Sahel Alouneh

Al Ain University, (on leave from GJU) · Cybersecurity program

A computationally secure physical layer wireless communication multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) system is proposed and analyzed in this article. The proposed algorithm is shown to be general for arbitrary MIMO systems, and very robust against brute–force attacks and cryptanalysis techniques. The algorithm relies on the knowledge of the wireles...

Several cloud service providers utilize Hadoop to offer big data analytics and warehousing solutions. The servers used in a cloud environment are very powerful in terms of CPUs and memory, hence the big data service providers typically deploy Hadoop on virtualized clusters to achieve better resources utilization and offer more cost-effective servic...

The university website is deemed the main web presence channel for a higher education institution. Thus, the university's identity, programs, research, activities, partnerships, and achievements must be presented on the website in an attractive fashion to draw the attention of prospective stakeholders. In that regard, the number of sites referencin...

Security and privacy are among the main challenges in the systems of systems. The distributed ledger technology and self-sovereign identity pave the way to empower systems and users’ security and privacy. By utilizing both technologies, this paper proposes a distributed and self-sovereign-based framework for systems of systems to increase the secur...

Deploying Hadoop MapReduce applications in a virtualized environment is adopted by some cloud computing providers for better resource utilization. However, the virtualization overhead can negatively affect the performance of applications when executed on virtual machines rather than physical servers. In that regard, this paper introduces a methodol...

Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems can be used to process breast ultrasound (BUS) images with the goal of enhancing the capability of diagnosing breast cancer. Many CAD systems operate by analyzing the region-of-interest (ROI) that contains the tumor in the BUS image using conventional texture-based classification models and deep learning-based...

Passive human activity recognition (HAR) systems, in which no sensors are attached to the subject, provide great potentials compared to conventional systems. One of the recently used techniques showing tremendous potential is channel state information (CSI)-based HAR systems. In this work, we present a multi-environment human activity recognition s...

System-of-Systems (SoS) offer unprecedented potential for new types of emerging services, which significantly exceed the capabilities of the constituting systems. SoS in safety-critical domains (e.g., medical applications, smart grid, disaster recovery, defense) are prominent examples, but they have stringent real-time and reliability requirements....

Several higher education institutions have harnessed e-learning tools to empower the application of different learning models that enrich the educational process. Nevertheless, the reliance on commercial or open-source platforms, in some cases, to deliver e-learning could impact system acceptability, usability, and capability. Therefore, this study...

With the ever increasing demand for higher speed internet connectivity that can fulfil the application continuous need for higher bandwidth Google being the pioneer in many web-based services has launched a new UDP-based protocol named quick UDP internet connections (QUIC), which aims at providing faster data delivery without requiring upgrades or...

Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) is an emerging wireless technology that is expected to be widely deployed and implemented in several applications, especially with the promising widespread use of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its potential applications within the Fifth Generation (5G) communication technology. LoRaWAN consists of a number...

Systems-of-systems (SoS) are gaining increasing at- tention for the realization of safety-relevant applications with re- liability and real-time requirements, by coordinating autonomous constituent systems from different application areas. For a given application that is initiated at a constituent system, the provision and use of services between c...

Boolean satisfiability (SAT) has been studied for the last twenty years. Advances have been made allowing SAT solvers to be used in many applications including formal verification of digital designs. However, performance and capacity of SAT solvers are still limited. From the practical side, many of the existing applications based on SAT solvers us...

Cloud computing systems’ performance is still a central focus of research for determining optimal resource utilization. Running several existing benchmarks simultaneously serves to acquire performance information from specific cloud system resources. However, the complexity of monitoring the existing performance of computing systems is a challenge...

The purpose of this study is to report on the industry’s perspectives and opinions on cross-platform mobile development, with an emphasis on the popularity, adoption, and arising issues related to the use of technical development frameworks and tools. We designed and conducted an online survey questionnaire, for which 101 participants were recruite...

In recent years, big data and cloud computing are considered key trends of modern computer technology. Extracting valuable information is the key purpose of analyzing big data that needs to be secured in order to avoid any potential risks. Most cloud systems applications contain sensitive data, such as; financial, legal and private information. The...

The need for effective approaches to handle big data that is characterized by its large volume, different types, and high velocity is vital and hence has recently attracted the attention of several research groups. This is especially the case when traditional data processing techniques and capabilities proved to be insufficient in that regard. Anot...

Systems of Systems (SoS) are collections of autonomous systems that share their resources in order to form a new larger system with more capabilities and enhanced performance. A fundamental challenge of service identification in SoS arises when constituent systems are dynamically composed. This paper proposes a new framework for SoS service identif...

Systems of systems have been used recently in many complex scenarios to simplify network communication, resources allocation and management. Given the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of systems of systems, providing security in such an environment is challenging and requires significant management and processing resources. In this paper, a securit...

The general trend for the usage of the Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS/MPLS) can be clearly noticed in wired computer networks. On the other hand, wireless networks are now being a dominating networking environment used by major Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Having said that, different requirements are needed for wireless net...

A practical mathematical programming based approach is introduced for solving the examination timetabling problem at the German Jordanian University (GJU), whereby the complex process of acquiring a feasible examination timetable is simplified by subdividing it into three smaller sub-problems (phases). Accordingly, the exams are initially allocated...

With the rapidly increasing number of cloud-based services, selecting a service provider is becoming more and more difficult. Among the many factors to be considered, trust in a given service and in a service provider is often critical. Appraisal of trust is a complex process, information about the offered service's quality needs to be collected fr...

The design and development of an information display system are discussed in this paper. This system is used to display dynamic content (e.g., announcements, news, slideshows, and other information) on HD TV screens that are distributed across the university campus. The low cost and small size raspberry pi devices running a Linux-based OS are utili...

Space modulation techniques (SMTs), in which some or all of the data bits modulate a block of spatial constellation symbol, are promising candidates for future 5G wireless systems. They promise data rate enhancements while maintaining low energy consumption, hardware cost and computational complexity. As such, they attracted significant research in...

The performance of quadrature spatial modulation (QSM) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with cooperative decode and forward (DF) relays is analyzed in this paper. QSM is a new MIMO transmission technique that enhances the overall performance of conventional spatial modulation through exploiting quadrature spatial dimension. A practical...

Considering end-user research and proliferation of smartphones and REpresentational State Transfer (REST) interfaces, we envisage that smartphone owners can innovate to compose applications on the small screen. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a REST service development framework (viz, REST4Mobile) with the aim to enhance the usabil...

The early days of voice over IP (VoIP) adoption were characterized by a lack of concern and awareness about security issues related to its use. Indeed, service providers and users were mostly preoccupied with issues related to its quality, functionality, and cost. Now that VoIP is a mainstream communication technology, security has become a major i...

big amount of data and information transfer among, within, and through organizations all over the globe. This big data information may include sensitive, confidential and restricted data, like financial, legal or private information. Any loss, threat, or leakage of information may trigger high-security risk on such data. Securing big data during an...

This compendium was created by partners on the OpenMed project and edited by staff at the Disruptive Media Learning Lab at Coventry University, UK, with significant contributions made by expert interviewees in international open education. It is aimed at: (a) Higher education practitioners with involvement or interest in open educational resources...

Security is considered a significant deficiency in cloud computing, and insider threats problem exacerbate security concerns in the cloud. In addition to that, cloud computing is very complex by itself, because it encompasses numerous technologies and concepts. Apparently, overcoming these challenges requires substantial efforts from information se...

Software systems are becoming more vulnerable to security breaches that might cause serious threats to information systems. Amid this evolving trend, one of the well-known and widely spreading security threats is the so called buffer overflow attack. If successful, such an attack executes an arbitrary code with the same access privileges as the att...

The need of processing medical data services is rapidly growing. However, the current local data health centers and systems have a shortage to manage this data proliferation and users' needs. Mobile applications can work in dynamic wireless networks that cover wide geographical areas, thus it can enhance the medical data services. In this paper, we...

With software systems continuously growing in size and complexity, the number and variety of security vulnerabilities in those systems is increasing in an alarming rate. Unfortunately, all previously proposed solutions that deal with this problem suffer from shortcomings and therefore highlighting the need for further research in this vital area. I...

Vulnerabilities that exist in many software systems can be exploited by attackers to cause serious damages to the users. One of such attacks that have become widely spread in the last decade is the buffer overflow attack. The attacker can, if successful, execute an arbitrary code with the same access privileges as the attacked process. Thus, if the...

Heart disease is one of the leaders in fatal diseases. Detecting disease in rudimentary stages leads to auspicious recovery rates. Analyzing the heart rate is a vital tool to detect abnormalities and malfunctions of the heart. Heart rate analyzers are used to identify the QRS complex of the Electrocardiograph ECG. Portable battery-operated ECG hard...

With software systems continuously growing in size and complexity, the number and variety of security vulnerabilities in those systems is increasing in an alarming rate. Vulnerabilities in the program's stack are commonly exploited by attackers in the form of stack-based attacks. In this paper, a software based solution for stack-based vulnerabilit...

Database security, corruption, and loss can be disruptive, time-consuming and expensive to organization operation and business continuity. Therefore, data protection and availability is a high priority and a sensitive concern during the design and implementation of information systems infrastructure. This paper proposes a novel technique for design...

Recently, there has been increasing demand for Multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) technology in most internet service provider networks. The application of MPLS technology in wireless networking is evolving. Therefore, next generation wireless networks are required to have IP mobility solutions with high reliability, low-latency handoffs, and tr...

Execution trace file analysis facilitates software comprehension which is a fundamental part of the software maintenance process. However, the scalability of large execution trace files limits understanding programmes and increases the complexity of the maintenance process. A programme interior representation which reflects the actual data structur...

Multiplication is one of the most basic arithmetic operations. It is used in digital applications, central processing units, and digital signal processors. In most systems, the multiplier lies within the critical path and hence, due to probability and reliability issues, the power consumption of the multiplier has become very important. Moreover, a...

Steganography is one of the most powerful techniques to conceal the existence of hidden secret data inside a cover object. Images are the most popular cover objects for steganography, and thus the importance of image steganography. Embedding secret information inside images requires intensive computations, and therefore, designing steganography in...

Software maintenance is an important part of software engineering life cycle especially in large software systems due to the size and complexity of typical traces. In fact, the changes made to the implementation of systems are usually not reflected in the design documentation and hence the gap between a system's implementation and its design models...

Distributed virtual memory (DVM) has been introduced in several researches and models in order to improve system memory performance. In this paper, various practical issues are addressed, examined and analyzed to exploit further areas of performance enhancements. In particular, a novel distributed algorithm for DVM management based on cluster cache...

As FPGA performance and capabilities have increased substantially in recent years, FPGA-based designs are employed to implement complex functions and designs. The objective of our work is to design an interface between two FPGAs using I/O interface available inside FPGAs for the purpose of reliable communication. The two FPGAs will be connected via...

Parallel counters are one of the important components to construct high performance DSP units including column compression multipliers (i.e. tree multipliers). As the multiplier size increases, designing optimised wider counters is critical for its performance, which is the motive of this study. This article proposes a novel approach to design (2n�...

This paper presents a novel steganography technique which combines Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Least Significant Bit (LSB). The objective is to maximize the capacity and invisibility of the secret image with minimal modification to the cover image (at most k-bits per block). The secret image is transformed to frequency domain using DCT. An...

In this paper, we present a methodology for managing the Distributed Virtual Memory (DVM). The methodology includes distributed algorithms for DVM management to detect the memory status which will enhance previous DVM techniques. The DVM data structure tables are similar to those found in current Conventional Virtual Memory (CVM) with some modifica...

In this paper, we present a methodology for managing the Distributed Virtual Memory (DVM). The methodology includes distributed algorithms for DVM management to detect the memory status which will enhance previous DVM techniques. The DVM data structure tables are similar to those found in current Conventional Virtual Memory (CVM) with some modifica...

Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) is an evolving network technology that has been used to provide Traffic Engineering and high speed networking. There has been current demand on Internet Service Providers, which support MPLS technology, to provide Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees and security. Fault tolerance is an important QoS factor that...

The inverse omega network possesses various attractive properties and its constituent node has a fixed degree independent of the system size. In this paper, a proof for a technique applied recursively to construct an N-input concentrator switching network which is similar in topology to the inverse omega network will be introduced. Also an examinat...

Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) network architecture does not protect the confidentiality of data transmitted. This paper proposes a mechanism to enhance the security in MPLS networks by using multi-path routing combined with a modified (k, n) threshold secret sharing scheme. An Internet Protocol (IP) packet entering MPLS ingress router can b...

Multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) is an evolving network technology that is used to provide traffic engineering (TE) and high speed networking. Internet service providers, which support MPLS technology, are increasingly demanded to provide high quality of service (QoS) guarantees. One of the aspects of QoS is fault tolerance. It is defined as t...

This paper proposes a new approach to provide security for MPLS multicast networks. The proposed work is based on the (k, k) Threshold Sharing Scheme (TSS) where it can protect the confidentiality of IP multicast packets transmitted though the MPLS networks. The receivers for a multicast session can reconstruct the original traffic from the k trees...

This paper presents a new approach to provide fault tolerance in MPLS multicast networks. MPLS has been used to provide faster forwarding; combining with multicasting it further supports applications with improved service. Fault tolerance is therefore important for such networks. Our strategy for fault tolerance is to divide and encode the traffic...

MPLS security is an evolving issue which has been raised by many researchers and service providers. The basic architecture of MPLS network does not provide security services such as encryption. Therefore, MPLS does not protect the confidentiality of data transmitted. This paper provides a mechanism to enhance the security in MPLS networks by propos...

MPLS network architecture does not protect the confidentiality of data transmitted. This paper proposes a mechanism to enhance the security in MPLS networks by using multi-path routing combined with a modified (k, n) threshold secret sharing scheme. An IP packet entering MPLS ingress router can be partitioned into n shadow (share) packets, which ar...

There has been current demand on Internet service providers (ISPs) to provide quality of service (QoS) guarantees. Fault tolerance is an important factor that needs to be considered to maintain the network survivability. It is the property of a system that continues to operate the network properly in the event of failure of some of its parts. There...