Yousaf Bin Zikria

• Ph.D., Information and Communication Engineering, Senior Member IEEE
• Program Coordinator for the BIT and the Master of Cyber Security programs at TIIS Sydney

Based on an open radio access network (O-RAN) architecture in terrestrial networks (TNs), this study proposed an open non-terrestrial network (open NTN) architecture in which multiple service operators could share low earth orbit (LEO) satellites for cost-effective network deployment in LEO-based NTNs. In the open NTN, a centralized unit (CU) of ne...

Location information has initiated a multitude of applications such as location-based services, health care, emergency response and rescue operations, and assets tracking. A plethora of techniques and technologies have been presented to ensure enhanced location accuracy, both horizontal and vertical. Despite many surveys covering horizontal localiz...

Devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) are growing in popularity across multiple industries. IoT links intelligent homes, buildings, businesses, and communities, and also links computers and mobile devices. Cybersecurity in IoT networks remains challenging, although many intrusion detection services for assault avoidance systems have bee...

Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been unfolded as a superior alternative for integrating a considerably greater extent of cores on a single chip. Recently, multi-core systems have become prevalent because of the increased processing demands for high-performance embedded applications. Application mapping techniques play a significant role in enhancing the...

Internet of Things (IoT) vision has astoundingly transcended environmental sensing with integrated computing systems and smart devices, providing seamless connectivity among humans, machines, and their environment to cooperate for convenience and economical benefits. Apart from all the tremendous benefits of IoT, this paradigm still suffers from ch...

The Sixth-Generation (6G) mobile network has the potential to provide not only traditional communication services but also additional processing, caching, sensing, and control capabilities to a massive number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Meanwhile, a 6G mobile network may provide global coverage and diverse quality-of-service provisioning t...

The data breach and the integrity violation of remote data remain significant issues in the domain of information security. A provably-secure hash function aids in providing solutions to integrity-related issues. Nevertheless, the choice of a provably-secure hash function has to be made with caution from the perspective of security. This research s...

Using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for data collecting in remote places is advantageous because of UAVs' low cost and extended range mobility. To facilitate the operation of time-sensitive applications, the acquired data is processed as geographically close to the end user as is practically possible. The suggested paradigm for energy-efficient U...

The heterogeneity and growing complexity from the evolution of 5G and beyond networks and the development of future IoT networks necessitate the automatic management of these networks. The exacerbated growth of IoT devices and foreseen network complexity deem manual management impractical. Zero touch networks (ZTNs) seems the practical solution to...

With the increased proliferation of internet-enabled mobile devices and large internet use, cybercrime incidents have grown exponentially, often leading to huge financial losses. Most cybercrimes are launched through malware attacks, phishing attacks, denial/distributed denial of attacks, looting people's money, stealing credential information for...

A common practice among programmers is to reuse existing code, accomplished by performing natural language queries through search engines. The main aim of code retrieval is to search for the most relevant snippet from a corpus of code snippets but unfortunately, code retrieval frameworks for low resource languages are insufficient. Retrieving the m...

The massive growth of diversified smart devices and continuous data generation poses a challenge to communication archi-tectures. To deal with this problem, communication networks consider fog computing as one of promising technologies that can improve overall communication performance. It brings on-demand services proximate to the end devices and...

Investigating prior methodologies, it has come to our knowledge that in smart cities, a disaster management system needs an autonomous reasoning mechanism to efficiently enhance the situation awareness of disaster sites and reduce its after-effects. Disasters are unavoidable events that occur at anytime and anywhere. Timely response to hazardous si...

Technological advancements have always been influencing our lives. Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain (BC) are emerging as potentially disruptive technologies. Whereby, the IoT is a system of inter-related devices with unique identifiers for data sharing and device management and control. IoT is based on the integration of tradit...

Healthcare information is essential for both service providers and patients. Further secure sharing and maintenance of Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) are imperative. EHR systems in healthcare have traditionally relied on a centralized system (e.g., cloud) to exchange health data across healthcare stakeholders, which may expose private and sens...

Future smart cities are the key to fulfilling the ever-growing demands of citizens. Information and communication advancements will empower better administration of accessible resources. The eventual fate of the world's betterment lies in its urban environment advancement. The fast influx of individuals creates possibility, yet it additionally caus...

The major cause of the increasing world mortality rate is cardiovascular disease (CVD), killing 17.9 million people annually. Current techniques are costly, challenging to operate on, and an expert is needed to confirm the diagnosis results. Phonocardiogram (PCG) signals are heart sound recordings of heart rhythms and have many advantages over trad...

In this paper, we propose an agent-based approach for the evaluation of Multiple Unmanned Autonomous Vehicle (MUAV) wildfire monitoring systems for remote and hard-to-reach areas. Emerging environmental factors are causing a higher number of wildfires and keeping these fires in check is becoming a global challenge. MUAV deployment for the monitorin...

Impressive technological advancements over the past decades commenced significant advantages in the maritime industry sector and elevated commercial, operational, and financial benefits. However, technological development introduces several novel risks that pose serious and potential threats to the maritime industry and considerably impact the mari...

Advancement in very large scale integration (VLSI) technologies and the ever-shrinking size of the transistors have led the semiconductor designers to create a multiprocessor system on chips. Network on chip (NoC) provides an efficient and flexible communication infrastructure to these systems. One of the most prominent research problems in NoC is...

The communication among smart meters (SMs) and neighborhood area network (NAN) gateways is a fundamental requisite for managing the energy consumption at the consumer site. The bi-directional communication among SMs and NANs over the insecure public channel is vulnerable to impersonation, SM traceability, and SM physical capturing attacks. Many exi...

Transmission rate is one of the contributing factors in the performance of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Congested network causes reduced network response time, queuing delay and more packet loss. To address the issue of congestion, we have proposed transmission rate control methods. To avoid the congestion, we have adjusted the transmission rat...

The phenomenal growth of smartphones and wearable devices has begun crowd-sourcing applications for the Internet of Things (IoT). E-healthcare is considered the essential service for crowd-sourcing IoT applications that help remote access or storage medical server (MS) data to the authorized doctors, patients, nurses, etc., via the public Internet....

Cardiac diseases constitute a major root of global mortality and they are likely to persist. Electrocardiogram (ECG) is widely opted in clinics to detect countless heart illnesses. Numerous artifacts interfere with the ECG signal, and their elimination is vital to allow medical specialists to acquire valuable statistics from the ECG. The utmost art...

With the increasing number and popularity of digital content, the management of digital access rights has become an utmost important field. Through digital rights management systems (DRM-S), access to digital contents can be defined and for this, an efficient and secure authentication scheme is required. The DRM authentication schemes can be used t...

The internet of Drones (IoD) can encompass many essential services, including surveillance and emergency/rescue operations. While IoD is becomin popular and experiencing a rapid usage increase, privacy and security are the main concerns to avoid leakage of critical information and/or denial of services by a single drone or a whole IoD network. In a...

The rising popularity of ICT and the Internet has enabled Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to offer advantageous assistance to Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET), realizing a relay node's role among the disconnected segments in the road. In this scenario, the communication is done between Vehicles to UAVs (V2U), subsequently transforming into a UAV-assi...

The characterization of aircraft in remote sensing satellite imagery has many armed and civil applications. For civil purposes, such as in tragedy and emergency aircraft searching, airport scrutiny and aircraft identification from satellite images are very important. This study presents an automated methodology based on handcrafted and deep convolu...

Soft errors in network‐on‐chip (NoC) such as single bit upsets and multibit upsets cause hazardous effects such as congestion, deadlock, livelock, and corruption of data. Error‐correcting codes (ECCs) are the best choices to handle these soft errors in links and memory buffers of NoC, which is the need of all modern systems, including internet of t...

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is structured upon both the sensing and communication infrastructure and computation facilities. The IoMT provides the convenient and cheapest ways for healthcare by aiding the remote access to the patients’ physiological data and using machine learning techniques for help in diagnosis. The communication delays...

The electricity demands are floated through smart grid (SG) devices to a remote power management system and utility center (UC) for utilizing energy-based services, while the UCs manage the distribution of power. Nevertheless, in smart grid systems, the communication messages are susceptible to various threats, since the information related to powe...

The Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a network that does not have a fixed infrastructure. Migratory routes and related hosts that are connected via wireless networks self-configure it. Routers and hosts are free to wander, and nodes can change the topology fast and unexpectedly. In emergencies, such as natural/human disasters, armed conflicts, and...

Indoor environments are challenging for global navigation satellite systems and cripple its performance. Magnetic field data-based positioning and localization has emerged as a potential solution for ubiquitous indoor positioning and localization. The availability of embedded magnetic sensors in the smartphone simplifies the positioning without the...

Blockchain is considered a distributed ledger that can transact securely and trustfully without involving any third party. It has caused a lot of interest in various sectors, like government, finance, banking, etc. Blockchain technology is suitable for areas where multiple data storage and transaction types generally require the third party to auth...

Network on chip (NoC) is a promising communication infrastructure for multiple cores on a chip to exchange data efficiently. In such NoC architecture, application mapping is a process of assigning tasks to the processing cores. An optimized application mapping technique enhances the performance of a chip and reduces the entire chip’s energy consump...

The routing in underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) has become a challenging issue due to several problems. First, in UASN, the distance between the nodes changes due to their mobility with the water current, thus increasing the network's energy consumption. Second problem in UASNs is the occurrence of the void hole, which affects the networ...

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing involves exchanging resources and files by computers connected through a network rather than a central server. In P2P, over mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), the fundamental necessity is the linkage of the overlay participating peers (OPPs) for the efficient operation of the DHT-based P2P overlay protocol over MANETs. Th...

Fifth-Generation (5G) networks have adopted a multi-tier structural model which includes femtocells, picocells, and macrocells to ensure the user quality-of-service (QoS). To meet these QoS demands, the system requires optimization of different resources in different network dynamics carefully. However, if ignored, this will lead to long processing...

The progression of Internet of Things (IoT) has resulted in generation of huge amount of data. Effective handling and analysis of such big volumes of data proposes a crucial challenge. Existing cloud-based frameworks of Big Data visualization are rising costs for servers, equipment, and energy consumption. There is a need for a green solution targe...

Incumbent wireless technologies for futuristic fifth generation (5G) and beyond 5G (B5G) networks, such as IEEE 802.11 ax (WiFi), are vital to provide ubiquitous ultra-reliable and low-latency communication services with massively connected devices. Amalgamating WiFi networks with 5G/B5G networks has attracted strong researcher interest over the pa...

Mapping application task graphs on intellectual property (IP) cores into network-on-chip (NoC) is a non-deterministic polynomial-time hard problem. The evolution of network performance mainly depends on an effective and efficient mapping technique and the optimization of performance and cost metrics. These metrics mainly include power, reliability,...

The COVID-19 epidemic, and the recent related waves of variant outbreaks, have had a significant impact on every field of life. One of the major impacts of COVID is the increased stress on the already exhausted healthcare system. Tactile healthcare is revolutionizing healthcare systems. The 5G and Beyond-5G (B5G) technologies are expected to enable...

The COVID-19 epidemic, and the recent related waves of variant outbreaks, have had a significant impact on every field of life. One of the major impacts of COVID is the increased stress on the already exhausted healthcare system. Tactile healthcare is revolutionizing healthcare systems. The 5G and Beyond-5G (B5G) technologies are expected to enable...

The advancements in the internet of things (IoT) require specialized security protocols to provide unbreakable security along with computation and communication efficiencies. Moreover, user privacy and anonymity has emerged as an integral part, along with other security requirements. Unfortunately, many recent authentication schemes to secure IoT-b...

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2022.103794

Recently, extensive research efforts have been devoted to developing beyond fifth generation (B5G), also referred to as sixth generation (6G) wireless networks aimed at bringing ultra-reli-able low-latency communication services. 6G is expected to extend 5G capabilities to higher communication levels where numerous connected devices and sensors can...

The wide use of mobile devices introduced several new services for the consumer market which are collectively called location-based services, the name being indicative of the significance of the consumer position. Consequently, a rich variety of positioning technologies have been adopted to provide and enhance user location information. The mass de...

The Information-Centric Networking (ICN) provides a new data dissemination Internet paradigm to support the communication services that will meet the end-users' modern requirements. ICN focuses on transmitting data rather than physical locations. It offers a cache-able environment to fulfill future requirements and delivers communication services w...

The Information-Centric Networking (ICN) provides a new data dissemination Internet paradigm to support the communication services that will meet the end-users’ modern requirements. ICN focuses on transmitting data rather than physical locations. It offers a cache-able environment to fulfill future requirements and delivers communication services w...

The tactile internet (TI) is believed to be the prospective advancement of the internet of things (IoT), comprising human-to-machine and machine-to-machine communication. TI focuses on enabling real-time interactive techniques with a portfolio of engineering, social, and commercial use cases. For this purpose, the prospective 5th generation (5G) te...

Intention mining is a promising research area of data mining that aims to determine end-users’ intentions from their past activities stored in the logs, which note users’ interaction with the system. Search engines are a major source to infer users’ past searching activities to predict their intention, facilitating the vendors and manufacturers to...

Internet of drones (IoD) has gained significant importance in recent times due to its applications in several critical domains ranging from commercial to defense and rescue operations. With several drones flying in different zones to carry out specified tasks, the IoD can be beneficial to gather the real time data for interpretation by the users. H...

Predominantly the localization accuracy of the magnetic field-based localization approaches is severed by two limiting factors: Smartphone heterogeneity and smaller data lengths. The use of multifarious smartphones cripples the performance of such approaches owing to the variability of the magnetic field data. In the same vein, smaller lengths of m...

It is predicted that by 2025, all devices will be connected to the Internet, subsequently causing the number of devices connected with the Internet to rise [...]

Wireless health is transforming health care by integrating wireless technologies into conventional medicine, including the diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment of illness [...]

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of infections worldwide, and the loss of trillions of dollars for many large economies. It poses a grave threat to the human population with an excessive number of patients constituting an unprecedented challenge with which health systems have to cope. Researchers from many...

The use of the magnetic field data to perform indoor positioning gained an accelerating interest during the last few years. The ubiquity of the magnetic field data makes it a potential candidate for indoor positioning and localization. Additionally, the availability of the embedded magnetic sensor in the smartphones makes it an infrastructure-less...

Fog computing (FC) is an infrastructure consisting of decentralized computing, where computing resources suchas storage, applications, and data are scattered among the cloud and data source. Fog computing inherits similarprivacy and security concerns present in cloud computing, such as authentication and key management issues.Recently, Wazid et al....

Postdoctoral Researcher

While the 6G/IoT transition is on the cards, the real advantage of this transition can be realized only if the user privacy and security are guaranteed. The smartcard and password based authentication protocols can help the transition in a rapid way. However, due to insecurities and/or heavy computation, many such protocols cannot cope with the dyn...

Decision making in case of medical diagnosis is a complicated process. A large number of overlapping structures and cases, and distractions, tiredness, and limitations with the human visual system can lead to inappropriate diagnosis. Machine learning (ML) methods have been employed to assist clinicians in overcoming these limitations and in making...

The idea of a smart home is getting attention for the last few years. The key challenges in a smart home are intelligent decision making, secure identification, and authentication of the IoT devices, continuous connectivity, data security, and privacy issues. The existing systems are targeting one or two of these issues whereas a smart home automat...

Speech emotion recognition (SER) plays a significant role in human-machine interaction. Emotion recognition from speech and its precise classification is a challenging task because a machine is unable to understand its context. For an accurate emotion classification, emotionally relevant features must be extracted from the speech data. Traditionall...

Network-on-chip (NoC) architectures have become a popular communication platform for heterogeneous computing systems owing to their scalability and high performance. Aggressive technology scaling makes these architectures prone to both permanent and transient faults. This study focuses on the tolerance of a NoC router to permanent faults. A permane...

Recent innovation, growth, and deployment of internet of things (IoT) networks are changing the daily life of people. 5G networks are widely deployed around the world, and they are important for continuous growth of IoT. The next generation cellular networks and wireless sensor networks (WSN) make the road to the target of the next generation IoT n...

Quality of service (QoS) implementation in a wireless local area network (WLAN) enables the prediction of network performance and utilization of effective bandwidth for multimedia applications. In QoS-supported WLAN, enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) adjusts back-off parameters to implement priority-based channel access at the medium acces...

Next-generation wireless networks have to be robust and self-sustained. Internet of things (IoT) is reshaping the technological adaptation in the daily life of human beings. IoT applications are highly diverse, and they range from critical applications like smart city, health-based industries, to industrial IoT. Machine learning (ML) techniques are...

Green cognitive radios show promise for high energy efficiency (EE) in the future of wireless communications. Spectrum sensing refers to an energy-consuming procedure that allows cognitive users to independently identify unused radio spectrum segments and prevent interference to primary users, and it should be minimized due to resource limitations....

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a world of connected networks and modern technology devices, among them vehicular networks considered more challenging due to high speed and network dynamics. Future trends in IoT allow these inter networks to share information. Also, the previous security solutions to vehicular IoT (VIoT) much emphasize on privacy p...

Computer-Aided Language Learning (CALL) is growing nowadays because learning new languages is essential for communication with people of different linguistic backgrounds. Mispronunciation detection is an integral part of CALL, which is used for automatic pointing of errors for the non-native speaker. In this paper, we investigated the mispronunciat...

Our traditional Internet is extended into the Internet of Things (IoT) by connecting physical world devices and objects (things) to it. The diversity of applications of IoT range from mission-critical applications, such as smart-grid, smart-transportation system, smart-surveillance, and smart-healthcare to business applications, such as smart-indus...

In 5G, low latency and high reliability have become the most significant issues in addition to ultra-high throughput and support of massive number of devices. To achieve the goal of low latency, the concept of tactile Internet has been introduced. To reduce the latency, the various techniques, which can be applied to from the physical layer to the...

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...

Advancements in sensor network have evolved rapidly in recent years, and devices are smart enough to build and manage their network and route optimization referred to as Internet of Things (IoT). Numerous IoT operating systems (OSs) are developed for resource-constrained IoT devices. Contiki IoT OS is a widely used IoT OS by researchers and practit...

With the immersive growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) and real-time adaptability, quality of life for people is improving. IoT applications are diverse in nature and one crucial aspect of it is multimedia sensors and devices. These IoT multimedia devices form the Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT). It generates a massive volume of data with d...

The advent of new devices, technology, machine learning techniques, and the availability of free large speech corpora results in rapid and accurate speech recognition. In the last two decades, extensive research has been initiated by researchers and different organizations to experiment with new techniques and their applications in speech processin...

Aggressive scaling in deep nanometer technology enables chip multiprocessor design facilitated by the communication-centric architecture provided by Network-on-Chip (NoC). At the same time, it brings considerable challenges in reliability because a fault in the network architecture severely impacts the performance of a system. To deal with these re...

The growing demand for food in terms of quality and quantity has increased the need for industrialization and intensification in the agriculture field. Internet of Things (IoT) is a highly promising technology that is offering many innovative solutions to modernize the agriculture sector. Research institutions and scientific groups are continuously...

The impact of the Internet of Things (IoT) on the advancement of the healthcare industry is immense. The ushering of the Medicine 4.0 has resulted in an increased effort to develop platforms, both at the hardware level as well as the underlying software level. This vision has led to the development of Healthcare IoT (H-IoT) systems. The basic enabl...

In a real network deployment, the diverse sensor applications generate a heterogeneous traffic pattern which may include basic sensing measurements such as temperature readings or high-volume multimedia traffic. In a heterogeneous traffic network, the two standardized objective functions (OFs), i.e., objective function zero (OF0) and the Minimum Ra...

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. Delay-sensitive and bandwidth-hungry multimedia ap...

Wireless local area networks (WLANs) are widely deployed for Internet-centric data applications. Due to their extensive norm in our day-to-day wireless-enabled life, WLANs are expected to play a vital role for Internet of Things (IoT). It is predicted that by 2020, about 50 billion devices (things) will be connected via IoT. Consequently, WLANs nee...