Showing papers by "Yongrui Qin published in 2017"

Fog Computing for Sustainable Smart Cities: A Survey

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to connect billions of smart objects to the Internet, which can bring a promising future to smart cities. These objects are expected to generate large amounts of data and send the data to the cloud for further processing, especially for knowledge discovery, in order that appropriate actions can be taken. However, in reality sensing all possible data items captured by a smart object and then sending the complete captured data to the cloud is less useful. Further, such an approach would also lead to resource wastage (e.g., network, storage, etc.). The Fog (Edge) computing paradigm has been proposed to counterpart the weakness by pushing processes of knowledge discovery using data analytics to the edges. However, edge devices have limited computational capabilities. Due to inherited strengths and weaknesses, neither Cloud computing nor Fog computing paradigm addresses these challenges alone. Therefore, both paradigms need to work together in order to build a sustainable IoT infrastructure for smart cities. In this article, we review existing approaches that have been proposed to tackle the challenges in the Fog computing domain. Specifically, we describe several inspiring use case scenarios of Fog computing, identify ten key characteristics and common features of Fog computing, and compare more than 30 existing research efforts in this domain. Based on our review, we further identify several major functionalities that ideal Fog computing platforms should support and a number of open challenges toward implementing them, to shed light on future research directions on realizing Fog computing for building sustainable smart cities.

Fog computing security: a review of current applications and security solutions

Abstract: Fog computing is a new paradigm that extends the Cloud platform model by providing computing resources on the edges of a network. It can be described as a cloud-like platform having similar data, computation, storage and application services, but is fundamentally different in that it is decentralized. In addition, Fog systems are capable of processing large amounts of data locally, operate on-premise, are fully portable, and can be installed on heterogeneous hardware. These features make the Fog platform highly suitable for time and location-sensitive applications. For example, Internet of Things (IoT) devices are required to quickly process a large amount of data. This wide range of functionality driven applications intensifies many security issues regarding data, virtualization, segregation, network, malware and monitoring. This paper surveys existing literature on Fog computing applications to identify common security gaps. Similar technologies like Edge computing, Cloudlets and Micro-data centres have also been included to provide a holistic review process. The majority of Fog applications are motivated by the desire for functionality and end-user requirements, while the security aspects are often ignored or considered as an afterthought. This paper also determines the impact of those security issues and possible solutions, providing future security-relevant directions to those responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining Fog systems.

Fog Computing for Sustainable Smart Cities: A Survey

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to connect billions of smart objects to the Internet, which can bring a promising future to smart cities. These objects are expected to generate large amounts of data and send the data to the cloud for further processing, specially for knowledge discovery, in order that appropriate actions can be taken. However, in reality sensing all possible data items captured by a smart object and then sending the complete captured data to the cloud is less useful. Further, such an approach would also lead to resource wastage (e.g. network, storage, etc.). The Fog (Edge) computing paradigm has been proposed to counterpart the weakness by pushing processes of knowledge discovery using data analytics to the edges. However, edge devices have limited computational capabilities. Due to inherited strengths and weaknesses, neither Cloud computing nor Fog computing paradigm addresses these challenges alone. Therefore, both paradigms need to work together in order to build an sustainable IoT infrastructure for smart cities. In this paper, we review existing approaches that have been proposed to tackle the challenges in the Fog computing domain. Specifically, we describe several inspiring use case scenarios of Fog computing, identify ten key characteristics and common features of Fog computing, and compare more than 30 existing research efforts in this domain. Based on our review, we further identify several major functionalities that ideal Fog computing platforms should support and a number of open challenges towards implementing them, so as to shed light on future research directions on realizing Fog computing for building sustainable smart cities.

Managing the Web of Things: Linking the Real World to the Web

Abstract: Managing the Web of Things: Linking the Real World to the Web presents a consolidated and holistic coverage of engineering, management, and analytics of the Internet of Things. The web has gone through many transformations, from traditional linking and sharing of computers and documents (i.e., Web of Data), to the current connection of people (i.e., Web of People), and to the emerging connection of billions of physical objects (i.e., Web of Things). With increasing numbers of electronic devices and systems providing different services to people, Web of Things applications present numerous challenges to research institutions, companies, governments, international organizations, and others. This book compiles the newest developments and advances in the area of the Web of Things, ranging from modeling, searching, and data analytics, to software building, applications, and social impact. Its coverage will enable effective exploration, understanding, assessment, comparison, and the selection of WoT models, languages, techniques, platforms, and tools. Readers will gain an up-to-date understanding of the Web of Things systems that accelerates their research. Offers a comprehensive and systematic presentation of the methodologies, technologies, and applications that enable efficient and effective management of the Internet of Things Provides an in-depth analysis on the state-of-the-art Web of Things modeling and searching technologies, including how to collect, clean, and analyze data generated by the Web of Things Covers system design and software building principles, with discussions and explorations of social impact for the Web of Things through real-world applications Acts as an ideal reference or recommended text for graduate courses in cloud computing, service computing, and more

Privacy-Preserving Distributed Service Recommendation Based on Locality-Sensitive Hashing

Abstract: With the advent of IoT (Internet of Things) age, considerable web services are emerging rapidly in service communities, which places a heavy burden on the target users' service selection decisions. In this situation, various techniques, e.g., collaborative filtering (i.e., CF) is introduced in service recommendation to alleviate the service selection burden. However, traditional CF-based service recommendation approaches often assume that the historical user-service quality data is centralized, while neglect the distributed recommendation situation. Generally, distributed service recommendation involves inevitable message communication among different parties and hence, brings challenging efficiency and privacy concerns. In view of this challenge, a novel privacy-preserving distributed service recommendation approach based on Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH), i.e., DistSRLSH is put forward in this paper. Through LSH, DistSRLSH can achieve a good tradeoff among service recommendation accuracy, privacy-preservation and efficiency in distributed environment. Finally, through a set of experiments deployed on WS-DREAM dataset, we validate the feasibility of our proposal in handling distributed service recommendation problems.

Efficient computation of distance labeling for decremental updates in large dynamic graphs

Abstract: Since today's real-world graphs, such as social network graphs, are evolving all the time, it is of great importance to perform graph computations and analysis in these dynamic graphs. Due to the fact that many applications such as social network link analysis with the existence of inactive users need to handle failed links or nodes, decremental computation and maintenance for graphs is considered a challenging problem. Shortest path computation is one of the most fundamental operations for managing and analyzing large graphs. A number of indexing methods have been proposed to answer distance queries in static graphs. Unfortunately, there is little work on answering such queries for dynamic graphs. In this paper, we focus on the problem of computing the shortest path distance in dynamic graphs, particularly on decremental updates (i.e., edge deletions). We propose maintenance algorithms based on distance labeling, which can handle decremental updates efficiently. By exploiting properties of distance labeling in original graphs, we are able to efficiently maintain distance labeling for new graphs. We experimentally evaluate our algorithms using eleven real-world large graphs and confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach. More specifically, our method can speed up index re-computation by up to an order of magnitude compared with the state-of-the-art method, Pruned Landmark Labeling (PLL).

Searching for the internet of things: where it is and what it looks like

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT), in general, is a compelling paradigm that aims to connect everyday objects to the Internet. Nowadays, IoT is considered as one of the main technologies which contribute towards reshaping our daily lives in the next decade. IoT unlocks many exciting new opportunities in a variety of applications in research and industry domains. However, many have complained about the absence of the real-world IoT data. Unsurprisingly, a common question that arises regularly nowadays is “Does the IoT already exist?”. So far, little has been known about the real-world situation on IoT, its attributes, the presentation of data, and user interests. To answer this question, in this work, we conduct an in-depth analytical investigation on real IoT data. More specifically, we identify IoT data sources over the Web and develop a crawler engine to collect large-scale real-world IoT data for the first time. We make the results of our work available to the public in order to assist the community in the future research. In particular, we collect the data of nearly two million Internet connected objects and study trends in IoT using a real-world query set from an IoT search engine. Based on the collected data and our analysis, we identify the typical characteristics of IoT data. The most intriguing finding of our study is that IoT data is mainly disseminated using Web Mapping while the emerging IoT solutions such as the Web of Things are currently not well adopted. On top of our findings, we further discuss future challenges and open research problems in the IoT area.

Toward Unified Cloud Service Discovery for Enhanced Service Identification.

Abstract: Nowadays cloud services are being increasingly used by professionals. A wide variety of cloud services are being introduced every day, and each of which is designed to serve a set of specific purposes. Currently, there is no cloud service specific search engine or a comprehensive directory that is available online. Therefore, cloud service customers mainly select cloud services based on the word of mouth, which is of low accuracy and lacks expressiveness. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive cloud service search engine to enable users to perform personalized search based on certain criteria including their own intention of use, cost and the features provided. Specifically, our cloud service search engine focuses on: (1) extracting and identifying cloud services automatically from the Web; (2) building a unified model to represent the cloud service features; and (3) prototyping a search engine for online cloud services. To this end, we propose a novel Service Detection and Tracking (SDT) model for modeling Cloud services. Then based on the SDT model, a cloud service search engine (CSSE) is implemented for helping effectively discover cloud services, relevant service features and service costs that are provided by the cloud service providers.

Security auditing in the fog

Abstract: Technology specific expert knowledge is often required to analyse security configurations and determine potential vulnerabilities, but it becomes difficult when it is a new technology such as Fog computing. Furthermore, additional knowledge is also required regarding how the security configuration has been constructed in respect to an organisation's security policies. Traditionally, organisations will often manage their access control permissions relative to their employees needs, posing challenges to administrators. This problem is even exacerbated in Fog computing systems where security configurations are implemented on a large amount of devices at the edges of Internet, and the administrators are required to retain adequate knowledge on how to perform complex administrative tasks. In this paper, a novel approach of translating object-based security configurations in to a graph model is presented. A technique is then developed to autonomously identify vulnerabilities and perform security auditing of large systems without the need for expert knowledge. Throughout the paper, access control configuration data is used as a case study, and empirical analysis is performed on synthetically generated access control permissions.

Identifying Domains and Concepts in Short Texts via Partial Taxonomy and Unlabeled Data

Abstract: Accurate and real-time identification of domains and concepts discussed in microblogging texts is crucial for many important applications such as earthquake monitoring, influenza surveillance and disaster management. Existing techniques such as machine learning and keyword generation are application specific and require significant amount of training in order to achieve high accuracy. In this paper, we propose to use a multiple domain taxonomy (MDT) to capture general user knowledge. We formally define the problems of domain classification and concept tagging. Using the MDT, we devise domain-independent pure frequency count methods that do not require any training data nor annotations and that are not sensitive to misspellings or shortened word forms. Our extensive experimental analysis on real Twitter data shows that both methods have significantly better identification accuracy with low runtime than existing methods for large datasets.

Edge Influence Computation in Dynamic Graphs

Abstract: Reachability queries are of great importance in many research and application areas, including general graph mining, social network analysis and so on. Many approaches have been proposed to compute whether there exists one path from one node to another node in a graph. Most of these approaches focus on static graphs, however in practice dynamic graphs are more common. In this paper, we focus on handling graph reachability queries in dynamic graphs. Specifically we investigate the influence of a given edge in the graph, aiming to study the overall reachability changes in the graph brought by the possible failure/deletion of the edge. To this end, we firstly develop an efficient update algorithm for handling edge deletions. We then define the edge influence concept and put forward a novel computation algorithm to accelerate the computation of edge influence. We evaluate our approach using several real world datasets. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms traditional approaches significantly.

A Semantic-Enabled Framework for Future Internet of Things Applications

Abstract: While the challenge of connecting Internet of Things (IoT) devices at the lowest layer has been widely studied, integrating and interoperating huge amounts of sensed data of heterogeneous IoT devices is becoming increasingly important because of the possibility of consuming such data in supporting many potential novel IoT applications. A common approach to processing and consuming IoT data is a centralized paradigm: sensor data is sent over the network to a comparatively powerful central server or a cloud service, where all processing takes place. However, this approach has some limitations as it requires devices to interact directly with a cloud which is not cost effective. First, it has high demands on the device's storage and computational capabilities. Second, as devices grow rapidly in a deployment area, sending all the data to a centralized cloud server requires high network bandwidth. Moreover, this often creates data privacy concerns as all raw data will be sent to a centralized place. To address the above limitations for building future Internet of Things applications, we present an early design of a novel framework that combines Internet of Things, Semantic Web, and Big Data concepts. We not only present the core components to build an IoT system, but also list existing alternatives with their merits. This framework aims to incorporate open standards to address the potential challenges in building future IoT applications. Therefore, our discussion revolves around open standards to build the framework, rather than proprietary standards.

The Anatomy of An Intent Based Search and Crawler Engine for the Web of Things

Abstract: Web of Things (WoT) is becoming increasingly interesting for researchers and professionals over the past few years. It provides numerous opportunities by disseminating the data that is generated by physical things and fills the gap between the physical and the virtual world. Despite its importance, WoT search has not been studied enough in the past. Given the dynamic challenge of the WoT, collecting data from WoT resources is not well developed. Furthermore, the effectiveness of WoT search can be significantly improved if the users' intention of the search is also considered. This can be facilitated by knowing the existing status of the WoT in real-world. In this chapter, we address multiple challenges in this area. Firstly, we depict the analytical structure of the future WoT which facilitate crawling, indexing and searching the data from physical things. Secondly, we show how we can identify WoT and extract the data from it. Thirdly, we use our crawler to crawl and analyse WoT data on the Internet. Furthermore, we provide a showcase in the analysis of the flights delay data. Finally, we provide a discussion on future research in this area.

Pattern Matching Over Linked Data Streams

Abstract: This chapter leverages semantic technologies, such as Linked Data, which can facilitate machine-to-machine (M2M) communications to build an efficient information dissemination system for semantic IoT. The system integrates Linked Data streams generated from various data collectors and disseminates matched data to relevant data consumers based on triple pattern queries registered in the system by the consumers. We also design two new data structures, TP-automata and CTP-automata, to meet the high performance needs of Linked Data dissemination. We evaluate our system using a real-world dataset generated from a Smart Building Project. With the new data structures, the proposed system can disseminate Linked Data faster than the existing approach with thousands of registered queries.