery mechanisms to discover services remotely. We first base our architecture on Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) as an example of local service discovery protocols, and Gnutella as an example of peer-to-peer distributed search protocols. We introduce a module called service mirror builder to the UPnP protocol, and a remote communication protocol over a Gnutella network. We then note that our architecture is actually independent on any locally deployed discovery protocol and thus supports full interoperability.