Sharif Digital Repository

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... 

We consider a wireless distributed computing system, in which multiple mobile users, connected wirelessly through an access point, collaborate to perform a computation task. In particular, users communicate with each other via the access point to exchange their locally computed intermediate computation results, which is known as data shuffling. We propose a scalable framework for this system, in which the required communication bandwidth for data shuffling does not increase with the number of users in the network. The key idea is to utilize a particular repetitive pattern of placing the data set (thus a particular repetitive pattern of intermediate computations), in order to provide the... 

How can we optimally trade extra computing power to reduce the communication load in distributed computing? We answer this question by characterizing a fundamental tradeoff between computation and communication in distributed computing, i.e., the two are inversely proportional to each other. More specifically, a general distributed computing framework, motivated by commonly used structures like MapReduce, is considered, where the overall computation is decomposed into computing a set of “Map” and “Reduce” functions distributedly across multiple computing nodes. A coded scheme, named “Coded Distributed Computing” (CDC), is proposed to demonstrate that increasing the computation load of the... 

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... 

Crosstalk faults occurring in wires of Networks on Chip (NoCs) can seriously threaten the reliability of data transfer. One efficient way to tackle crosstalk faults is numeral-based Crosstalk Avoidance Codes (CACs). Numeral-based CACs reduce crosstalk faults by preventing specific transition patterns to occur. One-Lambda Codes (OLCs) are the most efficient types of CACs. However, the codec of OLCs imposes overheads including power consumption, critical path and area occupation to the routers of NoCs. To find overhead-efficient OLCs, this paper proposes an Algorithm for Generating OLC Numeral systems (AGON). AGON provides a tradeoff for designers in selecting overhead-efficient OLCs. Using... 

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) cloud systems are becoming more popular due to the high computational capability, scalability, reliability, and efficient data sharing. However, sending and receiving a massive amount of data causes huge network traffic leading to significant communication delays. In P2P systems, a considerable amount of the mentioned traffic and delay is owing to the mismatch between the physical layer and the overlay layer, which is referred to as locality problem. To achieve higher performance and consequently resilience to failures, each peer has to make connections to geographically closer peers. To the best of our knowledge, locality problem is not considered in any well known P2P... 

This paper presents a framework for expansion planning studies of distributed energy storage systems (DESSs) in high wind penetrated power systems. The main objective is to find optimal location and capacity of DESSs in the viewpoint of independent system operator (ISO) while ensuring the maximum usage of wind farms output generation. Three different criteria are introduced for expansion planning studies. Minimizing wind curtailment cost together with transmission congestion cost are considered to properly deal with the issues associated with the curtailment of wind energy and constraints of transmission network. Furthermore, the minimum normalized profit for all DESSs' owners needs to be... 

In recent years, high interest in using Virtual Machines (VMs) in data centers and cloud computing has significantly increased the demand for high-performance data storage systems. A straightforward approach to providing a high-performance storage system is using Solid-State Drives (SSDs). Inclusion of SSDs in storage systems, however, imposes significantly higher cost compared to Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). Recent studies suggest using SSDs as a caching layer for HDD-based storage subsystems in virtualized platforms. Such studies neglect to address the endurance and cost of SSDs, which can significantly affect the efficiency of I/O caching. Moreover, previous studies only configure the cache... 

The widespread use of cloud computing services raises the question of how one can delegate the processing tasks to the untrusted distributed parties without breaching the privacy of its data and algorithms. Motivated by the algorithm privacy concerns in a distributed computing system, in this paper, we introduce the private function retrieval (PFR) problem, where a user wishes to efficiently retrieve a linear function of K messages from N non-communicating replicated servers while keeping the function hidden from each individual server. The goal is to find a scheme with minimum communication cost. To characterize the fundamental limits of the communication cost, we define the capacity of PFR... 

How can we optimally trade extra computing power to reduce the communication load in distributed computing? We answer this question by characterizing a fundamental tradeoff between computation and communication in distributed computing, i.e., the two are inversely proportional to each other. More specifically, a general distributed computing framework, motivated by commonly used structures like MapReduce, is considered, where the overall computation is decomposed into computing a set of “Map” and “Reduce” functions distributedly across multiple computing nodes. A coded scheme, named “coded distributed computing” (CDC), is proposed to demonstrate that increasing the computation load of the... 

Characteristics and way of behavior of attacks and infiltrators on computer networks are usually very difficult and need an expert. In addition; the advancement of computer networks, the number of attacks and infiltrations is also increasing. In fact, the knowledge coming from expert will lose its value over time and must be updated and made available to the system and this makes the need for expert person always felt. In machine learning techniques, knowledge is extracted from the data itself which has diminished the role of the expert. Various methods used to detect intrusions, such as statistical models, safe system approach, neural networks, etc., all weaken the fact that it uses all the... 

Execution speed seriously bothers application developers and users for wearable devices such as Google Glass. Intensive applications like 3D games suffer from significant delays when CPU is busy. Energy is another concern when the devices are in low battery level but users need them for urgency use. To ease such pains, one approach is to expand the computational power by cloud offloading. This paradigm works well when the available Internet access has enough bandwidth. Another way is to leverage nearby devices for computation-offloading, which is known as device-to-device (D2D) offloading. In this paper, we present Dandelion, a unified code offloading system for wearable computing. Dandelion... 

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. In this framework, we investigate the tension between storage resources, communication cost, and load balancing performance. To this end, we propose a randomized load balancing scheme which simultaneously considers cache size limitation and proximity in the server redirection process. In contrast to the classical power of two choices setup, since the memory limitation and the proximity constraint cause correlation in the server selection process, we may not benefit from the... 

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...