Flooded streets — A crowdsourced sensing system for disaster response: A case study

This study is about the disastrous flooding of an Indian metropolitan area of Chennai when the rain had nearly broken the record of 100-years with 374 mm rain falling on December 1, 2015, virtually breaking the November monthly average of 407.4 mm in a day. This city with a population of approximately 6.7 million people came to a standstill. Astonishingly, one of the biggest software development hubs in India was struggling for data and tools to identify which parts of the city were most affected and vulnerable to such climate phenomena. A group of software engineers quickly came up with an idea of using a Flood Map tool managed through crowdsourcing to help the citizens of Chennai and prevent further casualties. They developed a map-based tool called Flooded Streets to report flooded streets using OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. Using this Flood Map tool, anyone in the crowd could click on a street if they knew it was flooded and update the map information. Within the following 24 hours, over 2,500 streets had been reported as flooded by the citizens of Chennai using the Flood Map tool. An ordinary citizen could zoom into a locality, visualize which streets are reported as flooded and decide their next course of action. This map was also a great aid tool for relief and aid workers to track the flooded paths and provide appropriate aids in that area. The map consists of a base layer of low-lying areas created using elevation models from ISRO and NASA, and flooded areas from UNITAR. The map interactivity was built using Mapbox GL and hosted on GitHub. This crowdsourced sensing system is an extraordinary example of disaster response using the crowdsourcing concept, which potentially helped millions of people with the minimum time and resources but with great crowd contributions from both experts and non-experts

Choice of effective messaging protocols for IoT systems: MQTT, CoAP, AMQP and HTTP

The standard and real-time communication tech- nology is an unalloyed inevitability for the development of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, the selection of a standard and effective messaging protocol is a challenging and daunting task for any organisation because it depends on the nature of the IoT system and its messaging requirements. Copious messaging protocols have been developed and employed by various organisations based on their requirements in the last two decades. Though, none of them is able to support all messaging requirements of all types of IoT systems. Messaging protocol is an ongoing dilemma for the IoT industry; consequently, it is important to understand the pros and cons of the widely accepted and emerging messaging protocols for IoT systems to determine their best-fit scenarios. Therefore, this paper presents an evaluation of the four established messaging protocols MQTT, CoAP, AMQP and HTTP for IoT systems. Firstly, it presents the broad comparison among these messaging protocols to introduce their characteristics comparatively. Afterwards, it performs a further in-depth and relative analysis based on some interrelated criteria to gain insight into their strengths and limitations. Thus, based on this detailed evaluation, the user can decide their appropriate usage in various IoT systems according to their requirements and suitability

LPWAN technologies for IoT systems: choice between ultra narrow band and spread spectrum

Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) is imperative for the expansion and development of IoT networks and their connectivity infrastructure. This far-reaching connectivity of low power devices that are placed virtually anywhere is evolving a new things-based business model. This things-based business model has certain requirements such as long range, extended battery life and very low end point cost. LPWAN technologies have successfully addressed these IoT requirements and are receiving wider acceptance in the IoT industry. In most LPWAN technologies, two main alternative communication techniques, Ultra Narrow Band (UNB) and Spread Spectrum (SS) are used at the physical layer. However, the greatest dilemma is the selection of the most suitable technique from UNB and SS for LPWAN. This paper addresses this selection dilemma of UNB and SS by examining some of the most critical factors responsible for the performance of LPWAN technologies such as interference, capacity, link budget and coexistence. Furthermore, it evaluates the most popular UNB-based LPWAN technologies Sigfox and Telensa, and SS-based LPWAN technologies LoRa and RPMA investigating their strengths and limitations for IoT applications

Docker container-based big data processing system in multiple clouds for everyone

Big data processing is progressively becoming essential for everyone to extract the meaningful information from their large volume of data irrespective of types of users and their application areas. Big data processing is a broad term and includes several operations such as the storage, cleaning, organization, modelling, analysis and presentation of data at a scale and efficiency. For ordinary users, the significant challenges are the requirement of the powerful data processing system and its provisioning, installation of complex big data analytics and difficulty in their usage. Docker is a container-based virtualization technology and it has recently introduced Docker Swarm for the development of various types of multi-cloud distributed systems, which can be helpful in solving all above problems for ordinary users. However, Docker is predominantly used in the software development industry, and less focus is given to the data processing aspect of this container-based technology. Therefore, this paper proposes the Docker container-based big data processing system in multiple clouds for everyone, which explores another potential dimension of Docker for big data analysis. This Docker container-based system is an inexpensive and user-friendly framework for everyone who has the knowledge of basic IT skills. Additionally, it can be easily developed on a single machine, multiple machines or multiple clouds. This paper demonstrates the architectural design and simulated development of the proposed Docker container-based big data processing system in multiple clouds. Subsequently, it illustrates the automated provisioning of big data clusters using two popular big data analytics, Hadoop and Pachyderm (without Hadoop) including the Web-based GUI interface Hue for easy data processing in Hadoop

Software CROWD-Sourcing

Software crowdsourcing emerged from the crowdsourcing concept and inherited most of features from it. However, it adapted its nature according to the requirements of software engineering techniques and technologies. Therefore, it is important to understand the detailed elucidation of software crowdsourcing. This paper introduces the connotation of CROWD (Community, Remoteness, Open-call, Web, Diversity) in crowdsourcing and in particular software crowdsourcing. It expounds the meaning and importance of these five CROWD components of software crowdsourcing and their contribution in making it successful

Crowdsourcing, Open-sourcing, Outsourcing and Insourcing Software Development: A Comparative Analysis

The software development industry invariably embraces different models and techniques to develop the best user-oriented and cost-effective solutions. The selection of an appropriate software-sourcing model is one of the key factors that influences the entire development process. The various software-sourcing models Crowdsourcing, Open-sourcing, Outsourcing and Insourcing have been adopted to achieve the best software products. Every software-sourcing model possesses several strengths and may be effective in certain types of projects; however, its limitations may restrain the use of it in some other projects. It is very essential for an organisation to investigate the pros and cons of a potential sourcing-model before going to adopt it for their project. This paper presents a comparative analysis of Crowdsourcing, Open-sourcing, Outsourcing and Insourcing models in order to find out the best fit environment and suitability of each model

An Integrated Network Architecture for a High Speed Distributed Multimedia System.

Computer communication demands for higher bandwidth and smaller delays are increasing rapidly as the march into the twenty-first century gains momentum. These demands are generated by visualization applications which model complex real time phenomena in visual form, electronic document imaging and manipulation, concurrent engineering, on-line databases and multimedia applications which integrate audio, video and data. The convergence of the computer and video worlds is leading to the emergence of a distributed multimedia environment. This research investigates an integrated approach in the design of a high speed computer-video local area network for a distributed multimedia environment. The initial step in providing multimedia services over computer networks is to ensure bandwidth availability for these services. The bandwidth needs based on traffic generated in a distributed multimedia environment is computationally characterized by a model. This model is applied to the real-time problem of designing a backbone for a distributed multimedia environment at the NASA Classroom of the Future Program. The network incorporates legacy LANs and the latest high speed switching technologies. Performance studies have been conducted with different network topologies for various multimedia application scenarios to establish benchmarks for the operation of the network. In these performance studies it has been observed that network topologies play an important role in ensuring that sufficient bandwidth is available for multimedia traffic. After the implementation of the network and the performance studies, it was found that for true quality of service guarantees, some modifications will have to be made in the multimedia operating systems used in client workstations. These modifications would gather knowledge of the channel between source and destination and reserve resources for multimedia communication based on specified requirements. A scheme for reserving resources in a network consisting legacy LAN and ATM is presented to guarantee quality of service for multimedia applications

Securing digital identities in the cloud by selecting an apposite federated identity management from SAML, OAuth and OpenID Connect

Access to computer systems and the information held on them, be it commercially or personally sensitive, is naturally, strictly controlled by both legal and technical security measures. One such method is digital identity, which is used to authenticate and authorize users to provide access to IT infrastructure to perform official, financial or sensitive operations within organisations. However, transmitting and sharing this sensitive information with other organisations over insecure channels always poses a significant security and privacy risk. An example of an effective solution to this problem is the Federated Identity Management (FIdM) standard adopted in the cloud environment. The FIdM standard is used to authenticate and authorize users across multiple organisations to obtain access to their networks and resources without transmitting sensitive information to other organisations. Using the same authentication and authorization details among multiple organisations in one federated group, it protects the identities and credentials of users in the group. This protection is a balance, mitigating security risk whilst maintaining a positive experience for users. Three of the most popular FIdM standards are Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), Open Authentication (OAuth), and OpenID Connect (OIDC). This paper presents an assessment of these standards considering their architectural design, working, security strength and security vulnerability, to cognise and ascertain effective usages to protect digital identities and credentials. Firstly, it explains the architectural design and working of these standards. Secondly, it proposes several assessment criteria and compares functionalities of these standards based on the proposed criteria. Finally, it presents a comprehensive analysis of their security vulnerabilities to aid in selecting an apposite FIdM. This analysis of security vulnerabilities is of great significance because their improper or erroneous deployment may be exploited for attacks

Web Protocols and Challenges of Web Latency in the Web of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been substantially dominated by proprietary and domain specific protocol stacks. There is no universal application protocol for the IoT that can work across many networking interfaces available today. The successful implementation of the IoT requires a single universal application layer protocol for devices and applications to talk to each other, regardless of how they are physically connected. One of the simplest and apparent solutions is to reuse mechanism, which is already extensively used for building scalable and interactive applications, such as the World Wide Web (Web) itself. Therefore, the adoption of the Web ecosystem and infrastructure to build applications for the IoT, leads to the concept of the Web of Things (WoT) and extends the IoT with the amalgamation of the Web as an open IoT ecosystem based upon open standards. While the IoT has been focusing on lower layers and hardware infrastructure, the WoT relies exclusively on application level protocols and tools. Web protocols are a critical factor in the successful implementation of the WoT. However, one of the main issues is web latency that may significantly affect the real-time performance of IoT systems. Therefore, this paper conducts a number of practical investigations on the performance and web latency of application layer protocols: HTTP/1.1, SPDY and HTTP/2. Using experimental results, it analyses the challenges of web protocols for the implementation of WoT