Publications

2019
Hamouid K, Adi K. Secure and reliable certification management scheme for large-scale MANETs based on a distributed anonymous authority. Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications. 2019;12 (5) :1137–1155.Abstract

This paper proposes a compromise-tolerant (t,n)-threshold certification management scheme for MANETs. Our solution allows to mitigate the impact of compromised nodes that participate in the certification service. In our design, certification management is achieved anonymously by an Anonymous Certification Authority (ACA). The latter is fully distributed into multiple disjointed coalitions of nodes whose structure is made hidden. This prevents an adversary from taking the control of the ACA by arbitrarily compromising t or more nodes. In other words, our proposal enhances the compromise-tolerance to more than the threshold number t of nodes without breaking down the whole certification system. As a result, our scheme requires a very smaller threshold than traditional schemes, which improves considerably the service availability. The experimental study shows a clear advantage over traditional threshold-based certification schemes by ensuring a significant positive compromise between security and availability of certification service.

Belferdi W, Behloul A, Noui L. A Bayer pattern-based fragile watermarking scheme for color image tamper detection and restoration. Multidimensional Systems and Signal Processing. 2019;30 (3) :1093–1112.Abstract

The security of multimedia documents becomes an urgent need, especially with the increasing image falsifications provided by the easy access and use of image manipulation tools. Hence, usage of image authentication techniques fulfills this need. In this paper, we propose an effective self-embedding fragile watermarking scheme for color images tamper detection and restoration. To decrease the capacity of insertion, a Bayer pattern is used to reduce the color host image into a gray-level watermark, to further improve the security Torus Automorphism permutation is used to scramble the gray-level watermark. In our algorithm, three copies of the watermark are inserted over three components (R, G, and B channels) of the color host image, providing a high probability of detection accuracy and recovery if one copy is destroyed. In the tamper detection process, a majority voting technique is used to determine the legitimacy of the image and recover the tampered regions after interpolating the extracted gray-level watermark. Using our proposed method, tampering rate can achieve 25% with a high visual quality of recovered image and PSNR values greater than 34 (dB). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method affords three major properties: the high quality of watermarked image, the sensitive tamper detection and high localization accuracy besides the high-quality of recovered image.

Saadna Y, Behloul A, Mezzoudj S. Speed limit sign detection and recognition system using SVM and MNIST datasets. Neural Computing and Applications. 2019;31 :5005–5015.Abstract

This article presents a computer vision system for real-time detection and robust recognition of speed limit signs, specially designed for intelligent vehicles. First, a new segmentation method is proposed to segment the image, and the CHT transformation (circle hog transform) is used to detect circles. Then, a new method based on local binary patterns is proposed to filter segmented images in order to reduce false alarms. In the classification phase, a cascading architecture of two linear support vector machines is proposed. The first is trained on the GTSRB dataset to decide whether the detected region is a speed limit sign or not, and the second is trained on the MNIST dataset to recognize the sign numbers. The system achieves a classification recall of 99.81% with a precision of 99.08% on the GTSRB dataset; in addition, the system is also tested on the BTSD and STS datasets, and it achieves a classification recall of 99.39% and 98.82% with a precision of 99.05% and 98.78%, respectively, within a processing time of 11.22 ms.

Boubechal I, Rachid S, Benzid R. A Generalized and Parallelized SSIM-Based Multilevel Thresholding Algorithm. Applied Artificial Intelligence. 2019;33 (14) :1266-1289.Abstract

Multilevel thresholding is a widely used technique to perform image segmentation. It consists of dividing an input image into several distinct regions by finding the optimal thresholds according to a certain objective function. In this work, we generalize the use of the SSIM quality measure as an objective function to solve the multilevel thresholding problem using empirically tuned swarm intelligence algorithms. The experimental study we have conducted shows that our approach, producing near-exact solutions, is more effective compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we show that the computation complexity has been significantly reduced by adopting a shared-memory parallel programming paradigm for all the algorithms we have implemented.

Saliha M, Ali B, Rachid S. Towards large-scale face-based race classification on spark framework. Multimedia Tools and Applications . 2019;78 (18) :26729–26746.Abstract

Recently, the identification of an individual race has become an important research topic in face recognition systems, especially in large-scale face images. In this paper, we propose a new large-scale race classification method which combines Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and Logistic Regression (LR) on Spark framework. LBP is used to extract features from facial images, while spark’s logistic regression is used as a classifier to improve the accuracy and speedup the classification system. The race recognition method is performed on Spark framework to process, in a parallel way, a large scale of data. The evaluation of our proposed method has been performed on two large face image datasets CAS-PEAL and Color FERET. Two major races were considered for this work, including Asian and Non-Asian races. As a result, we achieve the highest race classification accuracy (99.99%) compared to Linear SVM, Naive Bayesian (NB), Random Forest(RF), and Decision Tree (DT) Spark’s classifiers. Our method is compared against different state-of-the-art methods on race classification, the obtained results show that our approach is more efficient in terms of accuracy and processing time.

Hedjazi D, Layachi F, Boubiche DE. A multi-agent system for distributed maintenance scheduling. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004579061832620X#!. 2019;77 :1-11.Abstract

Due to the intrinsically geo-distributed subcontracting maintenance activity practice, the maintenance scheduling has for a long time been a major challenge in the industry. This research work presents a methodology to schedule the maintenance activities of geo-distributed assets. A multi-agent system based approach is proposed to enable the decision-making for the subcontractors in a distributed industrial environment under uncertainty. An auction based negotiation mechanism is designed to promote competition and cooperation among the different agents, and to obtain global good schedule.Compared to the Weighted Shortest Processing Time first–Heuristic–Earliest Due Date (WSPT-H-EDD) method, the experimental results show that the proposed approach is able to provide scheduling scheme with good performances in terms of Global Cost, Total Weighted Tardiness Cost and makespan.

Gourdache S, Bilami A, Barka K. A framework for spectrum harvesting in heterogeneous wireless networks integration. Journal of King Saud University - Computer and Information Sciences. 2019.Abstract

Today’s, and near future, communication networks rely heavily on capacity expansion to keep pace with the massive number of mobile devices and ever-increasing mobile traffic. This expansion can be achieved through three major ingredients, namely, adding more wireless-spectrum, efficient usage of this spectrum, and adequate networks’ architectures. In this paper, a proposition for integrating these three ingredients in a cognitive-radio-inspired framework is presented. The focus is on the integration of the idle spectrum resources of different wireless networks into a single mobile heterogeneous wireless network. This framework is based on a conceptual network-architecture articulated with a generic and cooperative spectrum-harvesting scheme. The former brings the necessary agility for such heterogeneous environments, the latter keeps the network supplied with the vital spectrum resources. In our proposal, we make use of cross-correlated sequences (CCSs) for context-aware events’ signaling purposes. This choice is motivated by the particularly interesting characteristics of CCSs, namely, duration shortness, robustness to bad radio conditions, detection rather than decoding, and low probability of collision. As an illustration, we propose a reporting and detection scheme, in the context of OFDMA systems, and provide performance results from simulations to validate our proposal.

Hedjazi D, Layachi F, Boubiche DE. A multi-agent system for distributed maintenance scheduling. Computers & Electrical Engineering. 2019;77 :1-11.Abstract

Due to the intrinsically geo-distributed subcontracting maintenance activity practice, the maintenance scheduling has for a long time been a major challenge in the industry. This research work presents a methodology to schedule the maintenance activities of geo-distributed assets. A multi-agent system based approach is proposed to enable the decision-making for the subcontractors in a distributed industrial environment under uncertainty. An auction based negotiation mechanism is designed to promote competition and cooperation among the different agents, and to obtain global good schedule.Compared to the Weighted Shortest Processing Time first–Heuristic–Earliest Due Date (WSPT-H-EDD) method, the experimental results show that the proposed approach is able to provide scheduling scheme with good performances in terms of Global Cost, Total Weighted Tardiness Cost and makespan.

Athmani S, Bilami A, Boubiche DE. EDAK: An Efficient Dynamic Authentication and Key Management Mechanism for heterogeneous WSNs. Future Generation Computer Systems. 2019;92 :789-799.Abstract

Securing the network communication represents one of the most important challenges in wireless sensor networks. The key distribution problem has been widely discussed in classical wireless sensor networks contrarily to heterogeneous ones. HWSNs (Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks) have optimized the network capability and opened new security opportunities by introducing high resource capacity sensor nodes in the network. In this paper, an efficient dynamic authentication and key Management scheme is proposed for heterogeneous WSN. The main idea is to provide a single lightweight protocol for both authentication and key establishment while optimizing the security level. The key distribution algorithm is based on preexisting information to generate dynamic keys and does not require any secure channel and sharing phase which improves the security, energy efficiency and reduces the memory consumption. Experimental results have confirmed the performances of our mechanism compared to some of the existing security protocols.

Benayache A, Bilami A, Barkat S, Lorenz P, Taleb H. MsM: A microservice middleware for smart WSN-based IoT application. Journal of Network and Computer Applications. 2019;144 :138-154.Abstract

Actually, wireless sensor networks represent a substantial part in IoT. However, their limitation requires a special consideration in IoT applications. For their integration with the internet, it is necessary to adapt such networks using different middleware, with taking into account various challenges such as heterogeneity and interoperability.

Previously Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was the suitable design, but with a better practice, a new design called microservice becomes the leader due to its high performance and its suitability for IoT applications.

In this paper, we first survey the most important middleware that have been proposed to handle WSN through IoT. Also, we discuss the most crucial microservices that handle different integration factors by making them supported by the proposed middleware. Our proposal is inspired from artificial neural network architecture to allow dynamic service interaction; it supports unlimited services with a regard to various device capabilities separately of the cloud technologies. Moreover, the evaluation of our design clearly shows that our middleware allows a lightweight WSN integration with IoT regarding to their limitations and requirements.

Akleylek S, Soysaldı M, Boubiche DE, Toral-Cruz H. A Novel Method for Polar Form of Any Degree of Multivariate Polynomials with Applications in IoT. Sensors (Basel). 2019;19 (4) :903.Abstract

Identification schemes based on multivariate polynomials have been receiving attraction in different areas due to the quantum secure property. Identification is one of the most important elements for the IoT to achieve communication between objects, gather and share information with each other. Thus, identification schemes which are post-quantum secure are significant for Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. Various polar forms of multivariate quadratic and cubic polynomial systems have been proposed for these identification schemes. There is a need to define polar form for multivariate dth degree polynomials, where d ≥ 4 . In this paper, we propose a solution to this need by defining constructions for multivariate polynomials of degree d ≥ 4 . We give a generic framework to construct the identification scheme for IoT and RFID applications. In addition, we compare identification schemes and curve-based cryptoGPS which is currently used in RFID applications.

Boubiche DE, Imran M, Maqsood A, Shoaib M. Mobile crowd sensing – Taxonomy, applications, challenges, and solutions. Computers in Human Behavior. 2019;101 :352-370.Abstract

Recently, mobile crowd sensing (MCS) is captivating growing attention because of their suitability for enormous range of new types of context-aware applications and services. This is attributed to the fact that modern smartphones are equipped with unprecedented sensing, computing, and communication capabilities that allow them to perform more complex tasks besides their inherent calling features. Despite a number of merits, MCS confronts new challenges due to network dynamics, the huge volume of data, sensing task coordination, and the user privacy problems. In this paper, a comprehensive review of MCS is presented. First, we highlight the distinguishing features and potential advantages of MCS compared to conventional sensor networks. Then, a taxonomy of MCS is devised based on sensing scale, level of user involvement and responsiveness, sampling rate, and underlying network infrastructure. Afterward, we categorize and classify prominent applications of MCS in environmental, infrastructure, social, and behavioral domains. The core architecture of MCS is also described. Finally, we describe the potential advantages, determine and reiterate the open research challenges of MCS and illustrate possible solutions.

2018
Guezouli L, Barka K, Bouam S, Zidani A. A variant of random way point mobility model to improve routing in wireless sensor networks. International Journal of Information and Communication Technology. 2018;13 (4).Abstract

The mobility of nodes in a wireless sensor network is a factor affecting the quality of service offered by this network. We think that the mobility of the nodes presents an opportunity where the nodes move in an appropriate manner. Therefore, the routing algorithms can benefit from this opportunity. Studying a model of mobility and adapt it to ensure an optimal routing in an agitated network is the purpose of our work. We are interested in applying a variant of the mobility model RWP (named routing-random waypoint 'R-RWP') on the whole network in order to maximise the coverage radius of the base station (which will be fixed in our study) and thus to optimise the data delivery end-to-end delay.

Hedjazi D. Constructing collective competence: a new CSCW-based approach. International Journal of Information and Communication Technology. 2018;12 (3) :4.Abstract

Within the majority of contexts, it is persons that are considered to be competent or incompetent. However, in many cases it is the performance of groups and teams that is most important. This implies a concept of collective competence that integrates the set of skills in a group. In addition, the collective competence construction process is also enriched through collaboration which implies exchanges, confrontations, negotiations and interpersonal interactions. This paper presents our CSCW-based approach supporting collective competence construction. As a case of study, the industrial maintenance workspace is fundamentally a collaborative context. Our contribution in this area led us first, to analyse the related task in order to highlight collaborative maintenance vital needs and design the appropriate required group awareness supports which will be used to support collective competence. Finally, the experimentation study identifies the highly effective group awareness tools.

Sahraoui S, Sahraoui S, Benbousa O, Berkani A-S, Bilami A. Sensor-based wearable system for the detection and automatic treatment of nocturnal hypoglycaemia. Healthcare Technology Letters . 2018;5 (6) :239 - 241.Abstract

Diabetic patients are prone to daily and severe health-related risks, namely hyper and hypoglycaemia. Hypoglycaemia phenomenon happens when the glucose level in patient's blood is lower than a well-determined sill. It may induce serious impacts, such as functional brain failure or even the death. Hypoglycaemia is especially dangerous when it occurs during the night while the patient is asleep because it becomes difficult to be detected by the patient itself or other persons around him. While all existing sensor-based solutions are detection-only driven, the proposed solution goes beyond and attempts to treat autonomously, and at low cost, the nocturnal hypoglycaemia. The presented system detects the nocturnal hypoglycaemia phenomenon based on accelerated heart-rate symptom and a progressive detection algorithm. The system treats then the detected nocturnal hypoglycaemia throughout safe and automatic injection of glucagon.

Djebaili Y, Bilami A. A Cross-Layer Fault Tolerant Protocol with Recovery Mechanism for Clustered Sensor Networks. International Journal of Distributed Systems and Technologies (IJDST) . 2018;9 (1) :22.Abstract

This article describes how fault tolerance is an essential issue for many WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) applications such as wildlife monitoring, battlefield surveillance and health monitoring. It represents a great challenge for researchers regarding to the characteristics of sensor nodes which are prone to failures due essentially to their limited resources. Faults may occur, not only when sensor nodes exhaust their energy, but also when the congestion phenomenon emerges, because of a high traffic in the network and limited storage capacity of the sensor nodes. In order to support fault tolerance in WSNs, the authors propose a new scheme which incorporates a link quality estimation algorithm and a congestion detection mechanism to enable nodes that present high quality links to be chosen for routing in a non-congested area in case of faults. Evaluations through simulations under NS2 show that our proposed protocol tolerates faults with a minimum cost relatively to HEEP protocol and improves network's performances comparatively to other fault tolerant protocols such as EF-LEACH.

Beghriche A, Bilami A. A fuzzy trust-based routing model for mitigating the misbehaving nodes in mobile ad hoc networks. International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics. 2018.Abstract

Security is one of the major challenges in the design and implementation of protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). In such systems, the cooperation between nodes is one of the important principles being followed in the current research works to formulate various security protocols. Many existing works assume that mobile nodes will follow prescribed protocols without deviation. However, this is not always the case, because these networks are subjected to a variety of malicious attacks. Since there are various models of attack, trust routing scheme can guarantee security and trust of the network. The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel trusted routing model for mitigating attacks in MANETs.

Gourdache S, Bilami A, Barka K. Spectrum harvesting for heterogeneous wireless networks integration. Wireless Networks. 2018;26 (1) :431–447.Abstract

Massive capacity demand is a major impetus behind the advances, in various ways, of today and near future wireless communication networks. To face this challenge, more wireless spectrum is needed, efficient usage of this spectrum is necessary, and adequate architectures are required. In this paper, we present a conceptual solution based on a cognitive-radio-inspired cellular network, for integrating idle spectrum resources of different wireless networks into a single mobile heterogeneous wireless network. We describe the conceptual architecture of this integrating network, referred to as Integrating cognitive-radio-inspired cellular network (I-CRICNet), and present a cooperative spectrum-harvesting scheme that keeps the former supplied with spectrum resources. In the latter scheme, we make extensive use of cross-correlated sequences (CSSs), for events signaling purposes. This choice is motived by the particularly interesting characteristics of the CSSs, namely, duration shortness, robustness to bad radio conditions, detection rather than decoding, and low probability of collision. As an illustration, we propose a reporting and detection scheme, in the context of OFDMA systems, and provide performance results from simulations to validate our proposal.

Benyahia A, Bilami A, Sedrati M. CARTEE: congestion avoidance with reliable transport and energy efficiency for multimedia applications in wireless sensor networks. Wireless Networks. 2018;26 (167) :1–20.Abstract

Reliable data transport is an essential requirement for many multimedia applications in wireless sensor networks. Actually, an efficient transport protocol for these applications must take into account not only reliability and energy consumption factors but also memory occupancy and data delivery delay. Recently, many research works have been conducted in this area, however the proposed protocols treat some of these aspects and neglect others. Contrarily, in this paper we present a novel transport solution designed to provide 100% reliability without making light of other factors. Through different mechanisms, we attempt to reach this objective with congestion avoidance and good performances in terms of energy consumption, delivery delay, and memory storage. The proposed protocol, called congestion avoidance with reliable transmission and energy efficiency (CARTEE), attains these goals through several mechanisms, namely: fixed sliding window transmission, alternative implicit/explicit acknowledgement, a new congestion detection technique, and distributed transmission rate adjustment. To evaluate the proposed protocol, we have conducted simulations using ns-3. The obtained results confirm the efficiency and scalability of CARTEE and demonstrate that it outperforms the recent proposed transport protocols in terms of reliability, congestion avoidance, data cache occupancy, and latency.

Bahloul NEH, Boudjit S, Abdennebi M, Boubiche DE. A Flocking-Based on Demand Routing Protocol for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Journal of Computer Science and Technology. 2018;33 (2) :263–276.Abstract

The interest shown by some community of researchers to autonomous drones or UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) has increased with the advent of wireless communication networks. These networks allow UAVs to cooperate more efficiently in an ad hoc manner in order to achieve specific tasks in specific environments. To do so, each drone navigates autonomously while staying connected with other nodes in its group via radio links. This connectivity can deliberately be maintained for a while constraining the mobility of the drones. This will be suitable for the drones involved in a given path of a given transmission between a source and a destination. This constraint could be removed at the end of the transmission process and the mobility of each concerned drone becomes again independent from the others. In this work, we proposed a flocking-based routing protocol for UAVs called BR-AODV. The protocol takes advantage of a well known ad hoc routing protocol for on-demand route computation, and the Boids of Reynolds mechanism for connectivity and route maintaining while data is being transmitted. Moreover, an automatic ground base stations discovery mechanism has been introduced for a proactive drones and ground networks association needed for the context of real-time applications. The performance of BR-AODV was evaluated and compared with that of classical AODV routing protocol and the results show that BR-AODV outperforms AODV in terms of delay, throughput and packet loss.

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