Sharif Digital Repository

During the last years, researche'rs have proposed solutions to help smartphones improve execution time and reduce energy consumption by offloading heavy tasks to remote entities. Lately, inspired by the promising results of message forwarding in opportunistic networks, many researchers have proposed strategies for task offloading towards nearby mobile devices, giving birth to the Device-to-Device offloading paradigm. None of these strategies, though, offers any mechanism that considers selfish users and, most importantly, that motivates and defrays the participating devices who spend their resources. In this paper, we address these problems and propose the design of a framework that... 

Electric distribution system is one of the most important parts of power systems owing to delivering electricity to consumers. The major amount of losses in a power system is in distribution level. Optimal distributed generation (DG) placement and sizing have a significant effect on power loss reduction in distribution systems. In this paper, a mixed integer conic programming (MICP) approach is presented to solve the problem of DG placement, sizing, and hourly generation with the aim of reducing power loss and costs in radial distribution systems. The costs include both investment and operational costs of DGs. Hourly load variations are considered in the model. To verify the effectiveness of... 

One of the main shortcomings, caused by high penetration of wind power, is intermittency of generation. For integrating high penetration of wind power, the frequency regulation and the transactive control systems are modified to be sufficiently resilient against fluctuations of wind power and malicious cyber threats. Here, a hierarchical state-space model is presented for the frequency regulation and the transactive control systems in a smart grid environment. To achieve a resilient control, a framework based on cloud computing is proposed for the communication network. Benefits and challenges of the cloud-based framework are also described in this paper. To optimize the operation of the... 

Cloud manufacturing is an emerging service-oriented manufacturing paradigm that integrates and manages distributed manufacturing resources through which complex manufacturing demands with a high degree of customization can be fulfilled. The process of service selection optimization and scheduling (SSOS) is an important issue for practical implementation of cloud manufacturing. In this paper, we propose new mixed-integer programming (MIP) models for solving the SSOS problem with basic composition structures (i.e., sequential, parallel, loop, and selective). Through incorporation of the proposed MIP models, the SSOS with a mixed composition structure can be tackled. As transportation is... 

In this paper, we propose a new peer-to-peer (P2P) video streaming protocol which presents an implementation of network coding with a new caching mechanism. It employs a push-pull mechanism for sending the video chunks between peers. More specifically, this push-pull mechanism gives priority to the video chunks according to their video layers. The video base layer is transmitted through a pushing mechanism while the enhancement layers employ a pulling mechanism. Moreover, in the network coding algorithm of this protocol, we introduce a caching mechanism to improve the network's performance as well as the video streaming quality. The comprehensive simulations show that the proposed protocol... 

Elliptic localization is a range-based positioning technique exploiting multiple transmitter-receiver pairs, each of which provides separate bistatic range (BR) measurements. In this paper, a novel computationally efficient solution for locating a single target from BR measurements in distributed MIMO radar systems is proposed. Due to nonconvex nature of the associated maximum likelihood (ML) estimation problem, its globally optimal solution is difficult to obtain. We first reformulate the ML estimation as a nonconvex constrained weighted least squares problem. Owing to special structure of the resulting problem, it is recast as a convex problem, whose exact solution can be obtained in... 

On-chip interconnections play an important role in multi/many-processor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs). In order to achieve efficient optimization, each specific application must utilize a specific architecture, and consequently a specific interconnection network. For design space exploration and finding the best NoC solution for each specific application, a fast and flexible NoC simulator is necessary, especially for large design spaces. In this paper, we present an FPGA-based NoC co-simulator, which is able to be configured via software. In our proposed NoC simulator, entitled DuCNoC, we implement a Dual-Clock router micro-architecture, which demonstrates 75x-350x speed-up against BOOKSIM.... 

Nonlinear filtering techniques are used to fuse the Global Positioning System (GPS) with Inertial Navigation System (INS) to provide a robust and reliable navigation system with a performance superior to that of either INS or GPS alone. Prominent nonlinear estimators in this field are Kalman Filters (KF) and Particle Filters (PF). The main objective of this research is the comparative study of the well-established filtering methods of EKF, UKF, and PF based on EKF and UKF in an INS-GPS integrated navigation system. Different features of INS-GPS integrated navigation methods in the state estimation, bias estimation, and bias/scale factor estimation are investigated using these four filtering... 

In this paper, Stochastic Activity Networks (SANs) are exploited to model and evaluate the power consumption and performance of virtualized servers in cloud computing. The proposed SAN models the physical servers in three different power consumption and provisioning delay modes, switching the status of the servers according to the workload of the corresponding cluster if required. The Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) technique is considered in the proposed model for dynamically controlling the supply voltage and clock frequency of CPUs. Thus, Virtual Machines (VMs) on top a physical server can be divided into several power consumption and processing speed groups. According to the... 

We consider load balancing in a network of caching servers delivering contents to end users. Randomized load balancing via the so-called power of two choices is a well-known approach in parallel and distributed systems that reduces network imbalance. In this paper, we propose a randomized load balancing scheme which simultaneously considers cache size limitation and proximity in the server redirection process. Since the memory limitation and the proximity constraint cause correlation in the server selection process, we may not benefit from the power of two choices in general. However, we prove that in certain regimes, in terms of memory limitation and proximity constraint, our scheme results... 

To provide the privacy of the users who receive some computing services from the cloud, the users must encrypt their documents before outsourcing them to the cloud. Computation on outsourced encrypted data in the cloud rises some complexity to the system specially in the case when an entity would like to find some documents related to a special keyword. Searchable encryption is a tool for data owners to encrypt their data in a searchable manner. Generally, there exist two kinds of searchable encryption, namely symmetric (secret key) and asymmetric (public key) ones. Most of the public key searchable encryption schemes are vulnerable to the keyword guessing attack (KGA). In this paper we... 

In future smart grids, energy storage systems (EESs) are expected to play an indispensable role in balancing continuous load changes arising from customers' life-style as well as varying output of intermittent energy resources. This, however, needs significant investment that should be justified prior to their implementation. This paper presents a model to find the optimal capacity for ESSs in distribution systems. The model aims at maximizing system owner profit by reducing total electricity procurement costs. The model is formulated as a mixed integer non-linear programming problem. Due to the complexity and large size of the problem, a decouplebased method is proposed wherein optimal... 

Mobile e-health applications provide users and healthcare practitioners with an insightful way to check users/patients’ status and monitor their daily calorie intake. Mobile e-health applications provide users and healthcare practitioners with an insightful way to check users/patients’ status and monitor their daily activities. This paper proposes a cloud-based mobile e-health calorie system that can classify food objects in the plate and further compute the overall calorie of each food object with high accuracy. The novelty in our system is that we are not only offloading heavy computational functions of the system to the cloud, but also employing an intelligent cloud-broker mechanism to... 

Topology is widely known as the most important characteristic of networks-on-chip (NoC), since it highly affects overall network performance, cost, and power consumption. In this paper, we propose a reconfigurable architecture and design flow for NoCs on which a customized topology for any target application can be implemented. In this structure, the nodes are grouped into some clusters interconnected by a reconfigurable communication infrastructure. The nodes inside a cluster are connected by a mesh to benefit from the interesting characteristics of the mesh topology, i.e. regular structure and efficient handling of local traffic. A reconfigurable inter-cluster topology then eliminates the... 

The severity of timing delay in the communication channels of Network on Chip (NoC) depends on the transition patterns appearing on the wires. An analytical model can estimate the timing delay in NoC channels in the presence of crosstalk faults. However, recently proposed analytical model does not have enough accuracy and is based on 3-wire delay model. In this paper, an Accurate Crosstalk Model (ACM) based on 5-wire delay model is proposed to estimate the delay of communication channels in the presence of crosstalk faults. ACM is more accurate due to considering more wires in the delay model and also considering the overlaps between locations of transition patterns  

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) usually consist of many tiny sensor nodes and a Sink. Problems like nodes' misbehavior due to malicious, compromised or selfishness intentions, and WSNs' security vulnerabilities against different attacks due to free and unprotected communications, untrusted and broadcasted transmissions, hostile environments and limited resources, degrade the security and overall performance of WSNs. In another direction, most of the traditional security mechanisms are unsuitable for WSNs. One significant security solution against these problems is Trust Management System (TMS); TMS enhances the security by detecting the nodes' abnormal behaviors; it improves the cooperation... 

Topology is widely known as the most important characteristic of networks-on-chip (NoC), since it highly affects overall network performance, cost, and power consumption. In this paper, we propose a reconfigurable architecture and design flow for NoCs on which a customized topology for any target application can be implemented. In this structure, the nodes are grouped into some clusters interconnected by a reconfigurable communication infrastructure. The nodes inside a cluster are connected by a mesh to benefit from the interesting characteristics of the mesh topology, i.e. regular structure and efficient handling of local traffic. A reconfigurable inter-cluster topology then eliminates the... 

During the last years, researchers have proposed solutions to help smartphones offload heavy tasks to remote entities in order to improve execution time and reduce energy consumption. Lately, inspired by the promising results of message forwarding in opportunistic networks, many researchers have proposed strategies for task offloading towards nearby mobile devices. None of these strategies, though, proposes any mechanism that considers selfish users and, most importantly, that motivates and defrays the participating devices who spend their resources. In this paper, we address these problems and propose the design of a framework that integrates an incentive scheme and a reputation mechanism.... 

This paper proposes an efficient mechanism that mitigates crosstalk faults in Network-on-Chips (NoCs). This is done by using a Packet Manipulating mechanism called PAM for reliable data transfer of NoCs. PAM investigates the transitions of a packet to minimize the forbidden transition patterns appearing during the flit traversal in NoCs. To do this, the content of a packet is manipulated using three different manipulating mechanisms. In other words, PAM manipulates the content of packet in three manipulating modes including: vertical, horizontal and diagonal modes. Then, comparing the transitions of these manipulating mechanisms, a packet with minimum numbers of transitions is selected to be... 

Energy hubs that incorporate a variety of energy generation and energy transformation technologies can be used to provide the energy storage needed to enable the efficient operation of a ‘smart energy network’. When these hubs are combined as a network and allowed to exchange energy, they create efficiency advantages in both financial and environmental performance. Further, the interconnectedness of the energy network design provides an added layer of reliability. In this paper, a complex network of energy hubs is modeled and optimized under different scenarios to examine both the financial viability and potential reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Two case studies consisting of two and...