Papers by Muhammad Khalil Afzal
IEEE Access, 2021
Cognition is of paramount importance in modern communication systems for this brings the potentia... more Cognition is of paramount importance in modern communication systems for this brings the potential for adaptiveness and self-fine-tuning for dynamic reconfigurability. To achieve this feat, two primary tasks are to identify the influential configurable parameters and availability of comprehensive datasets representative of the real-world scenarios rather than simulated ones. For this article, an extensive dataset covering diverse settings of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) driven internet of things (IoT) is collected. It covers broad variations of 10 pre-configured communication parameters as well as some runtime information. In addition to legacy parameters (e.g., transmission power, and packet size, etc.), we also used two different medium access control protocols (i.e., carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) and time-slotted channel hopping (TSCH)), and routing metrics (i.e., objective function 0 (OF0), minimum rank with hysteresis (MRH), MRH with expected transmission count (ETX 2)). Important quality of service (QoS) metrics like packet delivery ratio, throughput, and energy consumption against all combinations of the communication parameters are measured and recorded. A statistical analysis is carried out to identify the correlations among the communication parameters and QoS metrics. The results lay the foundation for the design of a data-driven framework for predictive QoS control in the IoT.
Electronics, 2020
Scalability is a significant issue in system-on-a-chip architectures because of the rapid increas... more Scalability is a significant issue in system-on-a-chip architectures because of the rapid increase in numerous on-chip resources. Moreover, hybrid processing elements demand diverse communication requirements, which system-on-a-chip architectures are unable to handle gracefully. Network-on-a-chip architectures have been proposed to address the scalability, contention, reusability, and congestion-related problems of current system-on-a-chip architectures. The reliability appears to be a challenging aspect of network-on-a-chip architectures because of the physical faults introduced in post-manufacturing processes. Therefore, to overcome such failures in network-on-a-chip architectures, fault-tolerant routing is critical. In this article, a network adaptive fault-tolerant routing algorithm is proposed, where the proposed algorithm enhances an efficient dynamic and adaptive routing algorithm. The proposed algorithm avoids livelocks because of its ability to select an alternate outport. ...
IEEE Access, 2020
The immense increase in multimedia-on-demand traffic that refers to audio, video, and images, has... more The immense increase in multimedia-on-demand traffic that refers to audio, video, and images, has drastically shifted the vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) from scalar to Multimedia Internet of Things (M-IoT). IoT devices are constrained in terms of energy, computing, size, and storage memory. Delaysensitive and bandwidth-hungry multimedia applications over constrained IoT networks require revision of IoT architecture for M-IoT. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of M-IoT with an emphasis on architecture, protocols, and applications. This article starts by providing a horizontal overview of the IoT. Then, we discuss the issues considering the characteristics of multimedia and provide a summary of related M-IoT architectures. Various multimedia applications supported by IoT are surveyed, and numerous use cases related to road traffic management, security, industry, and health are illustrated to show how different M-IoT applications are revolutionizing human life. We explore the importance of Quality-of-Experience (QoE) and Quality-of-Service (QoS) for multimedia transmission over IoT. Moreover, we explore the limitations of IoT for multimedia computing and present the relationship between the M-IoT and emerging technologies including event processing, feature extraction, cloud computing, Fog/Edge computing and Software-Defined-Networks (SDNs). We also present the need for better routing and Physical-Medium Access Control (PHY-MAC) protocols for M-IoT. Finally, we present a detailed discussion on the open research issues and several potential research areas related to emerging multimedia communication in IoT. INDEX TERMS Multimedia Internet of Things (M-IoT), multimedia communication, Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT), multimedia computing, Quality-of-Experience (QoE), Quality-of-Service (QoS), multimedia routing, medium access control (MAC).
IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2022
IEEE Access, 2021
Facilitating citizens with accurate traffic flow prediction increases the quality of life. Roadsi... more Facilitating citizens with accurate traffic flow prediction increases the quality of life. Roadside sensors and devices are used to capture live streams of huge data and the Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming popular for the deployment of effective Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Traffic flow prediction from the live datastreams require building a data-driven model. This is a challenging task and has attracted researchers for better interpretation of the traffic characteristics. The core problem in traffic prediction is modeling a diversity of traffic trends and unpredictable flow variations with temporal dependencies. Initially, statistical and shallow neural network models were applied to some extent. Recently, deep learning has come up with proven and promising outcomes. Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) is a variation of recurrent neural networks used effectively for traffic flow prediction. Like other deep networks, GRU uses hyperparameters and a sliding window time-steps mechanism to prepare and tune the model. Better tuning for hyperparameters and search for optimal window size is a tedious process. In this research work, we present an algorithm for hyperparameters tuning along with sliding window steps optimization. Results obtained on a real-time public traffic dataset show a higher capability of the proposed method to reduce the error and an average gain of the optimized model over the untuned network is 4.5%. Furthermore, we apply the optimal hyperparameters obtained in the experiment to other deep learning models and present that our approach improves prediction accuracy and stability.
Throughput Enhancement in Cooperative Wireless Ad Hoc Networks
2014 IEEE Intl Conf on High Performance Computing and Communications, 2014 IEEE 6th Intl Symp on Cyberspace Safety and Security, 2014 IEEE 11th Intl Conf on Embedded Software and Syst (HPCC,CSS,ICESS), 2014
Next generation wireless networks are expected to provide services which require high performance... more Next generation wireless networks are expected to provide services which require high performance and reliability. However, channel conditions in wireless networks can affect both throughput and reliability. Cooperative communication has the advantage of offering throughput enhancement and reliability in wireless networks by using several single-antenna nodes to form a virtual antenna array. The performance in cooperative communication depends on the relay selection scheme. Therefore, in this paper, we propose and evaluate a distributed relay-selection scheme based on the channel conditions of candidate relay nodes. Results show that our proposed-relay selection scheme increases the system throughput.
IEEE Access, 2021
Future generation Internet of Things (IoT) communication infrastructure is expected to pave the p... more Future generation Internet of Things (IoT) communication infrastructure is expected to pave the path for innovative applications like smart cities, smart grids, smart industries, and smart healthcare. To support these diverse applications, the communication protocols are required to be adaptive and intelligent. At the network layer, an efficient and lightweight algorithm known as trickle-timer is designed to perform the route updates and it utilizes control messages to share the updated route information between IoT nodes. Trickle-timer tends to generate higher control overhead ratio and achieves lower reliability. Therefore, this article aims to propose an RL-based Intelligent Adaptive Trickle-Timer Algorithm (RIATA). The proposed algorithm performs threefold optimization of the trickle-timer algorithm. Firstly, the RIATA assigns higher probability to control message transmission to nodes that have received an inconsistent control message in the past intervals. Secondly, the RIATA utilizes RL to learn the optimal policy to transmit or suppress a control message in the current network environment. Lastly, the RIATA selects an adaptive redundancy constant value to avoid unnecessary transmissions of control messages. Simulation results show that RIATA outperforms the other state-of-the-art mechanisms in terms of reducing control overhead ratio by an average of 21%, decreasing the average total power consumption by 10%, and increasing the packet delivery ratio by 4% on an average. INDEX TERMS Internet of Things (IoT), trickle-timer, reinforcement learning, RPL.
Applied Sciences, 2020
Energy consumption is increasing exponentially with the increase in electronic gadgets. Losses oc... more Energy consumption is increasing exponentially with the increase in electronic gadgets. Losses occur during generation, transmission, and distribution. The energy demand leads to increase in electricity theft (ET) in distribution side. Data analysis is the process of assessing the data using different analytical and statistical tools to extract useful information. Fluctuation in energy consumption patterns indicates electricity theft. Utilities bear losses of millions of dollar every year. Hardware-based solutions are considered to be the best; however, the deployment cost of these solutions is high. Software-based solutions are data-driven and cost-effective. We need big data for analysis and artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques. Several solutions have been proposed in existing studies; however, low detection performance and high false positive rate are the major issues. In this paper, we first time employ bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit for ET detection for c...
A blockchain based incentive provisioning scheme for traffic event validation and information storage in VANETs
Information Processing & Management, 2021
Intelligent learning automata-based objective function in RPL for IoT
Sustainable Cities and Society, 2020
Abstract Sustainable cities are widely adopting the standards of the Internet of Things (IoT) in ... more Abstract Sustainable cities are widely adopting the standards of the Internet of Things (IoT) in almost every domain, e.g., smart grids (SG) to provide services to a sustainable community. It enables two-way communication to manage the energy resources, where routing protocol has a significant role in communication. The diversification of IoT networks arises many challenges for the routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL). The dynamic and lossy environment is one of the key challenges in various IoT networks, specifically SG. RPL does not able to adjust its link metric efficiently against the dynamic and lossy environment, which have a great impact on the performance metrics. To address this issue, we have introduced cognition in RPL by integrating learning automata with the objective function (LA-OF). Learning automata (LA) is applied to expected transmission count (ETX) to tune it according to the environment. LA learns through interacting with the environment and yields the best ETX values, afterwards the environment is monitored to trace down the instability in the environment. The proposed LA-OF is compared with standardized techniques MRHOF and OF0. The simulation results show a significant improvement with overall 7.04% in PRR, 17.52% in energy consumption, and 18.72% in overhead.
IEEE Access, 2017
The population of cities is increasing day-by-day. According to United Nations, it is estimated t... more The population of cities is increasing day-by-day. According to United Nations, it is estimated that by 2050, 66% of the world's population will live in cities [item 1) of the Appendix]. This is indicative of a drive to live in more privileged and smarter environments. Therefore, there exists an increased demand for intelligent and sustainable environments that offer citizens of urban areas a high quality life. Smart cities may be a solution. Millions of dedicated and reliable sensors are required in smart cities to enhance the quality of urban living. Communications infrastructure is inevitably required for connecting these sensors. In order to better manage urban resources, there exists a need to explore issues like deployment of sensors, communications technologies, information management, and defining and deploying proper smart city applications. Heterogeneous communication technologies are expected to play a vital role in terms of providing connectivity among different objects in smart cities. These communications technologies include wireless fidelity (WiFi) [IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ah/af], long term evolution (LTE) [3GPP], LTE advance (LTE-A) [3GPP], Bluetooth (IEEE 802.15.1), Zigbee (IEEE 802.15.4), and low power wide area network (LoRaWAN). Bluetooth and Zigbee are low range communications technologies and more suitable for personal area network (PAN) based applications. LoRaWAN provides lowpower WANs with features specifically needed to support low-cost mobile communications. These heterogeneous communication technologies can be used in most smart city applications such as smart grid, smart metering, smart street lightening, smart health monitoring, smart transportation, waste management, and smart ambulance. This Special Section in IEEE ACCESS is intended to provide a platform for researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry in the area of smart cities. We have invited original articles with novel contributions in sensing technologies, applications, and communication architecture, requirements and protocol design in smart cities. In this Special Section, we have included 16 high-quality articles from leading research groups around the world working on different research aspects of smart cities. Articles in this Special Section present novel ideas on smart metering,
Computers & Electrical Engineering, 2020
The adoption of emerging technological trends and applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) in... more The adoption of emerging technological trends and applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the industrial systems is leading towards the development of Industrial IoT (IIoT). IIoT serves as a new vision of IoT in the industrial sector by automating smart objects for sensing, collecting, processing and communicating the real-time events in industrial systems. The major objective of IIoT is to achieve high operational efficiency, increased productivity, and better management of industrial assets and processes through product customization, intelligent monitoring applications for production floor shops and machine health, and predictive and preventive maintenance of industrial equipment. In this paper, we present a new and clear definition of IIoT, which can help the readers to understand the concept of IIoT. We have described the state-of-the-art research effort s in IIoT. Finally, we have highlighted the enabling technologies for IIoT and recent challenges faced by IIoT.
Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, 2018
IEEE Access, 2018
Network-on-chip (NoC) has appeared to be an impending substitute for the communication paradigm i... more Network-on-chip (NoC) has appeared to be an impending substitute for the communication paradigm in modern very large scale integration embedded systems. Apart from many design challenges, application mapping on the NoC system is one of the most intractable and challenging optimization problems. In this paper, we propose a hybrid, branch & bound (BB)-based exact mapping (BEMAP) algorithm, for mapping real-time embedded applications on the NoC architecture. The BEMAP optimizes the latency and throughput of the NoC system and minimizes power consumption under the bandwidth constraint. This method utilizes the modular exact and systematic search optimization techniques to obtain a multi-objective optimized solution to the mapping problem of the NoC designs. The proposed algorithm exploits the stateof-the-art BB algorithm, in order to obtain optimized results against its competitors. Experimental results under the benchmarks of several real-time embedded applications show that the proposed algorithm achieves up to 19.93% savings in power consumption and 61.10% improvement in network latency for two dimension mesh and torus topologies. INDEX TERMS Algorithm, branch & bound, mapping, network-on-chip, optimization.
IEEE Access, 2019
Cheap energy from the utility can be stored during off-peak time in batteries and utilized during... more Cheap energy from the utility can be stored during off-peak time in batteries and utilized during on-peak time. However, energy storage more than future demand can degrade the system. The sharing of surplus stored energy within the community can reduce the energy consumption cost. A system of fetching surplus energy from storage systems of smart homes is indispensable to share within the community. In this paper, Fog-as-a-Power-Economy-Sharing service is proposed, which interconnects the distributed batteries based power and forms the unified energy storage system for a community. In a community, capacities of batteries storage, investment and power demand of every smart home are different. However, participants of the service share their battery based stored energy for social welfare following the no-profit-no-loss rule to form a unified energy storage system. When energy exhausted smart homes request for energy, the fog decides either power is supplied from the unified energy storage system or from the utility to reduce global energy cost for the community. In the paper, global cost (energy cost and cost of fogs' services) for twelve communities is analyzed, which is payable by smart homes in the communities. The results validate the significance of the proposed time efficient Fog-as-a-Power-Economy-Sharing service, which reduces global power cost and computing cost for each community. INDEX TERMS Battery based energy storage system, unified energy storage system, power economy sharing, smart community, on-peak-load, off-peak-load.
Future Generation Computer Systems, 2018
Fast rerouting requires that a backup route is already available at each node so that traffic can... more Fast rerouting requires that a backup route is already available at each node so that traffic can immediately be shifted on it without new path discovery and convergence time delay. Handling multiple failures with least possible delay, high throughput and least overhead with regard to memory and battery is a real challenge in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Current fast rerouting techniques that handle multiple failures do not specifically target mission-critical WSN applications. Fast Rerouting techniques use spanning trees, backup topologies or configurations to shift traffic immediately as and when error is detected. These techniques do not focus on finding least hop count on the backup path and therefore, end-to-end delay on the backup paths is higher than on the primary path. The proposed Fast Rerouting Protocol (FRP) establishes primary and backup routes before the start of data transfer. It creates at least one backup path towards destination from every node on the primary path. FRP therefore has the ability to handle multiple failures in mission-critical WSN environment. NS-2 simulation results of FRP against the competitor reveal that, FRP takes least time and control messages to establish shorter fast rerouting paths, produces minimum end-to-end delay, least energy consumption and higher network life time.
IEEE Access, 2019
The proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) requires to accommodate diverse applications wi... more The proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) requires to accommodate diverse applications with stringent performance requirements. Delay is one of the key metrics in the IoT, particularly, for domains, such as health care, where critical cases requiring an emergency response frequently occur. In this paper, we analyze the performance data generated using the IEEE 802.15.4 standard to derive an accurate predictive model for delay-sensitive applications. A deep neural network (DNN) is adopted to model the relationship between diverse communication parameters (e.g., queue size, application traffic rate, and transmission power) and delay. Evaluation reveals that the DNN model achieves a prediction accuracy of over 98% and outperforms other popular regression models. In addition, a fine-grained analysis of the size of training data, depth (number of layers), width (number of neurons per layer), and epochs (number of iterations) is carried out in an attempt to achieve best possible prediction results with minimally complex DNN. The statistics show that the derived model achieves a comparable accuracy even when trained with a small fraction (≥10%) of data. The proposed model recommends the values for different controllable communication parameters to the transmitter that can be fine-tuned considering the desired delay bounds. INDEX TERMS Delay prediction, deep learning, e-health, internet of things, multi-layer neural networks, wireless sensor networks.
Sensors, 2019
Internet-of-Things (IoT) enabling technologies such as ZigBee, WiFi, 6LowPAN, RFID, Machine-to-Ma... more Internet-of-Things (IoT) enabling technologies such as ZigBee, WiFi, 6LowPAN, RFID, Machine-to-Machine, LTE-Advanced, etc. depend on the license-free Industrial Scientific and Medical (ISM) bands for the Internet. The proliferation of IoT devices is not only anticipated to create a huge amount of congestion in the near future, but even now the unlicensed spectrum is not enough in the ISM bands. Towards this end, Cognitive Radio (CR) technology can resolve the spectrum shortage issue since CR users can opportunistically exploit white spaces in licensed channels of the adjacent wireless systems. In CR networks, it is critical to coordinate spectrum access among Secondary Users (SUs) while protecting priority rights of Primary Users (PUs). Therein, SUs need to take good care of hidden PUs in order to avoid harmful interference. Further, a densely deployed CR network can compromise spectrum sensing quality and certainty of the results when a large number of SUs contends to access the sa...
Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, 2018
Reliable video delivery is one of the most important requirements to satisfy end user needs. With... more Reliable video delivery is one of the most important requirements to satisfy end user needs. With the proliferation of multimedia technologies there is a growing demand for video multicast, particularly in challenging wireless environments. Effective video multicast services need to meet the conflicting goals of assured data rate and reliability. The most used IEEE standards (802.11a/b/g/n) do not ensure reliable multicasts since throughput remained primary focus of research in recent past. The IEEE 802.11aa remains the only standard that attempts to handle the unreliability issue with multicasting. However, the block acknowledgement scheme of the IEEE 802.11aa standard suffers from scalability issue. As the number of receivers increases, the number of acknowledgement packets increases proportionally. This increasing acknowledgement storm eventually causes a decrease in the average peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of the video frames. Therefore, in order to overwhelm the scalability limitation of the IEEE 802.11aa block acknowledgment scheme, this paper proposes a modified block acknowledgment scheme for video multicast. Our scheme considers the impact of the loss of different frames on video quality under Moving Picture Expert Group 4 (MPEG-4) and H.264 video coding. We provide a Markov chain model and numerical analysis of our proposed protocol. Simulation results indicate that proposed scheme performs well in terms of PSNR.
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Papers by Muhammad Khalil Afzal