Papers by Mohammad Derawi

Sustainability
The widespread use of business intelligence products, services, and applications piques the inter... more The widespread use of business intelligence products, services, and applications piques the interest of researchers in this field. The interest of researchers in business intelligence increases the number of studies significantly. Identifying domain-specific research patterns and trends is thus a significant research problem. This study employs a topic modeling approach to analyze domain-specific articles in order to identify research patterns and trends in the business intelligence field over the last 20 years. As a result, 36 topics were discovered that reflect the field’s research landscape and trends. Topics such as “Organizational Capability”, “AI Applications”, “Data Mining”, “Big Data Analytics”, and “Visualization” have recently gained popularity. A systematic taxonomic map was also created, revealing the research background and BI perspectives based on the topics. This study may be useful to researchers and practitioners interested in learning about the most recent developm...

Sensors
Low-power wide area network (LPWAN) technologies such as IQRF are becoming increasingly popular f... more Low-power wide area network (LPWAN) technologies such as IQRF are becoming increasingly popular for a variety of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, including smart cities, industrial control, and home automation. However, LPWANs are vulnerable to cyber attacks that can disrupt the normal operation of the network or compromise sensitive information. Therefore, analyzing cybersecurity risks before deploying an LPWAN is essential, as it helps identify potential vulnerabilities and threats as well as allowing for proactive measures to be taken to secure the network and protect against potential attacks. In this paper, a security risk analysis of IQRF technology is conducted utilizing the failure mode effects analysis (FMEA) method. The results of this study indicate that the highest risk corresponds to four failure modes, namely compromised end nodes, a compromised coordinator, a compromised gateway and a compromised communication between nodes. Moreover, through this methodology, a...

IEEE Access
This article proposes to design a distributed H ∞ optimal control algorithm for Van der Pol oscil... more This article proposes to design a distributed H ∞ optimal control algorithm for Van der Pol oscillators with unknown internal dynamics, input constraints and external disturbances, via event-triggering signal transmission of the Internet of Things (IoT). First, the graph theory for the IoT is introduced. Second, the dynamics of Van der Pol oscillators are transformed into the tracking dynamics which cooperate via the IoT network. Third, unlike the existing online optimal control algorithms using adaptive dynamic programming, we design an H ∞ optimal control algorithm employing an event-triggering signal transmission mechanism to reduce the burden of communication resource and computation bandwidth of the IoT network. As the triggering condition and approximation parameter update policies are appropriately designed, the algorithm guarantees that the Zeno phenomenon is free, the consensus errors are uniformly ultimately bounded, and the external disturbance is compensated. Finally, numerical simulation results with comparison to the time-triggering algorithms confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Electronics
Owing to its efficiency in the Internet of Things (IoT) applications in terms of low-power connec... more Owing to its efficiency in the Internet of Things (IoT) applications in terms of low-power connectivity, IQRF (Intelligent Connectivity using Radio Frequency) technology appears to be one of the most reasonable IoT technologies in the commercial market. To realize emerging smart building applications using IQRF, it is necessary to study the propagation characteristics of IQRF technology in indoor environments. In this study, preliminary propagation measurements are conducted using IQRF transceivers that operate on the 868 MHz band in a peer-to-peer (P2P) configured system. The measurements are conducted both in a single corridor of a building in a Line-of-Sight (LoS) link and two perpendicular corridors in a Non-Line-of-Sight (NLoS) with one single knife-edge link. Moreover, the measured path loss values are compared with the predicted path loss values in order to comparatively assess the prediction accuracy of the well-known empirical models, such as log-distance, ITU, and WINNER I...

IEEE Access
E-learning has gained further importance and the amount of e-learning research and applications h... more E-learning has gained further importance and the amount of e-learning research and applications has increased exponentially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, it is critical to examine trends and interests in e-learning research and applications during the pandemic period. This paper aims to identify trends and research interests in e-learning articles related to COVID-19 pandemic. Consistent with this aim, a semantic content analysis was conducted on 3562 peer-reviewed journal articles published since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, using the N-gram model and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling approach. Findings of the study revealed the high-frequency bigrams such as ''online learn'', ''online education'', ''online teach'' and ''distance learn'', as well as trigrams such as ''higher education institution'', ''emergency remote teach'', ''education online learn'' and ''online teach learn''. Moreover, the LDA topic modeling analysis revealed 42 topics. The topics of ''Learning Needs'', ''Higher Education'' and ''Social Impact'' respectively were the most focused topics. These topics also revealed concepts, dimensions, methods, tools, technologies, applications, measurement and evaluation models, which are the focal points of e-learning field during the pandemic. The findings of the study are expected to provide insights to researchers and future studies. INDEX TERMS E-learning trends, topic modeling, n-grams, covid-19, topic discovery.

Applied Sciences
This study aims to investigate up-to-date career opportunities and in-demand competence areas and... more This study aims to investigate up-to-date career opportunities and in-demand competence areas and skill sets for cloud computing (CC), which plays a crucial role in the rapidly developing teleworking environments with the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we conducted a semantic content analysis on 10,161 CC job postings using semi-automated text-mining and probabilistic topic-modeling procedures to discover the competency areas and skill sets as semantic topics. Our findings revealed 22 competency areas and 46 skills, which reflect the interdisciplinary background of CC jobs. The top five competency areas for CC were identified as “Engineering”, “Development”, “Security”, “Architecture”, and “Management”. Besides, the top three skills emerged as “Communication Skills”, “DevOps Tools”, and “Software Development”. Considering the findings, a competency-skill map was created that illustrates the correlations between CC competency areas and their related skills. Although there are many...

Sensors
Recently, IQRF has emerged as a promising technology for the Internet of Things (IoT), owing to i... more Recently, IQRF has emerged as a promising technology for the Internet of Things (IoT), owing to its ability to support short- and medium-range low-power communications. However, real world deployment of IQRF-based wireless sensor networks (WSNs) requires accurate path loss modelling to estimate network coverage and other performances. In the existing literature, extensive research on propagation modelling for IQRF network deployment in urban environments has not been provided yet. Therefore, this study proposes an empirical path loss model for the deployment of IQRF networks in a peer-to-peer configured system where the IQRF sensor nodes operate in the 868 MHz band. For this purpose, extensive measurement campaigns are conducted outdoor in an urban environment for Line-of-Sight (LoS) and Non-Line-of-Sight (NLoS) links. Furthermore, in order to evaluate the prediction accuracy of well-known empirical path loss models for urban environments, the measurements are compared with the pred...

IEEE Access
For the past few years, the Internet of Things (IoT) technology continues to not only gain popula... more For the past few years, the Internet of Things (IoT) technology continues to not only gain popularity and importance, but also witnesses the true realization of everything being smart. With the advent of the concept of smart everything, IoT has emerged as an area of great potential and incredible growth. An IoT ecosystem centers around innovation perspective which is considered as its fundamental core. Accordingly, IoT enabling technologies such as hardware and software platforms as well as standards become the core of the IoT ecosystem. However, any large-scale technological integration such as the IoT development poses the challenge to ensure secure data transmission. Perhaps, the ubiquitous and the resource-constrained nature of IoT devices and the sensitive and private data being generated by IoT systems make them highly vulnerable to physical and cyber threats. In this paper, we redefine an IoT ecosystem from the core technologies view point. We propose a modified three layer IoT architecture by dividing the perception layer into elementary blocks based on their attributed functions. Enabling technologies, attacks and security countermeasures are classified under each layer of the proposed architecture. Additionally, to give the readers a broader perspective of the research area, we discuss the role of various state-of-the-art emerging technologies in the IoT security. We present the security aspects of the most prominent standards and other recently developed technologies for IoT which might have the potential to form the yet undefined IoT architecture. Among the technologies presented in this article, we give a special interest to one recent technology in IoT domain. This technology is named IQRF that stands for Intelligent Connectivity using Radio Frequency. It is an emerging technology for wireless packet-oriented communication that operates in sub-GHz ISM band (868 MHz) and which is intended for general use where wireless connectivity is needed, either in a mesh network or pointto-point (P2P) configuration. We also highlighted the security aspects implemented in this technology and we compare it with the other already known technologies. Moreover, a detailed discussion on the possible attacks is presented. These attacks are projected on the IoT technologies presented in this article including IQRF. In addition, lightweight security solutions, implemented in these technologies, to counter these threats in the proposed IoT ecosystem architecture are also presented. Lastly, we summarize the survey by listing out some common challenges and the future research directions in this field. INDEX TERMS Cyber attacks, IoT architecture, Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, IQRF, network security. The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Songwen Pei .

Sensors
This study proposes a simple convolutional neural network (CNN)-based model for vehicle classific... more This study proposes a simple convolutional neural network (CNN)-based model for vehicle classification in low resolution surveillance images collected by a standard security camera installed distant from a traffic scene. In order to evaluate its effectiveness, the proposed model is tested on a new dataset containing tiny (100 × 100 pixels) and low resolution (96 dpi) vehicle images. The proposed model is then compared with well-known VGG16-based CNN models in terms of accuracy and complexity. Results indicate that although the well-known models provide higher accuracy, the proposed method offers an acceptable accuracy (92.9%) as well as a simple and lightweight solution for vehicle classification in low quality images. Thus, it is believed that this study might provide useful perception and understanding for further research on the use of standard low-cost cameras to enhance the ability of the intelligent systems such as intelligent transportation system applications.
Technologies and Infrastructure in Internet of Things (IoT)
Human-Machine Interaction and IoT Applications for a Smarter World

Internet-of-Things-Based Smart Transportation Systems for Safer Roads
2020 IEEE 6th World Forum on Internet of Things (WF-IoT), 2020
From the beginning of civilizations, transportation has been one of the most important requiremen... more From the beginning of civilizations, transportation has been one of the most important requirements for humans. Over the years, it has been evolved to modern transportation systems such as road, train, and air transportation. With the development of technology, intelligent transportation systems have been enriched with Information and Communications Technology (ICT). Nowadays, smart city concept that integrates ICT and Internet-of-Things (IoT) have been appeared to optimize the efficiency of city operations and services. Recently, several IoT-based smart applications for smart cities have been developed. Among these applications, smart services for transportation are highly required to ease the issues especially regarding to road safety. In this context, this study presents a literature review that elaborates the existing IoT-based smart transportation systems especially in terms of road safety. In this way, the current state of IoT-based smart transportation systems for safer roads are provided. Then, the current research efforts undertaken by the authors to provide an IoT-based safe smart traffic system are briefly introduced. It is emphasized that road safety can be improved using Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication technologies via the cloud (Infrastructure-to-Cloud – I2C). Therefore, it is believed that this study offers useful information to researchers for developing safer roads in smart cities.

The authentication via accelerometer-based biometric gait recognition offers a user-friendly alte... more The authentication via accelerometer-based biometric gait recognition offers a user-friendly alternative to common authentication methods on smartphones. It has the great advantage that the authentication can be performed without user interaction. When the user is walking, his walk-pattern can be extracted from the accelerations measured using the integrated sensors of the smartphone. This pattern can be used for authentication. A study showed that users often deactivate the authentication methods of their mobile devices because they consume too much time. Because all steps necessary to perform biometric gait recognition can be executed in the background, no user interaction is necessary for the presented technique. Performing a continuous authentication while the user is walking, an up-to-date authentication result is available at any point in time. During log-in, no calculations are necessary anymore, hence there is no delay. Only in cases where the user is not walking, an alterna...

Electronics, 2020
Generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM) is a waveform for the next-generation communic... more Generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM) is a waveform for the next-generation communication systems to succeed in the drawbacks of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). The symbols of users are transmitted with the time- and frequency-shifted versions of a prototype filter. According to filtering operation, the computational complexity and processing load are high for the devices that suffer from energy consumption. The communication systems are required to support the new generation devices that need low energy consumption and low latency issues. Motivated by such demands of the next-generation communication system, we propose a novel GFDM waveform that we call hexagonal GFDM. The contributions of the hexagonal GFDM are that it: (i) supports short transmission time based on its hexagonal time–frequency allocations; and (ii) provides low latency communication with low computational complexity manner. Furthermore, we design a transmitter and receiver structure...

IEEE Access, 2020
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in building smart cities based on the Internet... more In recent years, there has been a growing interest in building smart cities based on the Internet of Things (IoT) technology. However, selecting a low-cost IoT wireless technology that enables low-power connectivity remains one of the key challenges in integrating IoT to smart cities. In this context, the IQRF technology offers promising opportunities to provide cost-effective solutions. Yet, in the literature, there are limited studies on utilizing IQRF technology for smart city applications. Therefore, this study is aimed at increasing the awareness about the use of IQRF technology in IoT-based smart city development. For this purpose, a review of smart city architectures along with challenges/requirements in adopting IoT for smart cities is provided. Then, some of the common cost-effective IoT wireless technologies that enable low-power consumption are briefly presented. Next, the benefits of IQRF technology over other technologies are discussed by making theoretical comparisons based on technical documentations and reports. Moreover, the research efforts currently being undertaken by the authors as a part of ongoing project on the development of IoT-based smart city system in Gjøvik Municipality, Norway, are conceptually introduced. Finally, the future research directions are addressed.

Electronics, 2021
This study aims to provide a simple approach to characterize the effects of scattering by human b... more This study aims to provide a simple approach to characterize the effects of scattering by human bodies in the vicinity of a short-range indoor link at 28 GHz while the link is fully blocked by another body. In the study, a street canyon propagation characterized by a four-ray model is incorporated to consider the human bodies. For this model, the received signal is assumed to be composed of a direct component that is exposed to shadowing due to a human body blocking the link and a multipath component due to reflections from human bodies around the link. In order to predict the attenuation due to shadowing, the double knife-edge diffraction (DKED) model is employed. Moreover, to predict the attenuation due to multipath, the reflected fields from the human bodies around the link are used. The measurements are compared with the simulations in order to evaluate the prediction accuracy of the model. The acceptable results achieved in this study suggest that this simple model might work c...

Applied Sciences, 2021
Due to the environmental pollution threatening human life, clean water accessibility is one of th... more Due to the environmental pollution threatening human life, clean water accessibility is one of the major global issues. In this context, in literature, there are many portable water disinfection systems utilizing ultraviolet (UV) radiation. UV water disinfection systems employ piezoelectric-based electric power along with UV light-emitting diode (LED) sources. This paper elaborates on the detailed design and parametric optimization of a portable UV disinfection system. The proposed system aims to generate piezoelectric harvesting-based electrical power simply by shaking, and the generated power is then used to supply UV-LEDs for water disinfection. To this end, overall system parameters along with a physical-mathematical model of mechanical, electrical and biochemical aspects of the system are fully developed. Moreover, the main design parameters of the developed model are derived for optimal operation of the system by employing Genetic Algorithm (GA). Finally, optimal design parame...

Challenges of IoT in Healthcare
IoT and ICT for Healthcare Applications, 2020
This chapter discusses various challenges related to Internet of Things (IoT) implementation into... more This chapter discusses various challenges related to Internet of Things (IoT) implementation into the healthcare sector, namely, data resource management, security, loss of privacy, access control, and stakeholder collaboration. IoT is going to be an integral part of the patient’s diagnosis, treatment, recovery, and monitoring process in the near future. It is evident that a large number of objects will be connected to the IoT network. All these devices will generate unstructured data; these data must be processed in a time-critical manner. Otherwise, it becomes inadequate for real-time monitoring and decision-making, which requires immense infrastructure, computation, networking, storage capacity, etc. For monitoring purposes, it is critical to process and deliver data in synchronization to the stakeholders like treating physician’s panel, analytics platforms, healthcare providers, and insurance companies.

Computer Science & Information Technology (CS & IT), Nov 25, 2017
In this research work, we examine one of the most applied networking website, namely the Facebook... more In this research work, we examine one of the most applied networking website, namely the Facebook, for conducting courses as a replacement of valuable classical electronic learning platforms. At the initial stage of the Internet community, users of the Internet used email as the main communication mean. Even though email is still the indispensable approach of communication in a appropriate but offline mode, other services were presented, such as many Instant Messaging (IM) software applications like ICQ, Skype, Viber, WhatsApp, Instagram, Musical.ly and Messenger, which let people connect in a real-time mode. Nevertheless, the communication between people was further improved to the next phase, when Facebook came to reality as a social networking homepage that supports many features. People do not only link with others, but also establish all kinds of connections between them. Facebook offers rich functionalities for forming associations. The framework of Facebook delivers without charge software that were provided by traditional electronic learning. This research work looks at how people apply Facebook for teaching and learning, together with recommendations provided.
Biometric acoustic ear recognition
2016 International Conference on Bio-engineering for Smart Technologies (BioSMART), 2016
This paper deals with the holistic development of a biometric system based on acoustic ear recogn... more This paper deals with the holistic development of a biometric system based on acoustic ear recognition. Its main purpose is to map one aspects within acoustic ear recognition, namely the performance of the ear characteristics bands and peaks. 50 subjects have participated in experiments collecting biometric samples. The measuring device composed of a pair of headphones with an integrated microphone as sensor. Several methods have been utilized for feature extraction, and various types of distance metrics and classifiers have been employed.

On Data Transport Issues in Wireless Self-configuring Networks
Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, 2015
Performance and adaptability of the transport protocol are among the most critical parts of the T... more Performance and adaptability of the transport protocol are among the most critical parts of the TCP/IP protocol stack since these factors are directly related to the user’s interaction and application experience. In this paper we analyze specific problems of a reliable transport protocol’s performance caused by rapidly changing topology in MANETs in addition to classical transport layer challenges. Then we propose the wireless transport protocol (WTP)—a new lightweight, bandwidth-efficient, and reliable cross-layer transport protocol capable of adjusting its performance to suit highly dynamic environments, such as MANETs. Experimental results show that simplifying the protocol reduces its processing, while cross-layer optimization enables more precise adjustments to network and connection fluctuations, hence increasing transport protocol efficiency by up to 9 % under different conditions as compared to standard TCP protocol.
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Papers by Mohammad Derawi