5 research outputs found
Multi-agent based framework for secure and reliable communication among open clouds
Cloud Computing (CC) is an emerging field of Information Technology. CC environment
completely relies on the perception of utility, service-oriented, cluster and grid computing.
The idea of virtualization discriminates CC from other fields. CC environment provides better,
reliable, and scalable services. Since clouds are working independently smooth, but
standalone, cloud operation is complex. Therefore the need of interoperability and portability
with other clouds come into play which increases the scope of the cloud environment. Then,
the security threats are increased in the cloud environments. In order to address the problem,
a Secure Multi-Agent based framework for Communication among Open Clouds is proposed
in this paper. In the framework, each cloud has a secure Mobile Agent which is responsible of
the secure communication among clouds. Thus, authentication of Mobile Agents is performed
by the Directory Agent. Directory agents are included in order to avoid the joining malicious
or attacker mobile agents into the cloud. The theoretical and practical results show that
Multi-agent based framework is more reliable and secure than other cloud environments.Mehmood, A.; Song, H.; Lloret, J. (2014). Multi-agent based framework for secure and reliable communication among open clouds. Network Protocols and Algorithms. 6(4):60-76. doi:10.5296/npa.v6i4.6028S60766
Secure Multiuser Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks with TAS and Cooperative Jamming
In this paper, we investigate the secure transmission in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consisting of one multiple-antenna base station (BS), multiple single-antenna legitimate users, one single-antenna eavesdropper and one multiple-antenna cooperative jammer. In an effort to reduce the scheduling complexity and extend the battery lifetime of the sensor nodes, the switch-and-stay combining (SSC) scheduling scheme is exploited over the sensor nodes. Meanwhile, transmit antenna selection (TAS) is employed at the BS and cooperative jamming (CJ) is adopted at the jammer node, aiming at achieving a satisfactory secrecy performance. Moreover, depending on whether the jammer node has the global channel state information (CSI) of both the legitimate channel and the eavesdropper's channel, it explores a zero-forcing beamforming (ZFB) scheme or a null-space artificial noise (NAN) scheme to confound the eavesdropper while avoiding the interference to the legitimate user. Building on this, we propose two novel hybrid secure transmission schemes, termed TAS-SSC-ZFB and TAS-SSC-NAN, for WSNs. We then derive the exact closed-form expressions for the secrecy outage probability and the effective secrecy throughput of both schemes to characterize the secrecy performance. Using these closed-form expressions, we further determine the optimal switching threshold and obtain the optimal power allocation factor between the BS and jammer node for both schemes to minimize the secrecy outage probability, while the optimal secrecy rate is decided to maximize the effective secrecy throughput for both schemes. Numerical results are provided to verify the theoretical analysis and illustrate the impact of key system parameters on the secrecy performance.This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China (No. 61501507), and the Jiangsu Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (No. BK20150719). The work of Nan Yang is supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP150103905)
Providing security and fault tolerance in P2P connections between clouds for mHealth services
[EN] The mobile health (mHealth) and electronic health (eHealth) systems are useful to maintain a correct administration of health information and services. However, it is mandatory to ensure a secure data transmission and in case of a node failure, the system should not fall down. This fact is important because several vital systems could depend on this infrastructure. On the other hand, a cloud does not have infinite computational and storage resources in its infrastructure or would not provide all type of services. For this reason, it is important to establish an interrelation between clouds using communication protocols in order to provide scalability, efficiency, higher service availability and flexibility which allow the use of services, computing and storage resources of other clouds. In this paper, we propose the architecture and its secure protocol that allows exchanging information, data, services, computing and storage resources between all interconnected mHealth clouds. The system is based on a hierarchic architecture of two layers composed by nodes with different roles. The routing algorithm used to establish the connectivity between the nodes is the shortest path first (SPF), but it can be easily changed by any other one. Our architecture is highly scalable and allows adding new nodes and mHealth clouds easily, while it tries to maintain the load of the cloud balanced. Our protocol design includes node discovery, authentication and fault tolerance. We show the protocol operation and the secure system design. Finally we provide the performance results in a controlled test bench.Lloret, J.; Sendra, S.; Jimenez, JM.; Parra-Boronat, L. (2016). Providing security and fault tolerance in P2P connections between clouds for mHealth services. Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications. 9(5):876-893. doi:10.1007/s12083-015-0378-3S87689395The Fifty-eighth World Health Assembly, Resolutions and Decisions. Document: A58/21. 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Comput Methods Prog Biomed 110(3):253–259Bourouis A, Feham M, Bouchachia A (2012) A new architecture of a ubiquitous health monitoring system: a prototype of cloud mobile health monitoring system. arXiv preprint. Reference: arXiv:1205.6910Chen KR, Lin YL, Huang MS (2011) A mobile biomedical device by novel antenna technology for cloud computing resource toward pervasive healthcare. In proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering (BIBE 2011), Taichung, pp 133–136Lacuesta R, Lloret J, Sendra S, Peñalver L (2014), Spontaneous ad hoc mobile cloud computing network. Sci World J (Article ID 232419): 1–19Ghafoor KZ, Bakar KA, Mohammed MA, Lloret J (2013) Vehicular cloud computing: trends and challenges (Chapter 14). In Mobile Networks and Cloud computing Convergence for Progressive Services and Applications. IGI Global. pp. 262–274. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-4781-7.ch014Wan J, Zhang D, Zhao S, Yang LT, Lloret J (2014) Context-aware vehicular cyber-physical systems with cloud support: architecture, challenges and solutions. IEEE Commun Mag 52(8):106–113. doi: 10.1109/MCOM.2014.6871677Rodrigues JJPC, Zhou L, Mendes LDP, Lin K, Lloret J (2012) Distributed media-aware flow scheduling in cloud computing environment. Comput Commun 35(15):1819–1827Dutta R, Annappa B (2014) Protection of data in unsecured public cloud environment with open, vulnerable networks using threshold-based secret sharing. Netw Protoc Algoritm 6(1):58–75Modares H, Lloret J, Moravejosharieh A, Salleh R (2013) Security in mobile cloud computing (Chapter 5). In Mobile Networks and Cloud computing Convergence for Progressive Services and Applications. IGI Global. pp. 79–91Mehmood A, Song H, Lloret J (2014) Multi-agent based framework for secure and reliable communication among open clouds. 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Cloud Computing in VANETs: Architecture, Taxonomy, and Challenges
Cloud Computing in VANETs (CC-V) has been investigated into two major themes of research including Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC) and Vehicle using Cloud (VuC). VCC is the realization of autonomous cloud among vehicles to share their abundant resources. VuC is the efficient usage of conventional cloud by on-road vehicles via a reliable Internet connection. Recently, number of advancements have been made to address the issues and challenges in VCC and VuC. This paper qualitatively reviews CC-V with the emphasis on layered architecture, network component, taxonomy, and future challenges. Specifically, a four-layered architecture for CC-V is proposed including perception, co-ordination, artificial intelligence and smart application layers. Three network component of CC-V namely, vehicle, connection and computation are explored with their cooperative roles. A taxonomy for CC-V is presented considering major themes of research in the area including design of architecture, data dissemination, security, and applications. Related literature on each theme are critically investigated with comparative assessment of recent advances. Finally, some open research challenges are identified as future issues. The challenges are the outcome of the critical and qualitative assessment of literature on CC-V
Agent-based framework for person re-identification
In computer based human object re-identification, a detected human is recognised to a
level sufficient to re-identify a tracked person in either a different camera capturing the
same individual, often at a different angle, or the same camera at a different time and/or
the person approaching the camera at a different angle. Instead of relying on face
recognition technology such systems study the clothing of the individuals being monitored
and/or objects being carried to establish correspondence and hence re-identify the human
object.
Unfortunately present human-object re-identification systems consider the entire human
object as one connected region in making the decisions about similarity of two objects
being matched. This assumption has a major drawback in that when a person is partially
occluded, a part of the occluding foreground will be picked up and used in matching. Our
research revealed that when a human observer carries out a manual human-object re-identification
task, the attention is often taken over by some parts of the human
figure/body, more than the others, e.g. face, brightly colour shirt, presence of texture
patterns in clothing etc., and occluding parts are ignored.
In this thesis, a novel multi-agent based framework is proposed for the design of a human
object re-identification system. Initially a HOG based feature extraction is used in a SVM
based classification of a human object as a human of a full-body or of half body nature.
Subsequently the relative visual significance of the top and the bottom parts of the human,
in re-identification is quantified by the analysis of Gray Level Co-occurrence based
texture features and colour histograms obtained in the HSV colour space. Accordingly
different weights are assigned to the top and bottom of the human body using a novel
probabilistic approach. The weights are then used to modify the Hybrid Spatiogram and
Covariance Descriptor (HSCD) feature based re-identification algorithm adopted.
A significant novelty of the human object re-identification systems proposed in this thesis
is the agent based design procedure adopted that separates the use of computer vision
algorithms for feature extraction, comparison etc., from the decision making process of re-identification. Multiple agents are assigned to execute different algorithmic tasks and
the agents communicate to make the required logical decisions.
Detailed experimental results are provided to prove that the proposed multi agent based
framework for human object re-identification performs significantly better than the state of-the-art algorithms. Further it is shown that the design flexibilities and scalabilities of
the proposed system allows it to be effectively utilised in more complex computer vision
based video analytic/forensic tasks often conducted within distributed, multi-camera
systems