Digital Commons Network^™

Towards Zero Touch Next Generation Network Management, Sam Aleyadeh

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The current trend in user services places an ever-growing demand for higher data rates, near-real-time latencies, and near-perfect quality of service. To meet such demands, fundamental changes were made to the front and mid-haul and backbone networking segments servicing them. One of the main changes made was virtualizing the networking components to allow for faster deployment and reconfiguration when needed. However, adopting such technologies poses several challenges, such as improving the performance and efficiency of these systems by properly orchestrating the services to the ideal edge device. A second challenge is ensuring the backbone optical networking maximizes and maintains the …

Municipal Pathways Towards Digital Government: Ontario’S Municipal Modernization Program And The Determinants Of Technology Adoption, Owen Jaggard

MPA Major Research Papers

Ontario’s municipalities exist at various stages of e-government adoption. Municipalities are faced with the challenge of adopting new technologies to meet expanding services demands. Both municipalities and the Provincial government face the challenge of developing policies to support information and communication technologies (ICT) adoption. Understanding the unique determinants of technology adoption can assist with this policy making. The study answers how organizational factors affect ICT adoption in small and rural municipalities; and how Ontario’s municipal modernization funding interacts with these determinants. The study examines the determinants of ICT adoption for ICT policies, online services, and electronic records management systems. Focusing …

Classification Of Ddos Attack With Machine Learning Architectures And Exploratory Analysis, Amreen Anbar

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The ever-increasing frequency of occurrence and sophistication of DDoS attacks pose a serious threat to network security. Accurate classification of DDoS attacks with efficiency is crucial in order to develop effective defense mechanisms. In this thesis, we propose a novel approach for DDoS classification using the CatBoost algorithm, on CICDDoS2019, a benchmark dataset containing 12 variations of DDoS attacks and legitimate traffic using real-world traffic traces. With a developed ensemble feature selection method and feature engineering, our model proves to be a good fit for DDoS attack type prediction. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves high classification …

Transforming Large-Scale Virtualized Networks: Advancements In Latency Reduction, Availability Enhancement, And Security Fortification, Ibrahim Tamim

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In today’s digital age, the increasing demand for networks, driven by the proliferation of connected devices, data-intensive applications, and transformative technologies, necessitates robust and efficient network infrastructure. This thesis addresses the challenges posed by virtualization in 5G networking and focuses on enhancing next-generation Radio Access Networks (RANs), particularly Open-RAN (O-RAN). The objective is to transform virtualized networks into highly reliable, secure, and latency-aware systems. To achieve this, the thesis proposes novel strategies for virtual function placement, traffic steering, and virtual function security within O-RAN. These solutions utilize optimization techniques such as binary integer programming, mixed integer binary programming, column generation, …

Explainable Software Defect Prediction From Cross Company Project Metrics Using Machine Learning, Susmita Haldar, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Predicting the number of defects in a project is critical for project test managers to allocate budget, resources, and schedule for testing, support and maintenance efforts. Software Defect Prediction models predict the number of defects in given projects after training the model with historical defect related information. The majority of defect prediction studies focused on predicting defect-prone modules from methods, and class-level static information, whereas this study predicts defects from project-level information based on a cross-company project dataset. This study utilizes software sizing metrics, effort metrics, and defect density information, and focuses on developing defect prediction models that apply various …

Cluster-Based Station Reporting And Multi-Ap Coordination In Wi-Fi Networks, Zeyad Abdelmageid

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Due to the few available Wi-Fi channels and the existence of other technologies, the channel selected by an access point (AP) to be assigned to the network is of extreme importance for network performance due to different interference conditions at different channels. While channel selection algorithms have been proposed, very few of them are user-centric, which could incur a large signaling overhead. As a result, in this thesis, a channel selection algorithm with a low-overhead station (STA) reporting mechanism is proposed, which utilizes the spatial correlation of interference by clustering close-by STAs in order to reduce the feedback overhead by …

A Novel Method For Assessment Of Batch Effect On Single Cell Rna Sequencing Data, Behnam Jabbarizadeh

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In recent years, technological developments have enabled the comprehensive transcriptional profiling of thousands of single cells in a single experiment. However, there is still much to be gained from the integration of datasets from different donors, studies, and technological platforms. One major challenge in this regard is the technical variability introduced by handling different batches, known as batch effects, which can obscure biological variations. Assessing batch effects within a dataset has been the focus of various studies seeking to establish reliable criteria for selecting a batch effect removal method. However, these methods do not always perform reliably. This study provides …

A Reference Framework For Variability Management Of Software Product Lines, Saiqa Aleem, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Variability management (VM) in software product line engineering (SPLE) is introduced as an abstraction that enables the reuse and customization of assets. VM is a complex task involving the identification, representation, and instantiation of variability for specific products, as well as the evolution of variability itself. This work presents a comparison and contrast between existing VM approaches using “qualitative meta-synthesis” to determine the underlying perspectives, metaphors, and concepts of existing methods. A common frame of reference for the VM was proposed as the result of this analysis. Putting metaphors in the context of the dimensions in which variability occurs and …

Study On Integration Of Fastapi And Machine Learning For Continuous Authentication Of Behavioral Biometrics, Priya Bansal

Inspiring Minds – A Digital Collection of Western’s Graduate Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

How To Wisely Use The Resource At The Edge Of Network?, Shi Chang

Inspiring Minds – A Digital Collection of Western’s Graduate Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Employing Edge Computing To Overcome Cloud Limitations In Internet-Of-Mobile-Things, Arshin Rezazadeh

Inspiring Minds – A Digital Collection of Western’s Graduate Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Building The Next Generation Of The Web, Duff Jones

Inspiring Minds – A Digital Collection of Western’s Graduate Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Radiation Exposure Determination In A Secure, Cloud-Based Online Environment, Ben C. Shirley, Eliseos J. Mucaki, Peter Rogan

Biochemistry Publications

Rapid sample processing and interpretation of estimated exposures will be critical for triaging exposed individuals after a major radiation incident. The dicentric chromosome (DC) assay assesses absorbed radiation using metaphase cells from blood. The Automated Dicentric Chromosome Identifier and Dose Estimator System (ADCI) identifies DCs and determines radiation doses. This study aimed to broaden accessibility and speed of this system, while protecting data and software integrity. ADCI Online is a secure web-streaming platform accessible worldwide from local servers. Cloud-based systems containing data and software are separated until they are linked for radiation exposure estimation. Dose estimates are identical to ADCI …

Virtual Sensor Middleware: Managing Iot Data For The Fog-Cloud Platform, Fadi Almahamid, Hanan Lutfiyya, Katarina Grolinger

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

This paper introduces the Virtual Sensor Middleware (VSM), which facilitates distributed sensor data processing on multiple fog nodes. VSM uses a Virtual Sensor as the core component of the middleware. The virtual sensor concept is redesigned to support functionality beyond sensor/device virtualization, such as deploying a set of virtual sensors to represent an IoT application and distributed sensor data processing across multiple fog nodes. Furthermore, the virtual sensor deals with the heterogeneous nature of IoT devices and the various communication protocols using different adapters to communicate with the IoT devices and the underlying protocol. VSM uses the publish-subscribe design pattern …

Towards More Complete Metagenomic Analyses Through Circularized Genomes And Conjugative Elements, Benjamin R. Joris

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Advancements in sequencing technologies have revolutionized biological sciences and led to the emergence of a number of fields of research. One such field of research is metagenomics, which is the study of the genomic content of complex communities of bacteria. The goal of this thesis was to contribute computational methodology that can maximize the data generated in these studies and to apply these protocols human and environmental metagenomic samples.

Standard metagenomic analyses include a step for binning of assembled contigs, which has previously been shown to exclude mobile genetic elements, and I demonstrated that this phenomenon extends to all conjugative …

Ai-Based Traffic Forecasting In 5g Network, Maryam Mohseni

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Forecasting of the telecommunication traffic is the foundation for enabling intelligent management features as cellular technologies evolve toward fifth-generation (5G) technology. Since a significant number of network slices are deployed over a 5G network, it is crucial to evaluate the resource requirements of each network slice and how they evolve over time. Mobile network carriers should investigate strategies for network optimization and resource allocation due to the steadily increasing mobile traffic. Network management and optimization strategies will be improved if mobile operators know the cellular traffic demand at a specific time and location beforehand. The most effective techniques nowadays devote …

Effective Resource Scheduling For Collaborative Computing In Edge-Assisted Internet Of Things Systems, Qianqian Wang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Along with rapidly evolving communications technologies and data analytics, Internet of Things (IoT) systems interconnect billions of smart devices to gather, exchange, analyze data, and perform tasks autonomously, which poses a huge pressure on IoT devices' computing capabilities. Taking advantage of collaborative computing enabled by cloud computing and edge computing technologies, IoT devices can offload computation tasks to idle computing devices and remote servers, thus alleviating their pressure. However, scheduling resources effectively to realize collaborative computing remains a severe challenge due to diverse application objectives, limited distributed resources, and unpredictable environments. To overcome the above challenges, this thesis aims to …

Learning Analytics For The Formative Assessment Of New Media Skills, Negar Shabihi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Recent theories of education have shifted learning environments towards student-centred education. Also, the advancement of technology and the need for skilled individuals in different areas have led to the introduction of new media skills. Along with new pedagogies and content, these changes require new forms of assessment. However, assessment as the core of learning has not been modified as much as other educational aspects. Hence, much attention is required to develop assessment methods based on current educational requirements. To address this gap, we have implemented two data-driven systematic literature reviews to recognize the existing state of the field in the …

Defining Service Level Agreements In Serverless Computing, Mohamed Elsakhawy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The emergence of serverless computing has brought significant advancements to the delivery of computing resources to cloud users. With the abstraction of infrastructure, ecosystem, and execution environments, users could focus on their code while relying on the cloud provider to manage the abstracted layers. In addition, desirable features such as autoscaling and high availability became a provider’s responsibility and can be adopted by the user's application at no extra overhead.

Despite such advancements, significant challenges must be overcome as applications transition from monolithic stand-alone deployments to the ephemeral and stateless microservice model of serverless computing. These challenges pertain to the …

Radiation Exposure Determination In A Secure, Cloudbased Online Environment, Ben C. Shirley, Eliseos J. Mucaki, Joan H.M. Knoll, Peter Rogan

Biochemistry Publications

Rapid sample processing and interpretation of estimated exposures will be critical for triaging exposed individuals after a major radiation incident. The dicentric chromosome (DC) assay assesses absorbed radiation using metaphase cells from blood. The Automated Dicentric Chromosome Identifier and Dose Estimator System (ADCI) identifies DCs and determines radiation doses. This study aimed to broaden accessibility and speed of this system, while protecting data and software integrity. ADCI Online is a secure web-streaming platform accessible worldwide from local servers. Cloud-based systems containing data and software are separated until they are linked for radiation exposure estimation. Dose estimates are identical to ADCI …

Proposal For Extended/Open Access/Smart Libraries Across Middlesex County Libraries: Phase One, Ellen Freeman

Final Projects Winter 2022

No abstract provided.

Situation-Aware Quality Of Service Enhancement For Heterogeneous Ultra-Dense Wireless Iot Networks, Sabin Bhandari

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

By engaging a massive number of heterogeneous devices, future Internet of Things (IoT) systems are expected to support diverse applications ranging from eHealthcare to industrial control. In highly-dense deployment scenarios such as Industrial IoT (IIoT) systems, meeting the stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements such as low-latency and high reliability becomes challenging due to the uncertainty and dynamics within the IoT networks. To enhance the overall QoS performance, this thesis aims to address the technical challenges of IoT networks. Firstly, to enhance the network reliability, a cloud-assisted priority-based channel access and data aggregation scheme is proposed to minimize the network …

Westernaccelerator：Rapid Development Of Microservices, Haoran Wei

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Context & Motivation/problem: In the context that cloud platforms are widely adopted, Microservice Architecture (MSA) has quickly become the new paradigm for modern software development due to its great modularity, scalability, and resiliency, which fits well in the cloud environment. However, to embrace the benefits of MSA, organizations must overcome the challenges of adopting new methodologies and processes to deal with the extra development complexities that microservices created, e.g., establishing interface-based communication between distributed services and managing the configurations and locations of services. Consequently, creating a microservice-based application is relatively complex and effortful. Research Question: How to create a tool …

Consensus-Enabled And Value-Oriented Collaboration In Distributed Iot Systems: Mechanisms, Design, And Implementation, Ruitao Chen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The ongoing convergence of Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence and big data analytics has inspired many innovative IoT applications. Enabling these new applications requires accurate and reliable capabilities in data sensing, exchange and processing, which can be best fulfilled by collaborative IoT systems. Nevertheless, the dynamic condition of IoT networks may lead to ever-changing demand and objectives among devices, making it difficult for reliable and efficient collaboration. To overcome these challenges, this thesis develops a new framework on consensus-enabled and value-oriented collaboration, which resolves two critical technical challenges, i.e., low latency consensus creation and value-oriented decision-making, to enable collective …

A Black-Box Approach For Containerized Microservice Monitoring In Fog Computing, Shi Chang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The goal of the Internet of Things (IoT) is to convert the physical world into a smart space in which physical objects, called things, are equipped with computing and communication capabilities. Those things can connect with anything, anyone at any time, any space via any network or service. The predominant Internet of Things (IoT) system model today is cloud centric. This model introduces latencies into the application execution, as data travels first upstream for processing and secondly the results, i.e., control commands, travel downstream to the devices. In contrast with the cloud-model, the cloud-fog-based model pushes computing capability to the …

Music For Self-Attention, Jeffrey A T Lupker

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Creating an artificial intelligence aid for music composers requires a practical and modular approach that allows the composer to manipulate the technology as needed in the search for new sounds and ideas. Many existing approaches fail to capture the interest of composers as they are limited beyond their demonstrative purposes or allow minimal interaction with the composer. Score-Transformer (ST) demonstrates a practical integration of artificial intelligence to aid in the creation of new music by working seamlessly alongside any popular notation software. Furthermore, ST can be trained by the user with additional works (including their own compositions), fine-tuning it and …

Load Balancing And Resource Allocation In Smart Cities Using Reinforcement Learning, Aseel Alorbani

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Today, smart city technology is being adopted by many municipal governments to improve their services and to adapt to growing and changing urban population. Implementing a smart city application can be one of the most challenging projects due to the complexity, requirements and constraints. Sensing devices and computing components can be numerous and heterogeneous. Increasingly, researchers working in the smart city arena are looking to leverage edge and cloud computing to support smart city development. This approach also brings a number of challenges. Two of the main challenges are resource allocation and load balancing of tasks associated with processing data …

Building Effective Network Security Frameworks Using Deep Transfer Learning Techniques, Harsh Dhillon

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Network traffic is growing at an outpaced speed globally. According to the 2020 Cisco Annual Report, nearly two-thirds of the global population will have internet connectivity by the year 2023. The number of devices connected to IP networks will also triple the total world population's size by the same year. The vastness of forecasted network infrastructure opens opportunities for new technologies and businesses to take shape, but it also increases the surface of security vulnerabilities. The number of cyberattacks are growing worldwide and are becoming more diverse and sophisticated. Classic network intrusion detection architectures monitor a system to detect malicious …

Deciphering Tip-Enhanced Raman Imaging Of Carbon Nanotubes With Deep Learning Neural Networks., Usant Kajendirarajah, María Olivia Avilés, François Lagugné-Labarthet

Chemistry Publications

Recent release of open-source machine learning libraries presents opportunities to unify machine learning with nanoscale research, thus improving effectiveness of research methods and characterization protocols. This paper outlines and demonstrates the effectiveness of such a synergy with artificial neural networks to provide for an accelerated and enhanced characterization of individual carbon nanotubes deposited over a surface. Our algorithms provide a rapid diagnosis and analysis of tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy mappings and the results show an improved spectral assignment of spectral features and spatial contrast of the collected images. Using several examples, we demonstrate the robustness and versatility of our deep learning …

Network Resource And Performance Optimization In Autonomous Systems: A Connected Vehicles And Autonomous Networks Perspective, Ibrahim Shaer

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis covers two topics that optimize a network-related problem subject to environment-specific constraints; placing vehicular applications and executing network traffic assignment changes. The first topic introduces an optimization model, Resource and Delay-aware V2X service Placement (RDP), and a baseline approach that only considers the resource requirements of vehicular services. Both are responsible for placing vehicular services used by vehicular applications in an edge computing environment. Under different simulation scenarios, the results obtained by RDP satisfy the delay requirements of vehicular applications as opposed to the baseline approach. The second topic examines the efficient execution of inter-domain traffic changes under …