Computer Engineering Commons^™

Deep Learning-Based Intrusion Detection Methods For Computer Networks And Privacy-Preserving Authentication Method For Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks, Ayesha Dina

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

The incidence of computer network intrusions has significantly increased over the last decade, partially attributed to a thriving underground cyber-crime economy and the widespread availability of advanced tools for launching such attacks. To counter these attacks, researchers in both academia and industry have turned to machine learning (ML) techniques to develop Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSes) for computer networks. However, many of the datasets use to train ML classifiers for detecting intrusions are not balanced, with some classes having fewer samples than others. This can result in ML classifiers producing suboptimal results. In this dissertation, we address this issue and present …

A Flexible Photonic Reduction Network Architecture For Spatial Gemm Accelerators For Deep Learning, Bobby Bose

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

As deep neural network (DNN) models increase significantly in complexity and size, it has become important to increase the computing capability of specialized hardware architectures typically used for DNN processing. The major linear operations of DNNs, which comprise the fully connected and convolution layers, are commonly converted into general matrix-matrix multiplication (GEMM) operations for acceleration. Specialized GEMM accelerators are typically employed to implement these GEMM operations, where a GEMM operation is decomposed into multiple vector-dot-product operations that run in parallel. A common challenge that arises in modern DNNs is the mismatch between the matrices used for GEMM operations and the …

Parallel Real Time Rrt*: An Rrt* Based Path Planning Process, David Yackzan

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical Engineering

This thesis presents a new parallelized real-time path planning process. This process is an extension of the Real-Time Rapidly Exploring Random Trees* (RT-RRT*) algorithm developed by Naderi et al in 2015 [1]. The RT-RRT* algorithm was demonstrated on a simulated two-dimensional dynamic environment while finding paths to a varying target state. We demonstrate that the original algorithm is incapable of running at a sufficient rate for control of a 7-degree-of-freedom (7-DoF) robotic arm while maintaining a path planning tree in 7 dimensions. This limitation is due to the complexity of maintaining a tree in a high-dimensional space and the network …

Protocols And Architecture For Privacy-Preserving Authentication And Secure Message Dissemination In Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks, Shafika Showkat Moni

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

The rapid development in the automotive industry and wireless communication technologies have enhanced the popularity of Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Today, the automobile industry is developing sophisticated sensors that can provide a wide range of assistive features, including accident avoidance, automatic lane tracking, semi-autonomous driving, suggested lane changes, and more. VANETs can provide drivers a safer and more comfortable driving experience, as well as many other useful services by leveraging such technological advancements. Even though this networking technology enables smart and autonomous driving, it also introduces a plethora of attack vectors. However, the main issues to be sorted out …

Improving Network Policy Enforcement Using Natural Language Processing And Programmable Networks, Pinyi Shi

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Computer networks are becoming more complex and challenging to operate, manage, and protect. As a result, Network policies that define how network operators should manage the network are becoming more complex and nuanced. Unfortunately, network policies are often an undervalued part of network design, leaving network operators to guess at the intent of policies that are written and fill in the gaps where policies don’t exist. Organizations typically designate Policy Committees to write down the network policies in the policy documents using high-level natural languages. The policy documents describe both the acceptable and unacceptable uses of the network. Network operators …

Developing Reactive Distributed Aerial Robotics Platforms For Real-Time Contaminant Mapping, Joshua Ashley

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

The focus of this research is to design a sensor data aggregation system and centralized sensor-driven trajectory planning algorithm for fixed-wing aircraft to optimally assist atmospheric simulators in mapping the local environment in real-time. The proposed application of this work is to be used in the event of a hazardous contaminant leak into the atmosphere as a fleet of sensing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) could provide valuable information for evacuation measures. The data aggregation system was designed using a state-of-the-art networking protocol and radio with DigiMesh and a process/data management system in the ROS2 DDS. This system was tested to …

Routing And Applications Of Vehicular Named Data Networking, Bassma G. Aldahlan

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork (VANET) allows vehicles to exchange important informationamong themselves and has become a critical component for enabling smart transportation.In VANET, vehicles are more interested in content itself than from which vehicle the contentis originated. Named Data Networking (NDN) is an Internet architecture that concentrateson what the content is rather than where the content is located. We adopt NDN as theunderlying communication paradigm for VANET because it can better address a plethora ofproblems in VANET, such as frequent disconnections and fast mobility of vehicles. However,vehicular named data networking faces the problem of how to efficiently route interestpackets and …

Algorithms For Achieving Fault-Tolerance And Ensuring Security In Cloud Computing Systems, Md. Tariqul Islam

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Security and fault tolerance are the two major areas in cloud computing systems that need careful attention for its widespread deployment. Unlike supercomputers, cloud clusters are mostly built on low cost, unreliable, commodity hardware. Therefore, large-scale cloud systems often suffer from performance degradation, service outages, and sometimes node and application failures. On the other hand, the multi-tenant shared architecture, dynamism, heterogeneity, and openness of cloud computing make it susceptible to various security threats and vulnerabilities. In this dissertation, we analyze these problems and propose algorithms for achieving fault tolerance and ensuring security in cloud computing systems.

First, we perform a …

A Diverse Band-Aware Dynamic Spectrum Access Architecture For Connectivity In Rural Communities, Vijay K. Shah

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Ubiquitous connectivity plays an important role in improving the quality of life in terms of economic development, health and well being, social justice and equity, as well as in providing new educational opportunities. However, rural communities which account for 46% of the world's population lacks access to proper connectivity to avail such societal benefits, creating a huge "digital divide" between the urban and rural areas. A primary reason is that the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) providers have less incentives to invest in rural areas due to lack of promising revenue returns. Existing research and industrial attempts in providing connectivity …

Automated Network Security With Exceptions Using Sdn, Sergio A. Rivera Polanco

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Campus networks have recently experienced a proliferation of devices ranging from personal use devices (e.g. smartphones, laptops, tablets), to special-purpose network equipment (e.g. firewalls, network address translation boxes, network caches, load balancers, virtual private network servers, and authentication servers), as well as special-purpose systems (badge readers, IP phones, cameras, location trackers, etc.). To establish directives and regulations regarding the ways in which these heterogeneous systems are allowed to interact with each other and the network infrastructure, organizations typically appoint policy writing committees (PWCs) to create acceptable use policy (AUP) documents describing the rules and behavioral guidelines that all campus network …

Contributions To Edge Computing, Vernon K. Bumgardner

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Efforts related to Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Machine to Machine (M2M) technologies, Industrial Internet, and Smart Cities aim to improve society through the coordination of distributed devices and analysis of resulting data. By the year 2020 there will be an estimated 50 billion network connected devices globally and 43 trillion gigabytes of electronic data. Current practices of moving data directly from end-devices to remote and potentially distant cloud computing services will not be sufficient to manage future device and data growth.

Edge Computing is the migration of computational functionality to sources of data generation. The importance of …

Hierarchical Implementation Of Aggregate Functions, Pablo Quevedo

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Most systems in HPC make use of hierarchical designs that allow multiple levels of parallelism to be exploited by programmers. The use of multiple multi-core/multi-processor computers to form a computer cluster supports both fine-grain and large-grain parallel computation. Aggregate function communications provide an easy to use and efficient set of mechanisms for communicating and coordinating between processing elements, but the model originally targeted only fine grain parallel hardware. This work shows that a hierarchical implementation of aggregate functions is a viable alternative to MPI (the standard Message Passing Interface library) for programming clusters that provide both fine grain and large …

Understanding Home Networks With Lightweight Privacy-Preserving Passive Measurement, Xuzi Zhou

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Homes are involved in a significant fraction of Internet traffic. However, meaningful and comprehensive information on the structure and use of home networks is still hard to obtain. The two main challenges in collecting such information are the lack of measurement infrastructure in the home network environment and individuals’ concerns about information privacy.

To tackle these challenges, the dissertation introduces Home Network Flow Logger (HNFL) to bring lightweight privacy-preserving passive measurement to home networks. The core of HNFL is a Linux kernel module that runs on resource-constrained commodity home routers to collect network traffic data from raw packets. Unlike prior …

Per-Pixel Calibration For Rgb-Depth Natural 3d Reconstruction On Gpu, Sen Li

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Ever since the Kinect brought low-cost depth cameras into consumer market, great interest has been invigorated into Red-Green-Blue-Depth (RGBD) sensors. Without calibration, a RGBD camera’s horizontal and vertical field of view (FoV) could help generate 3D reconstruction in camera space naturally on graphics processing unit (GPU), which however is badly deformed by the lens distortions and imperfect depth resolution (depth distortion). The camera’s calibration based on a pinhole-camera model and a high-order distortion removal model requires a lot of calculations in the fragment shader. In order to get rid of both the lens distortion and the depth distortion …

A Network Path Advising Service, Xiongqi Wu

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

A common feature of emerging future Internet architectures is the ability for applications to select the path, or paths, their packets take between a source and destination. Unlike the current Internet architecture where routing protocols find a single (best) path between a source and destination, future Internet routing protocols will present applications with a set of paths and allow them to select the most appropriate path. Although this enables applications to be actively involved in the selection of the paths their packets travel, the huge number of potential paths and the need to know the current network conditions of each …

Design Of A Scalable Path Service For The Internet, Mehmet O. Ascigil

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Despite the world-changing success of the Internet, shortcomings in its routing and forwarding system have become increasingly apparent. One symptom is an escalating tension between users and providers over the control of routing and forwarding of packets: providers understandably want to control use of their infrastructure, and users understandably want paths with sufficient quality-of-service (QoS) to improve the performance of their applications. As a result, users resort to various “hacks” such as sending traffic through intermediate end-systems, and the providers fight back with mechanisms to inspect and block such traffic.

To enable users and providers to jointly control routing and …

A Hypernet Architecture, Shufeng Huang

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Network virtualization is becoming a fundamental building block of future Internet architectures. By adding networking resources into the “cloud”, it is possible for users to rent virtual routers from the underlying network infrastructure, connect them with virtual channels to form a virtual network, and tailor the virtual network (e.g., load application-specific networking protocols, libraries and software stacks on to the virtual routers) to carry out a specific task. In addition, network virtualization technology allows such special-purpose virtual networks to co-exist on the same set of network infrastructure without interfering with each other.

Although the underlying network resources needed to support …

Automatic Detection Of Abnormal Behavior In Computing Systems, James Frank Roberts

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

I present RAACD, a software suite that detects misbehaving computers in large computing systems and presents information about those machines to the system administrator. I build this system using preexisting anomaly detection techniques. I evaluate my methods using simple synthesized data, real data containing coerced abnormal behavior, and real data containing naturally occurring abnormal behavior. I find that the system adequately detects abnormal behavior and significantly reduces the amount of uninteresting computer health data presented to a system administrator.

Algorithms For Fault Tolerance In Distributed Systems And Routing In Ad Hoc Networks, Qiangfeng Jiang

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Checkpointing and rollback recovery are well-known techniques for coping with failures in distributed systems. Future generation Supercomputers will be message passing distributed systems consisting of millions of processors. As the number of processors grow, failure rate also grows. Thus, designing efficient checkpointing and recovery algorithms for coping with failures in such large systems is important for these systems to be fully utilized. We presented a novel communication-induced checkpointing algorithm which helps in reducing contention for accessing stable storage to store checkpoints. Under our algorithm, a process involved in a distributed computation can independently initiate consistent global checkpointing by saving its …

Independent Component Analysis Enhancements For Source Separation In Immersive Audio Environments, Yue Zhao

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

In immersive audio environments with distributed microphones, Independent Component Analysis (ICA) can be applied to uncover signals from a mixture of other signals and noise, such as in a cocktail party recording. ICA algorithms have been developed for instantaneous source mixtures and convolutional source mixtures. While ICA for instantaneous mixtures works when no delays exist between the signals in each mixture, distributed microphone recordings typically result various delays of the signals over the recorded channels. The convolutive ICA algorithm should account for delays; however, it requires many parameters to be set and often has stability issues. This thesis introduces the …

Measuring Effectiveness Of Address Schemes For As-Level Graphs, Yinfang Zhuang

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

This dissertation presents measures of efficiency and locality for Internet addressing schemes.

Historically speaking, many issues, faced by the Internet, have been solved just in time, to make the Internet just work~\cite{justWork}. Consensus, however, has been reached that today's Internet routing and addressing system is facing serious scaling problems: multi-homing which causes finer granularity of routing policies and finer control to realize various traffic engineering requirements, an increased demand for provider-independent prefix allocations which injects unaggregatable prefixes into the Default Free Zone (DFZ) routing table, and ever-increasing Internet user population and mobile edge devices. As a result, the DFZ routing …