Lab Research Program

The research Activity of the CNAS laboratory is conducted following five research programs:

Project Title: Modeling, design and protection of cyber physical systems in healthcare and environment surveillance

Funded by: Ministry of higher education and scientific research

Period: 2016-2019

Description:

The proposed research for this project aims at developing solutions for the modelling, design, and protection of cyber physical systems, for which little results have been developed by the research and industrial communities. One can notice that, despite sensor networks and wireless body area networks, a limited number of contributions has been provided recently by the research community, knowing that some of these contributions experience several limitations. Our work will contribute to overcome these drawbacks. Most of the solutions we will provide are built on the need to develop and protect supervisory applications in healthcare and environmental Cyber Physical Systems (CPS). In particular, several cloud platforms will be designed or used to optimize and increase the reliability and scale of CPS applications. In addition, an investigation theory will be developed for CPSs.

Project Title: QoS Provision in 5G Networks and Beyond

Funded by: Ministry of higher education and scientific research

Period: 2016-2019

Description:

The 5G technologies promise a universal communication environment that enables to address the wider societal challenges such as in transportation, societal safety, health, environment, and energy production and distribution that may provide the communications infrastructure for building large services. Moreover, the 5G communication networking aims at providing large bandwidth, infinite capability of communication and networking (including Device-to-Device) and extensive signal coverage in order to support high QoS to the end users. Given the huge smart and autonomous objects in 5G networks, network topology will change frequently, then, it is necessary to develop an intelligent routing protocol. 5G architectures must take into account the quality of service constraints. In fact, 5G protocols should ensure guaranteed bandwidth through the duration of connection as well as providing the use of most energy efficient paths. However, the performance of a QoS framework will rely on the speed at which routing protocols can compute new routes after topology changes have occurred. Indeed, the delay in computing new routes will have an impact on the delivered QoS. Furthermore, the radio resources are limited and the number of participating objects in communication in B5G networks is very important, it is necessary to develop an algorithm which allows a suitable management of resource allocation and admission control objects. Given the number of mobile objects envisioned for the Internet of Mobile Things (IoMT) architecture, it is crucial to have a scheme providing unique and extensible identification, using RFID technology, for example. Indeed, extensibility is required feature for the addition of new objects in the IoMT.

The expected outputs of this project aim at providing contributions in solving the following major problems: (a) Constructing an efficient communication architecture for 5G networks; (b) building efficient schemes for QoS provision and traffic engineering; (c) defining an efficient identity management and user authentication scheme; (d) contributing in solving the problem of RF to Optical communication conversion; and (e) building robust modules/components for access networks to 5G networks.

Project Title: Telecommunication Management and BigData Engineering

Funded by: Ministry of higher education and scientific research

Period: 2016-2019

Description:

Big data concept has been defined as data that exceeds the capability of commonly used hardware environments and software tools to capture, manage, and process it within a tolerable elapsed time for its users. A management scheme for big data is among the current urgent needs, since it ensures the representation, the interrogation and the storage of huge volumes of data. In addition, this scheme should be appropriate to deal with big data constraints and it is mainly affected by the size of the big graph data that represents the huge volumes of data. Defining a smart structure that represents structured and non-structured data is among the first needs that should be considered to enhance the representation and the querying of big data using structured querying languages. On the other hand, 4G networks and beyond are among the sources of generated big data for the services provided through these networks.

Project Title: Cyber Security, cyber Defense, and Strategic Intelligence

Funded by: Ministry of higher education and scientific research

Period: 2016-2019

Description:

Today, no one can contest the importance of cyber security, nor deny the fact that attackers are continually escalating their knowledge and ability to find and exploit vulnerabilities, leaving security defenders largely behind. In particular, the following asymmetry is observed between cyber-attacks and cyber defense: the effect of attacks generated through the spread of self-propagating and autonomous malware (e.g., worms) is increasing by the increase of network connectivity, while the cyber defense is not. To eliminate such an asymmetry novel strategies, techniques, and systems for the active and proactive cyber defense, offensive countermeasures generation, and cyber deception have been proposed recently in the literature. These techniques include the exploitation of the network connections and the available vulnerabilities to spread white and benign worms in order to thwart the true malwares, which also propagate thanks to the exploitation of the same networks and vulnerabilities. However, due to the cost and sensitivity of active defense strategies and techniques, it becomes necessary to develop the models that allow to infer the optimal strategy, prove its optimality and effectiveness, and determine its cost and duration, before applying it.

Project Title: Harmonic Analysis associated to advanced operators and applications to telecommunications

Funded by: Ministry of higher education and scientific research

Period: 2016-2019

Description:

In this project, we will study generalized wavelets and generalized continuous wavelet transform and packet transforms associated to cherednick operators and the Heckman-Opdam theory on Rd. To achieve this, we consider the Chrednik operators on Rd associated to a root system R. Thanks to these operators, Heckman-Opdam and K. Trimèche have developed a theory generalizing the harmonic analysis on group theory. With the aid of their results we will define and study the generalized wavelet transform, and we will prove, for these transforms, Plancherel and inversion formulas, and we establish a Calderon’s formula. To achieve these objectives, the project considers the study of the hypergeometric Fourier transform, the hypergeometric translation operator and the hypergeometric convolution products associated to the Cherednik operators and Heckma-Opdam theory.