Sameer Qazi

National University of Sciences & Technology (NUST), Electronic and Power ENgineering, Faculty Member

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Papers by Sameer Qazi

Queueing Theory based Performance Analysis of Cloud based BlockChain as a Service (BaaS)

Third party cloud service providers are becoming common for offering BlockChain-as-a-Service (Baa... more Third party cloud service providers are becoming common for offering BlockChain-as-a-Service (BaaS). In this framework, incoming requests are processed by a number of stages sequentially with each service stage having different processing times. Each stage will manifest a particular component of BlockChain primitives such as digital transactions undertaken by businesses within permissioned users. This will require sophisticated steps of digital fingerprint/certificate generation, secure transaction management based on permission levels, federated consensus and transaction validation among others using distributed cryptographic techniques. Such architectures are becoming common as third-party Cloud Services will begin to offer BlockChain-as-a-Service (BaaS) for improved security for clients. BaaS will typically incorporate the M/Hypo/1/L queueing model in which incoming requests are Poisson distributed, processing times are hypo-exponential and having finite buffers. Our main contrib...

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Revisiting constraint based geo location: improving accuracy through removal of outliers

Int. Arab J. Inf. Technol., 2018

IP based GeoLocation has become increasingly important for network administrators for a number of... more IP based GeoLocation has become increasingly important for network administrators for a number of reasons. The first and foremost is to determine cyber attackers’ geographical location to prevent, contain and thwart further attacks. A secondary reason may be to target potential advertisements to users based on their geographical location. IP addresses are indicators of the users location at a course level such as country or city. For further refined estimate of user location within a city, for example, network measurements as simple as simple round trip time of pings to the user can give a more precise estimate of users location. Recently, several researchers have proposed constraint based optimization approaches to estimate a users location using a set of landmark hosts using multi-lateration. In this work, we show that the optimization of such schemes are sometimes plagued by outliers which causes location estimated to be deteriorated greatly. We provide anecdotal evidence for thi...

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Migrate to IPv6 on 6PE with MPLS-TE

SmartCR, Apr 1, 2014

A Dependable Global Location Service using Rendezvous on Hierarchic Distributed Hash Tables

International Conference on Networking, International Conference on Systems and International Conference on Mobile Communications and Learning Technologies (ICNICONSMCL'06)

A location service is the part of a naming architecture that maps identifiers to network addresse... more A location service is the part of a naming architecture that maps identifiers to network addresses. Ideally, the identifiers are globally unique, persistent and semantic-free. It has been acknowledged that Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) enable, for the first time, the use of semantic-free identifiers in massive, global networks. We argue that hierarchy is essential for dependability in massive, geographically distributed DHTs. Existing hierarchic DHTs embed location information in identifiers. Consequently, if identifiers move between DHTs in the hierarchy, then the changes always propagate to the root DHT. This Location Information Plane (LIP) design is the first hierarchic DHT that contains "moves and changes" within the lower layers of the hierarchy. It protects the root DHT using the rendezvous abstraction. We show how it supports global internet telephony networks based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).

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Scalable Resilient Overlay Networks Using Destination-Guided Detouring

2007 IEEE International Conference on Communications, 2007

Routing policies used in the Internet tend to be restrictive limiting communication between sourc... more Routing policies used in the Internet tend to be restrictive limiting communication between source-destination pairs to one route, when often better alternates exist. To avoid route flapping, recovery mechanisms may be dampened, making adaptation slow. Unstructured overlays have been widely used to mitigate the issues of path and performance failures in the Internet by routing through alternate paths via overlay peers. The construction of such routing overlays often does not take into account the physical topology of the network which necessitates that all overlay nodes use aggressive online algorithms for endto-end path discovery, limiting scalability. In this paper, we analyze a topologically-aware architecture to estimate end-to-end path availability for service on Internet. We propose Destination-Guided Detouring via Resilient Overlay Network (DG-RON); a distributed coordinate based overlay architecture, which uses landmark based heuristics for scalable end-to-end path discovery. Simulations show that DG-RON can predict alternate paths with a high success rate.

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Migrate to IPv6 on 6PE with MPLS-TE: Questions on Feasibility and Reluctance in Deployment?

The Smart Computing Review, 2014

Due to the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, the transition to IPv6 has already begun using various t... more Due to the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, the transition to IPv6 has already begun using various transition mechanisms. In this paper comparison between two transition mechanism 6PE and 6to4 tunneling over MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) based network has been performed. The experimental platform used is based on GNS3/Dynagen using emulated routers on which multiple TCP and UDP flows were generated between separated IPv6 network traversing through IPv4 based core. Traffic were generated using both transition mechanism and are compared to native IPv4 based MPLS network. Performance metric used are end-to-end delay, jitter and throughput, these parameters are also analyzed statistically using ANOVA, F-Test and T-Test to support a conclusion. Further, MPLS Traffic-Engineering (TE) using RSVP-TE signalling is applied, describing the implementation and performance test and analysis of TE tunnels on 6PE for IPv6 traffic. The same test-bed is used to implement and observe MPLS-TE behavior and throughput of 6PE based MPLS-TE to that of native IPv4 based MPLS-TE. Concluding, throughput of 6PE and 6to4 is around 99% and 96%, respectively, as compared to that of native IPv4.

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IoT-Equipped and AI-Enabled Next Generation Smart Agriculture: A Critical Review, Current Challenges and Future Trends

IEEE Access, 2022

Smart agriculture techniques have recently seen widespread interest by farmers. This is driven by... more Smart agriculture techniques have recently seen widespread interest by farmers. This is driven by several factors, which include the widespread availability of economically-priced, low-powered Internet of Things (IoT) based wireless sensors to remotely monitor and report conditions of the field, climate, and crops. This enables efficient management of resources like minimizing water requirements for irrigation and minimizing the use of toxic pesticides. Furthermore, the recent boom in Artificial Intelligence can enable farmers to deploy autonomous farming machinery and make better predictions of the future based on present and past conditions to minimize crop diseases and pest infestation. Together these two enabling technologies have revolutionized conventional agriculture practices. This survey paper provides: (a) A detailed tutorial on the available advancements in the field of smart agriculture systems through IoT technologies and AI techniques; (b) A critical review of these two available technologies and challenges in their widespread deployment; and (c) An in-depth discussion about the future trends including both technological and social, when smart agriculture systems will be widely adopted by the farmers globally. INDEX TERMS Smart agriculture, Internet of Things (IoT), smart irrigation, organic farming, artificial intelligence (AI), big data.

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Internet of Things (IoT) for Next-Generation Smart Systems: A Review of Current Challenges, Future Trends and Prospects for Emerging 5G-IoT Scenarios

by Bilal Khawaja and Sameer Qazi

IEEE Access

The Internet of Things (IoT)-centric concepts like augmented reality, high-resolution video strea... more The Internet of Things (IoT)-centric concepts like augmented reality, high-resolution video streaming, self-driven cars, smart environment, e-health care, etc. have a ubiquitous presence now. These applications require higher data-rates, large bandwidth, increased capacity, low latency and high throughput. In light of these emerging concepts, IoT has revolutionized the world by providing seamless connectivity between heterogeneous networks (HetNets). The eventual aim of IoT is to introduce the plug and play technology providing the end-user, ease of operation, remotely access control and configurability. This paper presents the IoT technology from a bird's eye view covering its statistical/architectural trends, use cases, challenges and future prospects. The paper also presents a detailed and extensive overview of the emerging 5G-IoT scenario. Fifth Generation (5G) cellular networks provide key enabling technologies for ubiquitous deployment of the IoT technology. These include carrier aggregation, multiple-input multipleoutput (MIMO), massive-MIMO (M-MIMO), coordinated multipoint processing (CoMP), device-to-device (D2D) communications, centralized radio access network (CRAN), software-defined wireless sensor networking (SD-WSN), network function virtualization (NFV) and cognitive radios (CRs). This paper presents an exhaustive review for these key enabling technologies and also discusses the new emerging use cases of 5G-IoT driven by the advances in artificial intelligence, machine and deep learning, ongoing 5G initiatives, quality of service (QoS) requirements in 5G and its standardization issues. Finally, the paper discusses challenges in the implementation of 5G-IoT due to high data-rates requiring both cloud-based platforms and IoT devices based edge computing.

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UAV-based Life-Saving Solution For Police To Maintain Social-Distancing During Covid-19 Pandemic Using 4G-LTE Technology

2021 International Conference on Communication Technologies (ComTech)

Finding Alternate Paths in the Internet: A Survey of Techniques for End-to-End Path Discovery

ArXiv, 2013

The Internet provides physical path diversity between a large number of hosts, making it possible... more The Internet provides physical path diversity between a large number of hosts, making it possible for networks to use alternative paths when one path fails to deliver the required Quality of Service. However, for various reasons, many established protocols (e.g. de facto Internet inter-domain routing protocol, Border-Gateway Protocol - BGP) do not fully exploit such alternate paths. This paper surveys research into techniques for discovering end-to-end alternate paths, including those based on monitoring path performance, choosing paths that are maximally disjoint, and in routing across multiple paths. It surveys proposals for making BGP better able to exploit multiple paths and how multi-homing can create alternate paths. It also describes how alternate paths can be realized through detour routing (application layer mechanisms) and routing deflections (network layer mechanisms). It also discusses Fast Re-Route techniques for construction of backup routes. It concludes by surveying ...

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First Elephants then Mice: A Two-stage Robust Estimation Technique for Traffic Matrix in Large Cloud Networks in Presence of Over Dispersion

TENCON 2018 - 2018 IEEE Region 10 Conference, 2018

Traffic Matrix estimation has always caught attention of researchers for better network managemen... more Traffic Matrix estimation has always caught attention of researchers for better network management and future planning. However, with the advent of cloud services the traffic patterns have become so diversified that they do not follow one probability distribution such as Gaussian, Poisson, Negative Binomial etc that makes it difficult to model them. Further complicating matters is the fact that the elements of the traffic matrix may exhibit over-dispersion, a trait where variation in traffic volumes surpasses the mean value has become increasingly. We find that over dispersion is a more severe problem with mice flows. Thus, we formulate a two step optimization approach in which elephant flows which are more closer to Gaussian approximation are estimate in first step with reasonable accuracy with more estimation error for over-dispersed mice flows. The solution for over-dispersed mice flows is refined through a second bounded-value optimization step by adding an additional constraint...

Intelligent Traffic Matrix Estimation Using LevenBerg-Marquardt Artificial Neural Network of Large Scale IP Network

2019 13th International Conference on Mathematics, Actuarial Science, Computer Science and Statistics (MACS), 2019

The expansion in computer networks leads the traffic matrix estimation problem to be an essential... more The expansion in computer networks leads the traffic matrix estimation problem to be an essential component in managing the networks. In this paper, we have estimated the large IP network traffic matrix (TM) using a Levenberg-Marquardt Neural Network. Traffic matrix estimation is generally a complicated task for a large scale IP network, therefore, we involved neural networks for the intelligent and accurate estimation of it. The performance of proposed Neural Network has been verified using Abilene dataset available publicly for researchers and it has been observed that our used algorithm gives promising results when it comes to traffic matrix estimation.

A compressed framework for monitoring and anomaly detection in cloud networks

2018 International Conference on Computing, Mathematics and Engineering Technologies (iCoMET), 2018

The frequent and increased number of attacks on large-scale cloud networks have necessitated a ne... more The frequent and increased number of attacks on large-scale cloud networks have necessitated a need for scalable network analyzing techniques for monitoring and anomaly/threat detection. This paper presents a lightweight Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) based network analysis and measurement approach that can identify, visualize along with mid level categorization of attacks and anomalies in cloud traffic. We propose a network data traffic flow in terms of frames or images. With such an approach, a series of samples can represent a sequence of frames or video, thus, allows categorization/identification of various kinds of attacks. This enables various image processing techniques that can be applied to the network traffic to analyze interesting features of cloud platform traffic. We use two real world datasets and show that 2 dimensional DCT may be used to obtain reduction in storage of network traffic traces up to 98 percent in lossy compressed format. Similarly, 1 dimensional DCT pr...

QoE Analysis of Real-Time Video Streaming over 4G-LTE for UAV-Based Surveillance Applications

Drones also known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) perform an significant role in surveillance ... more Drones also known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) perform an significant role in surveillance at a remote location by streaming real-time video with their attached cameras. A good architecture for such kind of surveillance is required that ensures real-time monitoring at targeted areas. As the streaming video is used in monitoring; it is much important to ensure its quality during transmission so that remote client can view clear insights and could take prompt action on time if required. In this paper, we have proposed a 4G-LTE architecture and examined the effects of different factors in such architecture. We have shown the comparative analysis between two latest codec schemes i.e. H.264 and H.265 (HEVC) in video streaming. Our study is an important step towards exploring the factors that influence the real-time video streaming and degrade the Quality of Experience (QoE) of video viewing in such architecture. To examine the received video quality, two objective metrics, Peak-Sig...

Singular valued differential link count linear estimator for traffic matrix of large cloud computing networks

Today cloud computing dominates the range of services one can obtain from the Internet including ... more Today cloud computing dominates the range of services one can obtain from the Internet including Software as a service (SAAS), Platform as a service (PAAS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS). These services increasingly provide ease to end user by providing a large number of applications. However, this versatility in services and applications make network planning, administration, management, security and assurances of service quality even more difficult. Hence, the significance of network traffic estimation from perspective of network planning and analysis has now become undeniable. The traffic estimation problem is often modeled as a system of linear equations Y=AX where the unobservable Origin Destination (OD) Traffic Matrix X has to be estimated from the observable Link Counts Matrix Y and Routing matrix A. However, this system of equations is under-constrained leading to difficulty in estimation of traffic matrix without knowledge of a prior estimate as a starting point. Re...

Evaluation of video streaming capacity of UAVs with respect to channel variation in 4G-LTE Surveillance Architecture

Nobody can deny the importance of technology in every sphere of life. The latest trends in techno... more Nobody can deny the importance of technology in every sphere of life. The latest trends in technology ensure better surveillance which could not be possible ever before. Drones with attached cameras also known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are one of the example used in surveillance operations. These camera mounted spies have the ability to capture real-time video of targeted areas in the monitored zone and stream the captured video to the location where all activities are observed by the administrative body. This setup provides the platform of taking prompt action in time if required. To enhance the efficiency of UAVs in a surveillance framework, it is very essential to understand the circumstances where the video-streaming capacity of UAVs are affected. In this paper, we propose a UAV-based surveillance architecture over 4G-LTE Network and we try to explore the fact that how variation in transmitting channel effects the video streaming capacity of UAVs. For this purpose, we t...

Tri-Compress: A Cascaded Data Compression Framework for Smart Electricity Distribution Systems

arXiv: Signal Processing, 2018

Modern smart distribution system requires storage, transmission and processing of big data genera... more Modern smart distribution system requires storage, transmission and processing of big data generated by sensors installed in electric meters. On one hand, this data is essentially required for intelligent decision making by smart grid but on the other hand storage, transmission and processing of that huge amount of data is also a challenge. Present approaches to compress this information have only relied on the traditional matrix decomposition techniques benefitting from low number of principal components to represent the entire data. This paper proposes a cascaded data compression technique that blends three different methods in order to achieve high compression rate for efficient storage and transmission. In the first and second stages, two lossy data compression techniques are used, namely Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and Normalization; Third stage achieves further compression by using the technique of Sparsity Encoding (SE) which is a lossless compression technique but onl...

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Design and Implementation of a Robust Convolutional Neural Network-Based Traffic Matrix Estimator for Cloud Networks

Recent research literature shows promising results by convolutional neural network(CNN-) based ap... more Recent research literature shows promising results by convolutional neural network(CNN-) based approaches for estimation of traffic matrix of cloud networks using different architectures. Although conventionally, convolutional neural network-based approaches yield superior estimation; however, these rely on assumptions of availability of a large training dataset which is completely accurate and nonsparse. In real world, both these assumptions are problematic as training data size may be limited, and it is also prone to missing (or incomplete) measurements as well as may have measurement errors. Similarly, the 2-D training datasets derived from network topology based may be sparse. We investigate these challenges and develop a novel architecture which can cater for these challenges and deliver superior performance. Our approach shows promising results for traffic matrix estimation using convolutional neural network-based techniques in the presence of limited training data and outlier...

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Why is Internet of Autonomous Vehicles not as Plug and Play as We Think ? Lessons to Be Learnt From Present Internet and Future Directions

IEEE Access, 2020

The recent race for autonomous or ‘driverless’ vehicles, has spawned a lot of research in the are... more The recent race for autonomous or ‘driverless’ vehicles, has spawned a lot of research in the area of Internet of Autonomous Vehicles (IAVs). With the advent of the latest technology fueled by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) can now determine the best possible route to a destination based on the current traffic situation and take dynamic driving decisions accordingly, while preventing accidents. Field trials for single autonomous vehicles have been largely successful. However, as more autonomous vehicles will be added to the intelligent transport networks, current research is now centered around their synergistic coexistence in the offering of network-centric and user-centric services. This development is governed by borrowing several concepts from the legacy Internet to address the problems of IAVs. In this paper, we present an extensive overview of the research challenges in the IAVs. Moreover, our contributions in this paper are that (i) We...

Disjoint-Path Selection in Internet: What traceroutes tell us?

ArXiv, 2014

Routing policies used in the Internet can be restrictive, limiting communication between source-d... more Routing policies used in the Internet can be restrictive, limiting communication between source-destination pairs to one path, when often better alternatives exist. To avoid route flapping, recovery mechanisms may be dampened, making adaptation slow. Unstructured overlays have been proposed to mitigate the issues of path and performance failures in the Internet by routing through an indirect-path via overlay peer(s). Choosing alternate-paths in overlay networks is a challenging issue. Ensuring both availability and performance guarantees on alternate paths requires aggressive monitoring of all overlay paths using active probing; this limits scalability. An alternate technique to select an overlay-path is to bias its selection based on physical disjointness criteria to bypass the failure on the primary-path. Recently, several techniques have emerged which can optimize the selection of a disjoint-path without incurring the high costs associated with probing paths. In this paper, we sh...

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