A Multilayer Low-Altitude Airspace Model for UAV Traffic Management

in Samir Labib, Nader; Danoy, Grégoire; Musial, Jedrzej (Eds.) et al 9th ACM Symposium on Design and Analysis of Intelligent Vehicular Networks and Applications (DIVANet '19) (2019, November)

Over the recent years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles' (UAVs) technology developed rapidly. In turn shedding light on a wide range of potential civil and commercial applications ranging from mapping and ... [more ▼]

Over the recent years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles' (UAVs) technology developed rapidly. In turn shedding light on a wide range of potential civil and commercial applications ranging from mapping and surveillance, parcel delivery to more demanding ones that require UAVs to operate in heterogeneous swarms. However, with the great advantages UAVs bring, they are expected to soon dominate the shared, low-altitude airspace over populated cities, introducing multiple new research challenges in safely managing the unprecedented traffic demands. The main contribution of this work is addressing the complex problem of UAV traffic management at an abstract level by proposing a structure for the uncontrolled low-altitude airspace. The paper proposes a model of the airspace as a weighted multilayer network of nodes and airways and presents a set of experimental simulations of UAV traffic for the verification and validation of the model. Finally, the paper outlines our intended future work. [less ▲]

Trustworthiness in IoT - A Standards Gap Analysis on Security, Data Protection and Privacy

in Samir Labib, Nader; Brust, Matthias R.; Danoy, Grégoire (Eds.) et al Trustworthiness in IoT - A Standards Gap Analysis on Security, Data Protection and Privacy (2019, October)

With the emergence of new digital trends like Internet of Things (IoT), more industry actors and technical committees pursue research in utilising such technologies as they promise a better and optimised ... [more ▼]

With the emergence of new digital trends like Internet of Things (IoT), more industry actors and technical committees pursue research in utilising such technologies as they promise a better and optimised management, improved energy efficiency and a better quality living through a wide array of value-added services. However, as sensing, actuation, communication and control become increasingly more sophisticated, such promising data-driven systems generate, process, and exchange larger amounts of security-critical and privacy-sensitive data, which makes them attractive targets of attacks. In turn this affirms the importance of trustworthiness in IoT and emphasises the need of a solid technical and regulatory foundation. The goal of this paper is to first introduce the concept of trustworthiness in IoT, its main pillars namely, security, privacy and data protection, and then analyse the state-of-the-art in research and standardisation for each of these subareas. Throughout the paper, we develop and refer to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as a promising value-added service example of mobile IoT devices. The paper then presents a thorough gap analysis and concludes with recommendations for future work. [less ▲]

A GP Hyper-Heuristic Approach for Generating TSP Heuristics

in 33rd IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2019) (2019, May 20)

A Memory-Based Label Propagation Algorithm for Community Detection

in Complex Networks and Their Applications VII (2019)

The objective of a community detection algorithm is to group similar nodes in a network into communities, while increasing the dissimilarity between them. Several methods have been proposed but many of ... [more ▼]

The objective of a community detection algorithm is to group similar nodes in a network into communities, while increasing the dissimilarity between them. Several methods have been proposed but many of them are not suitable for large-scale networks because they have high complexity and use global knowledge. The Label Propagation Algorithm (LPA) assigns a unique label to every node and propagates the labels locally, while applying the majority rule to reach a consensus. Nodes which share the same label are then grouped into communities. Although LPA excels with near linear execution time, it gets easily stuck in local optima and often returns a single giant community. To overcome these problems we propose MemLPA, a novel LPA where each node implements memory and the decision rule takes past states of the network into account. We demonstrate through extensive experiments on the Lancichinetti-Fortunato-Radicchi benchmark and a set of real-world networks that MemLPA outperforms most of state-of-the-art community detection algorithms. [less ▲]

A Memory-Based Label Propagation Algorithm for Community Detection

in Aiello, Luca Maria; Cherifi, Chantal; Cherifi, Hocine (Eds.) et al Complex Networks and Their Applications VII (2018, December 02)

The objective of a community detection algorithm is to group similar nodes in a network into communities, while increasing the dis- similarity between them. Several methods have been proposed but many of ... [more ▼]

The objective of a community detection algorithm is to group similar nodes in a network into communities, while increasing the dis- similarity between them. Several methods have been proposed but many of them are not suitable for large-scale networks because they have high complexity and use global knowledge. The Label Propagation Algorithm (LPA) assigns a unique label to every node and propagates the labels locally, while applying the majority rule to reach a consensus. Nodes which share the same label are then grouped into communities. Although LPA excels with near linear execution time, it gets easily stuck in local optima and often returns a single giant community. To overcome these problems we propose MemLPA, a novel LPA where each node imple- ments memory and the decision rule takes past states of the network into account. We demonstrate through extensive experiments on the Lancichinetti-Fortunato-Radicchi benchmark and a set of real-world net- works that MemLPA outperforms most of state-of-the-art community detection algorithms. [less ▲]

A Standardized Broker Model in Smart Cities

Poster (2018, May)

As urban residents are expected to represent more than 60 per cent of the world’s population by 2050, the current developments and interests in the “Smart City” concept are essential to enable the ... [more ▼]

As urban residents are expected to represent more than 60 per cent of the world’s population by 2050, the current developments and interests in the “Smart City” concept are essential to enable the successful transition to this new era. This paradigm relies on the integration of emerging Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud Computing, Big Data to manage assets and resources efficiently while facilitating the planning, construction, management and smart services within cities. While smart cities aim to enhance the quality, performance and interactivity of urban services at reduced cost, their realization is faced by many regulatory and technical challenges. Among these challenges, is the integration of renewable energy resources to the utility system of smart cities motivated by the increasingclimate change concerns. Adding further to its complexity, is the challenge of incorporating multiple renewable energy retailers in the same region each with their own pricing strategies due to the lack of a standardized metering indicator and billing system. These challenges create a need for an intelligent and standardized cloud-based energy broker to satisfying the end-user requests, and minimize expenses by efficiently selecting the most suitable energy retailer. In our work, a particular focus is raised towards the optimization of such energy brokering service which is motivated by the orchestration of a brokering role aiming to improve user experience and interaction with smart city services. Hence our main contribution is proposing a standardized intelligent broker model with smart trading strategies to cope with the dynamics and complexity of the energy retail market, while allocating energy resources based on endusers’ demands. This is achieved through the following steps: 1) studying a complete model of the broker service and involved parties within the exposed framework. 2) proposing a multiobjective heuristic to provide a dynamic optimization of the grid operations and resources, with full cyber-security, within the boundaries of the city. 3) analyzing the gaps among industry practices, market requirements and current technical standardization efforts at ISO/IEC JTC 1/ SC 38 (Cloud Computing and distributed platform) in order to pave the way to establishing standards in metering indicators and billing principles for cloud services this while keeping in mind privacy and data protection risks and regulations enforced by ISO JT1/SC 27 and EU General Data Protection Regulation effective May 2018. This research was conducted in collaboration with ILNAS - the Institut Luxem- bourgeois de la Normalisation, de l’Accréditation, de la Sécurité et qualité des produits et services (ILNAS) under the authority of the Minister of Economy, Luxembourg. [less ▲]

Detecting Target-Area Link-Flooding DDoS Attacks using Traffic Analysis and Supervised Learning

in Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing (2018)

Coverage optimization with connectivity preservation for UAV swarms applying chaotic dynamics

in IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC), Columbus 17-21 July 2017 (2017, August 11)

Cooperative usage of multiple UAVs as a swarm can deliver high-quality surveillance performance. However, the communication capabilities within the UAV swarm must be maintained for local data propagation ... [more ▼]

Cooperative usage of multiple UAVs as a swarm can deliver high-quality surveillance performance. However, the communication capabilities within the UAV swarm must be maintained for local data propagation to swarm members in favor of achieving an efficient global behavior. In this paper, we address the problem of optimizing two adversary criteria for such a UAV swarm: (a) maximizing the area coverage, while (b) preserving network connectivity. Our approach, called CACOC², solves the problem with a novel chaotic ant colony optimization approach, which combines an Ant Colony Optimization approach (ACO) with a chaotic dynamical system. CACOC² employs swarming behavior to obtain UAV clustering that result in maximized area coverage and preserved network connectivity. We show by extensive simulations how the size of the UAV swarm influences the coverage and connectivity. A metrics comparison chart shows the correlation of coverage and connectivity metrics. [less ▲]

Defending Against Intrusion of Malicious UAVs with Networked UAV Defense Swarms

in 42nd IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (2017)

The Privacy Exposure Problem in Mobile Location-Based Services

in 2016 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM) (2016)

Mobile location-based services (LBSs) empowered by mobile crowdsourcing provide users with context- aware intelligent services based on user locations. As smartphones are capable of collecting and ... [more ▼]

Mobile location-based services (LBSs) empowered by mobile crowdsourcing provide users with context- aware intelligent services based on user locations. As smartphones are capable of collecting and disseminating massive user location-embedded sensing information, privacy preservation for mobile users has become a crucial issue. This paper proposes a metric called privacy exposure to quantify the notion of privacy, which is subjective and qualitative in nature, in order to support mobile LBSs to evaluate the effectiveness of privacy-preserving solutions. This metric incorporates activity coverage and activity uniformity to address two primary privacy threats, namely activity hotspot disclosure and activity transition disclosure. In addition, we propose an algorithm to minimize privacy exposure for mobile LBSs. We evaluate the proposed metric and the privacy-preserving sensing algorithm via extensive simulations. Moreover, we have also implemented the algorithm in an Android-based mobile system and conducted real-world experiments. Both our simulations and experimental results demonstrate that (1) the proposed metric can properly quantify the privacy exposure level of human activities in the spatial domain and (2) the proposed algorithm can effectively cloak users' activity hotspots and transitions at both high and low user-mobility levels. [less ▲]