Research & Development

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Water Infrastructure Management

The management of the water infrastructure in cities is a major undertaking. It must ensure the distribution of sufficient and safe drinking water to the entire population in a reliable manner. The management of this network is complicated by the fact that parts of the water distribution system often very old and uses hundreds of kilometers of metal pipes which can fail without warning due to corrosion. Due to the high cost of proactively replacing water pipes, many cities around the world including the City of Ottawa have implemented sacrificial anode based cathodic protection infrastructure to extend the life of the metal pipes. Unfortunately, there is no automated way to monitor the effectiveness of the cathodic protection. Anode based cathodic protection have a life span of 15 to 20 years but can prematurely fail without being detected therefore allowing the metal water pipes to rust. The cost of repairing unexpected water pipe failures is very high.

The City of Ottawa has an underground network of waterpipes and sacrificial anode based cathodic protection infrastructure. The monitoring of this protection infrastructure is time-consuming and labour-intensive. In this research project, Sanstream's R&D team is collaborating with the City of Ottawa in developing a centralized remote monitoring system for underground water pipe's corrosion protection system. Through extensive research and experimental development, a self-harvesting wireless sensor network will be built for capturing data from corrosion protection system and transmitting the data to a central cloud server for analysis and visualization.

Sanstream is collaborating with professors at University of Waterloo (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada) for this research.

Security of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System

SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems are integral to the operation of critical infrastructures. SCADA systems are used for monitoring and controlling physical systems. Traditionally, such systems were isolated and individually managed. However, recent designs have seen a rapid increase in the use of open access communication networks and the applications that they manage are mainly smart devices and sensors that connect to the Internet of Things (IoT). While this has led to vastly improved performance, better manageability and control, and data analytics, it has also exposed such systems to cyber-threats and made them vulnerable to cyber-attacks. While the long-term goal of this project is to propose and develop an end to end security solution for SCADA system, the short-term goal is to build a SCADA system test bed and validate different components of the proposed SCADA security system solution. Sanstream is collaborating on this project with a research team at Dalhousie University (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada).

Customer Experience Management in Wireless Broadband Network

Today the mobile service providers struggle to ensure the performance, reliability and quality of data and other emerging services such as video, online gaming, instant messaging, etc. to their customer. Traditionally, the quality and performance metrics are measured mostly at network level by placing probes in the network. With the advanced wireless technology, the smart-phones and other similar devices (e.g. tablets) are becoming the preferred platform over desktops and laptops. This brings more challenges to the service providers as the source of the service quality and performance problems could very well be originated at customer device and/or on the cloud services (web service, online gaming, etc.). The problem is getting even bigger and more complex with advanced wireless technology e.g. 4G, 5G as much more services are now offered and accessed by users. This is also changing the user traffic pattern significantly. Understanding the quality issues and more importantly pin-pointing the source of these issues would be a paramount task without a good solution for end to end service monitoring and management. In this research project, Sanstream develops methodologies for accurately capturing service-specific metrics at different layers to measure end to end service performance, quality and reliability and thereby objectively measures the end user experience.

Energy Performance Evaluation of Mobile Device

With the growing amount of applications available for download on smartphones today, the time users spend on them is increasing. Manufacturers have managed to provide good processors and graphic cards to run all these applications, however, they have not managed to keep users content with the phone's battery life. Users have no idea as to which applications are draining their battery power and by how much. Also, not only end users, the mobile app developers are not also aware of the fact that there are many potential energy related issues due to improper implementation of the mobile applications. In this project, we focus on the energy (i.e. battery) performance evaluation of smartphones. Specifically, we are interested in research and development of systems to evaluate energy performance of mobile apps. Sanstream is collaborating with professors at University of Waterloo (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada) for this research.

Publications

  1. S. Ghosh, M. Zaman, G. Sakauye, and S. Sampalli, "An Intrusion Resistant SCADA Framework Based on Quantum and Post-Quantum Scheme", Applied Sciences 11, no. 5: 2082. https://doi.org/10.3390/app11052082, 2021.
  2. M. Bhuyian, K. Naik, M. Zaman and G. Sakauye, "Characterization and Modeling of the Harvested Energy from an SACP Setup.", 7th International Conference on Structure, Engineering & Environment, SEE-Pattaya Thailand 10-12 Nov. 2021, 2021.
  3. D. Upadhyay, S. Sampalli and B. Plourde, "Vulnerabilities assessment and mitigation strategies for the small linux server, Onion Omega2", Electronics 2020, 9, 967; doi:10.3390/electronics9060967, 2020.
  4. M. Bhuyian, M. Al-tekreeti, K. Naik, B. Plourde and G. Sakauye, "A Soil-Based Energy Harvester for Wireless Sensor Nodes to Monitor Corrosion Characteristics of Underground Water Pipes", 2019 IEEE SENSORS, 2019, pp. 1-4, doi: 10.1109/SENSORS43011.2019.8956871, 2019.
  5. M. Al-tekreeti, K. Naik, A. Abdrabou, M. Zaman and P. Srivastava, "Test Generation for Performance Evaluation of Mobile Multimedia Streaming Applications", MODELSWARD 2018 - 6th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development, 2018.
  6. A. M. Abbasi, M. Al-Tekreeti, K. Naik, A. Nayak, P. Srivastava and M. Zaman, "Characterization and Detection of Tail Energy Bugs in Smartphones", IEEE Access (Volume: 6), 2018.
  7. L. Qiu, C.H. Lung , S. Ajila and P. Srivastava, "LXC Container Migration in Cloudlets under Multipath TCP.", IEEE 41st Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC), pp. 31-36, 2017.
  8. M. Al-tekreeti, K. Naik, A. Abdrabou, M. Zaman, and P. Srivastava, "Performance Robustness Evaluation of Mobile Networked Applications." , 2017 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI), 2017.
  9. R. Soundar Raja James, A. Albasir, K. Naik, M.Y. Dabbagh, P. Dash, M. Zaman and N. Goel, "Detection of Unknown Applications in Smartphones: A Signal Processing Perspective", 2017 IEEE 30th Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering (CCECE), 2017.
  10. R. Soundar Raja James, A. Albasir, K. Naik, M. Y. Dabbagh, P. Dash, M. Zaman and N. Goel, "Detection of Anomalous Behavior of Smartphones Using Signal Processing and Machine Learning Techniques", 2017 IEEE 28th Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor, and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC), 2017
  11. A. M. Abbasi, M. Al-tekreeti, Y. Ali, K. Naik, A. Nayak, N. Goel, and B. Plourde, "A Framework for Detecting Energy Bugs in Smartphones", 2015 6th International Conference on the Network of the Future (NOF), 2015.
  12. K. Zhan, C. H. Lung and P. Srivastava, "A Green Analysis of Mobile Cloud Computing Applications", Proc. of the 29th Annual ACM Symp. on Applied Computing, 2014.
  13. A. Albasir, K. Naik, B. Plourde and N. Goel, "Experimental Study of Energy and Bandwidth Costs of Web Advertisements on Smartphones", 2014 6th International Conference on Mobile Computing, Applications and Services (MobiCASE), 2014.
  14. K. Zhan, C. H. Lung, and P. Srivastava, "A Comparative Evaluation of Computation Offloading for Mobile Applications, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings), and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom), 2014.
  15. A. Albasir, V. Mahinthan, K. Naik, A. Abogharaf, N. Goel and B. Plourde, "Performance Testing of Mobile Applications on Smartphones", International Journal of Handheld Computing Research (IJHCR), Vol. 5, No. 4, 2014.