Sonia Fahmy

Bio: Sonia Fahmy is an academic researcher from Purdue University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Asynchronous Transfer Mode & Wireless sensor network. The author has an hindex of 39, co-authored 217 publications receiving 11177 citations. Previous affiliations of Sonia Fahmy include Ohio State University & Hewlett-Packard.

Downscaling Network Scenarios with Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks

Abstract: A major challenge that researchers face in studying denial of service (DoS) attacks is the size of the network to be investigated. A typical DoS attack usually takes place over a large portion of the Internet and involves a considerable number of hosts. This can be intractable for testbed experimentation, and even simulation. Therefore, it is important to simplify a network scenario with DoS attacks before applying it to a simulation/testbed platform. Several approaches have been proposed in the literature to downscale a network scenario, while preserving certain critical properties. In this paper, we investigate via simulations the applicability of packet-level downscaling approaches to DoS scenarios. We select two representative methods: SHRiNK and TranSim. Our experiments identify the operational range of the two downscaling approaches, and propose guidelines for researches to select the most suitable downscaling approach for for their own research.

Predicting Prefix Availability in the Internet

Abstract: The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) maintains inter-domain routing information by announcing and withdrawing IP prefixes, possibly resulting in temporary prefix unreachability. Prefix availability observed from different vantage points in the Internet can be lower than standards promised by Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In this paper, we develop a framework for predicting long-term prefix availability, given short-duration prefix information from publicly available BGP routing databases. We compare three prediction models, and find that bagged decision trees perform the best when predicting for long future durations, whereas a simple model works well for short prediction durations. We show that mean time to failure and to recovery outperform past availability in terms of their importance for predicting availability for long durations. We also find that predictability is higher in the year 2009, compared to four years earlier. Our models allow ISPs to adjust BGP routing policies if predicted availability is low, and the models are useful for cloud computing systems, P2P, and VoIP applications.

ERUPT: Energy-efficient trustworthy provenance trees for wireless sensor networks

Abstract: Sensor nodes are inherently unreliable and prone to hardware or software faults. Thus, they may report untrustworthy or inconsistent data. Assessing the trustworthiness of sensor data items can allow reliable sensing or monitoring of physical phenomena. A provenance-based trust framework can evaluate the trustworthiness of data items and sensor nodes based on the intuition that two data items with similar data values but with different provenance (i.e., forwarding path) can be considered more trustworthy. Forwarding paths of data items generated from redundantly deployed sensors should consist of trustworthy nodes and remain dissimilar. Unfortunately, operating many sensors with dissimilar paths consumes significant energy. In this paper, we formulate an optimization problem to identify a set of sensor nodes and their corresponding paths toward the base station that achieve a certain trustworthiness threshold, while keeping the energy consumption of the network minimal. We prove the NP-hardness of this problem and propose ERUPT, a simulated annealing solution. Testbed and simulation results show that ERUPT achieves high trustworthiness, while reducing total energy consumption by 32–50% with respect to current approaches.

Omnify: investigating the visibility and effectiveness of copyright monitors

Abstract: The arms race between copyright agencies and P2P users is an ongoing and evolving struggle. On the one hand, content providers are using several techniques to stealthily find unauthorized distribution of copyrighted work in order to deal with the problem of Internet piracy. On the other hand, P2P users are relying increasingly on blacklists and anonymization methods in order to avoid detection. In this work, we propose a number of techniques to reveal copyright monitors' current approaches and evaluate their effectiveness. We apply these techniques on data we collected from more than 2.75 million BitTorrent swarms containing 71 million IP addresses. We provide strong evidence that certain nodes are indeed copyright monitors, show that monitoring is a world-wide phenomenon, and devise a methodology for generating blacklists for paranoid and conservative P2P users.

Robust 360° Video Streaming via Non-Linear Sampling

Abstract: We propose CoRE, a 360° video streaming approach that reduces bandwidth requirements compared to transferring the entire 360° video. CoRE uses non-linear sampling in both the spatial and temporal domains to achieve robustness to view direction prediction error and to transient wireless network bandwidth fluctuation. Each CoRE frame samples the environment in all directions, with full resolution over the predicted field of view and gradually decreasing resolution at the periphery, so that missing pixels are avoided, irrespective of the view prediction error magnitude. A CoRE video chunk has a main part at full frame rate, and an extension part at a gradually decreasing frame rate, which avoids stalls while waiting for a delayed transfer. We evaluate a prototype implementation of CoRE through trace-based experiments and a user study, and find that, compared to tiling with low-resolution padding, CoRE reduces data transfer amounts, stalls, and H.264 decoding overhead, increases frame rates, and eliminates missing pixels.

HEED: a hybrid, energy-efficient, distributed clustering approach for ad hoc sensor networks

Abstract: Topology control in a sensor network balances load on sensor nodes and increases network scalability and lifetime. Clustering sensor nodes is an effective topology control approach. We propose a novel distributed clustering approach for long-lived ad hoc sensor networks. Our proposed approach does not make any assumptions about the presence of infrastructure or about node capabilities, other than the availability of multiple power levels in sensor nodes. We present a protocol, HEED (Hybrid Energy-Efficient Distributed clustering), that periodically selects cluster heads according to a hybrid of the node residual energy and a secondary parameter, such as node proximity to its neighbors or node degree. HEED terminates in O(1) iterations, incurs low message overhead, and achieves fairly uniform cluster head distribution across the network. We prove that, with appropriate bounds on node density and intracluster and intercluster transmission ranges, HEED can asymptotically almost surely guarantee connectivity of clustered networks. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed approach is effective in prolonging the network lifetime and supporting scalable data aggregation.

Topology Control in Wireless Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks

Abstract: Topology Control (TC) is one of the most important techniques used in wireless ad hoc and sensor networks to reduce energy consumption (which is essential to extend the network operational time) and radio interference (with a positive effect on the network traffic carrying capacity). The goal of this technique is to control the topology of the graph representing the communication links between network nodes with the purpose of maintaining some global graph property (e.g., connectivity), while reducing energy consumption and/or interference that are strictly related to the nodes' transmitting range. In this article, we state several problems related to topology control in wireless ad hoc and sensor networks, and we survey state-of-the-art solutions which have been proposed to tackle them. We also outline several directions for further research which we hope will motivate researchers to undertake additional studies in this field.