Feasibility of Serverless Cloud Services for Disaster Management Information Systems

Serverless is the new generation of cloud services that supports the pay-per-use policy in true spirit by charging only for the execution time of the hosted code. Amazon introduced serverless service of Lambda in 2014 and it is consider as the most popular serverless cloud service till date. This paper focuses on the serverless cloud services of Lambda and elaborates the importance of Lambda based serverless cloud services for hosting the disaster management information systems (DMIS). We have identified two repeatedly occurring phases of the life cycle of a DMIS viz. low activity phase and high activity phase. Our findings state that serverless cloud services are well-suited for both of these phases of a DMIS. Serverless reduces the operational cost during the low activity phase by detaching the code from running containers and it improves the scalability during the high activity phase by quickly assigning the already available containers from the container pool. However, this all comes with the price of reduced QoS (Quality of Service) for initial requests after specific idle duration and our experimental results report the QoS degradation with respect to idle time for Lambda service

Towards Reliable Computation Offloading in Mobile Ad-Hoc Clouds Using Blockchain

Mobile Ad-hoc Cloud (MAC) refers to the computation offloading of a mobile device among the multiple co-located mobile devices. However, it is difficult to convince the randomly participating mobile devices to offer their resources for performing the computation offloading of other mobile devices. These devices can be convinced for resource sharing by limiting the compute shedding of a device nearly equal to the computation that same device has already performed for other mobile devices. However, this cannot be achieved without establishing the trust among the randomly co-located mobile devices. Blockchain has been already proven for the trust-establishment between multiple independent stakeholders. However, to the best of our knowledge, no one has used blockchain for reliable computation offloading among the independently operating co-located mobile devices of MAC. In this position paper, we proposed the mapping of blockchain concepts for the realization of reliable computation offloading in MAC. We have also identified the future research directions that can be focused for improving the proposed integration of blockchain and MAC

Churn Resilience of Peer-to-Peer Group Membership: a Performance Analysis

Partitioning is one of the main problems in p2p group membership, This problem rises when failures and dynamics of peer participation, or churn, occur in the overlay topology created by a group membership protocol connecting the group of peers. Solutions based on Gossip-based Group Membership (GGM) cope well with the failures while suffer from network dynamics. This paper shows a performance evaluation of SCAMP, one of the most interesting GGM protocol, The analysis points out that the probability of partitioning of the overlay topology created by SCAMP increases with the churn rate, We also compare SCAMP with DET - another membership protocol that deterministically avoids partitions of the overlay, The comparison points out an interesting trade-off between (i) reliability, in terms of guaranteeing overlay connectivity at any churn rate, and (ii) scalability in terms of creating scalable overlay topologies where latencies experienced by a peer during join and leave operations do not increase linearly with the number of peers in the group. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005

Heavy metals toxicity in spinach (Spinacia oleracea) irrigated with sanitary wastewater in rural areas

Heavy metal contamination harms soil and plant growth, making it a serious global environmental issue. Due to the scarcity of canal water, people have become more reliant on groundwater, but aquifers are expensive and of poor quality. Therefore, wastewater has become one of the essential sources of irrigation in developing countries and rural areas. In rural areas, sanitary, sewage, and municipal wastewater are the most common sources of irrigation. The objective was to analyze and compare the concentration of heavy metals in Spinach (Spinacia oleracea) collected from two different sites, i.e., one field irrigated using sanitary wastewater and another by tube well water through drainage ditches in a rural area of Faisalabad. AAS (Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometry) analyzed heavy metals from plants through irrigated water, soil, and the collected edible parts of plant samples. The samples were digested by using acids and AAS-analyzed metals. The concentration of Cd (0.051 ± 0.029) mg/l found higher than the recommended values by WHO (0.01 mg/l) in sanitary wastewater, as well as Cd concentration (0.478 ± 0.276) mg/kg in edible parts of spinach, also detected beyond the permissible limits (0.2) mg/kg of WHO (2007). These exceeding values of Cd in edible parts of spinach may cause serious human health risks

Erratum to: Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy (3rd edition) (Autophagy, 12, 1, 1-222, 10.1080/15548627.2015.1100356

non present