Archive for Research Ideas

Afrimesh Paper Accepted at IIWAS 2012

October 11, 2012 at 3:29 pm · Filed under Collaborations, Conferences, Mozilla Talks, Research Ideas

iiWAS2012 Notification
From: iiWAS2012 <iiwas2012@easychair.org>
To: Michael Adeyeye <x_x_x@x_x.X_>
Priority: Normal
Date 10-02-2012 01:51 PM
Dear Michael,We are glad to inform you that your paper:

Paper ID: 107
Paper Title: Afrimesh: A Framework for Management and Monitoring of Wireless Mesh Networks

has been accepted as a short paper at the 14th International Conference on
Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services (iiWAS2012).

You should refer to the comments of the reviewers attached to this email to
assist you in preparing the final version of your paper for publication.

The conference proceedings will be published by ACM with the ISBN  978-1-4503-
1306-3 and will be available during the conference. Selected papers will be
further considered for publication in several special issues of international
journals.

Please refer to (http://www.iiwas.org/conferences/iiwas2012/submission.php) for
submitting a revised camera ready copy of your paper (maximum 4 pages) for
inclusion in the proceedings before 20th October 2012.

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Microsoft Word or Latex source files zipped and named

PaperID_iiWAS2012_Short_FirstAuthorLastName.zip.

The camera ready can be uploaded here:

http://www.iiwas.org/conferences/iiwas2012/crForm.php

In order for your paper to be included in the proceedings, we require at least
one author to register for the conference and pay the registration fees before
20th Oct 2012. Please confirm your participation and register for the
conference as soon as possible in order for us to prepare a coherent program.
Registration can be done through this page

http://www.iiwas.org/conferences/iiwas2012/registration.php

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Thank you and congratulations for your contribution to iiWAS2012 !

See you in Bali in December,

David Taniar, Ismail Khalil, and Eric Pardede

———————– REVIEW 1 ———————
PAPER: 107
TITLE: Afrimesh: A Framework for Management and Monitoring of Wireless Mesh Networks
AUTHORS: Michael Adeyeye and Antoine Van Gelder

OVERALL RATING: 1 (weak accept)
REVIEWER’S CONFIDENCE: 2 (medium)

The paper is well structured and the topic is very interesting. The proposed system has been tested in a real scenario and I see it is open as a Google code project.

The motivation for the experiments in section V is not clear to me. The paper focus is supposed to be about the WMN, but then the measurements are about the routing protocol o generic packet RTT, with no apparent relation to the WMN. Only al the end, with Table II there’s some kind of evaluation. The relation between the experiments and the proposed WMN, and why the experiments are deemed useful then, should be cleared up at the experiment description. If they are not related, then the paper goals should be better explained, since they are no just related with presenting a WMN.

Some minor comments:

Node numbers in Figure 3 are a bit small. Maybe a larger font could be used to easily identify nodes (specially #3, the Afrimesh server node)

I understand that Afrimesh was created to cater to the TelcoVillage scenario, but it would be interesting to know whether it can be applied to other scenarios.

Maybe the authors could reference the Afrimesh Google code project in the paper.

Reference [8] has a format error (“[8] [8]“)

———————– REVIEW 2 ———————
PAPER: 107
TITLE: Afrimesh: A Framework for Management and Monitoring of Wireless Mesh Networks
AUTHORS: Michael Adeyeye and Antoine Van Gelder

OVERALL RATING: -2 (reject)
REVIEWER’S CONFIDENCE: 2 (medium)

The paper deals with protocols and management for wireless networks.
It seems to have ended up at the wrong conferences since it does not address any of the topics listed in the iiwas call for papers.

———————– REVIEW 3 ———————
PAPER: 107
TITLE: Afrimesh: A Framework for Management and Monitoring of Wireless Mesh Networks
AUTHORS: Michael Adeyeye and Antoine Van Gelder

OVERALL RATING: 2 (accept)
REVIEWER’S CONFIDENCE: 4 (expert)

The paper discusses and evaluates the performance of a wireless mesh network management system called Afrimesh. The paper first reviews similar systems such as MeshMan, MeshMon, DAMON, etc. and then describes in detail the architecture of the Afrimesh system in terms of the underlying routing protocol, called BATMAN, the three layers comprising the system, and the corresponding interface. The software components at mobile nodes and the system admin node are also listed and briefly described. The second half of the paper describes two simple experiments (unloaded and loaded scenarios) to characterize the performance of the management system and the underlying protocols in terms of signaling overhead, delay of data, throughput and jitter.

The paper is easy to read and follow. However it is long and in most section be can condensed further. For example, the discussion section includes a table (Table II) which is followed considerable text explaining the terms used in the table. The authors need to be more concise and brief in many places.

There are minor typos in the paper and places where acronyms are used before spelling out the terms like OLSR and SSH. The word “co- ordinates” should not include a space, etc. Figures 6 and 7 need to be made readable.

Comments

WebRTC: Another Nightmare for Telecom Providers?

September 9, 2012 at 7:10 am · Filed under Collaborations, Excellence, ICT and Innovation, Mozilla Talks, Ph.D Project, Research Ideas, Uncategorized

I wasn’t going to publish this blog post, until I noticed that Visionmobile and Tmcnet wouldn’t make my comments on their articles available to the public.

What fascinates me is that the authors of the articles (WebRTC May Radically Change Communications, WebRTC: a new game-changer, disrupting Telcos and OTTs) and I think alike. It reminds of the proverb, “Great minds think alike!!.” I was at the Meraka Institute,  Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), South Africa, as a visiting researcher last July and gave a talk titled “WebRTC: Another Nightmare for Telecom Providers?”.

Below are the summary and the presentation slides.

Summary:

Web browsers will now use WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) to communicate with one another. WebRTC can also be used to communicate with existing telecommunication networks. As a result, voice services in existing telecommunication networks will likely drop as customers will pay more for data services in order to use WebRTC. In addition, the number of VOIP & IM applications on a PC would likely reduce. WebRTC is a game changer, and it is bound to take some of the market share of voice and data services from the telco operators. This talk will take a look at WebRTC and its potentials. It will also include a short demonstration.

Presentation Slides (in html)
Presentation at CSIR

Presentation at CSIR

Comments (1)

SIP on the Web

May 14, 2012 at 5:11 pm · Filed under ICT and Innovation, Mozilla Talks, Research Ideas, Technologies (Mobicents, Mozilla, Pandaboard e.t.c.)

Early this morning, Richard Good referred me to the site http://www.sipml5.org/  to check the amazing project on it. He remembered it was very close to my doctoral work. I like the work (a SIP stack in HTML5 and JavaScript), but that was not the first time I got to know about the idea. I visited the below sites some weeks ago and referred Richard to them, just as he did.
http://sip-on-the-web.aliax.net/
http://code.google.com/p/sip-js/
http://phono.com/webrtc

It’s nice to see various implementations of SIP on the Web; .I also wrote about the interworking of SIP and WebRTC sometime ago. Below is an excerpt from the concluding part in my doctoral thesis.

In summary, while session handoff has been widely explored, content sharing and the proxy services are relatively new services in the Web-browsing context. These services could encourage collaboration and community interaction between the Internet users. In addition, having shown that the integration of a SIP stack into a Web browser makes no significant change on the memory footprint or quality of experience, the inclusion of SIP in commercial Web browsers is not only feasible, but also will offer new services to end users. SIP is an extensible protocol that is not only used in multimedia services provisioning, but also in control and automation, such as smart homes. Should Free Open Source Software (FOSS) and Open Standards be widely adopted, many more innovative solutions, like this project, would be introduced into the Web browsing experience and found in this Web 2.0 era as services are rapidly converging.

SIP is good at what it does, and the future is the web :) .

Comments

Two Instructors wanted for Mozilla Nigeria

March 2, 2012 at 1:59 pm · Filed under Collaborations, General, Mozilla Talks, Research Ideas

We are currently looking for a developer and a FoSS (Free and Open Source Software) evangelist that could teach Open Source Software Development (OSSD) using Mozilla Technologies and preach to an audience the use of FoSS, respectively. We’ve run a couple of bootcamps in the past; an example is POSSE SA. This time around, we will be running a 3-day immersive bootcamp using the Mozilla Curriculum here.

The event will take place in one of the tertiary institutions in Lagos, Nigeria and its website is https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_Nigeria. If you are interested, please drop me a comment.

Comments (2)

Using OpenStack Could Computing Platform

January 9, 2012 at 12:10 am · Filed under Cloud Computing, Collaborations, Research Ideas, Technologies (Mobicents, Mozilla, Pandaboard e.t.c.)

Over the last one month, I have been reading and testing a couple of the open source cloud computing projects, such as OpenNebula, DevStack, Eucalyptus and Nimbus before deciding on  which one to use. I noticed that not all of the projects are full-fledged could computing software; that is, not all of them exist as a suite of services. I like the way OpenNebula has been built; it has three controllers – node, cluster and cloud controllers. And then came OpenStack with its five major components, namely Compute, Object Storage, Image Service, Dashboard and Identity. It is worth mentioning that most of these projects technically use the same codebase, though they are often extended to meet the requirements of each project. To choose the platform I would use in my research, I factored in the OS I am using, community involvement in the project and the current state of the project, In addition, for the full fledged projects, I considered interoperability with other platforms e.g. other storage and image services.

None of these projects is easy to deploy. I spent days trying to get them to work. After experimenting with a number of them, I decided to focus on OpenStack. OpenStack is a full-fledged cloud computing software with services, such as Image and Identity services. In addition, it is a suite offered by the same team. One could choose to use all its components or  use some of them with other solutions – Amazon EC2, BoxGrinder, e.t.c. It can however be used to deliver a massively scalable cloud operating system. Getting the OpenStack basic services (glance for image service and nova for compute, network, scheduler and volume services) up and running seems easy; but things start getting difficult (and messy) when one tries to integrate its dashboard (called Horizon). Integrating its dashboard requires installing the Identity component (called Keystone). In addition, one would need to get Glance to authenticate with Keystone. Getting the whole suite working would require one starting a number of services, pretty much like running the OpenIMSCore.

Below are some screenshots of the dashboard showing, among other things, the instances limit and the instance(s) running on the test machine. OpenStack has also been tested with BoxGrinder. Many thanks to the members of the CPUT CRDOT and guys at the OpenStack IRC channel for their help.

 

Comments

ITU Kaliedoscope ’11

December 15, 2011 at 8:36 pm · Filed under Collaborations, Conferences, General, ICT and Innovation, Mozilla Talks, Research Ideas

The ITU Kaliedoscope ’11 conference came to an end  yesterday. It is one of those conferences I have always wanted to attend, and I am glad this year’s conference took place at my backyard. It was at the University of Cape Town. It was nice meeting folks from Italy, most notably University of Bologna, where I have got some collaborators. The paper presentations were great, and I am really impressed with the diverse papers on policies, services, rural development and so on.
Many thanks to those that made it happen. I remember Paul Inglesby told me at a function (I think AfricaCom ’10) at CTICC that he wanted the next ITU Kaliedoscope conference to take place here.

Comments

WebRTC: Another Realization of Browser-to-Browser Interaction

November 12, 2011 at 7:20 pm · Filed under ICT and Innovation, M.Sc. Project, Mozilla Talks, Ph.D Project, Research Ideas, Technologies (Mobicents, Mozilla, Pandaboard e.t.c.)

I reported the similarities and differences between Google Wave and my work TransferHTTP + CAS two years ago.  It is fascinating to see another related work called WebRTC. I would not be discussing the similarities and differences between it and my work this time around. Rather, I will present an excerpt of one of my papers that briefly discusses WebRTC. See below.

WebRTC is an open framework that offers web application developers the ability to write rich real-time multimedia applications (e.g. video and gaming applications) on the web without requiring plugins or extensions. Its purpose is to help build a strong Real Time Communication (RTC) platform that works across multiple web browsers and platforms. In an implementation, the WebRTC API will abstract several key components for real-time audio, video, networking and signal [1, 2].

One of the IETF RTCWEB WG [3] is currently discussing how to integrate WebRTC with deployed SIP equipment and domains. An area of its application is being able to communicate from WebRTC applications to existing deployed SIP/RTP-based Voice/Video-over-IP devices at the signalling and media planes. It may require an interworking middlebox function (e.g. an integrated Web Server module) in the media-plane. However, the deployed devices should communicate using SIP at a signaling layer rather than HTTP. Other protocol implementations, such as XMPP and H.323, can also be achieved.

From the industry perspective, the web browser software industry is also implementing browser-to-browser interaction in various ways. Although WebRTC is currently being standardized, it is however possible that some of the its implementations might require extending an existing terminal (like a web client in our work), a proxy or a server.

References

  1. WebRTC, http://www.webrtc.org, Accessed on November 20, 2011.
  2. IETF WebRTC, http://tools.ietf.org/wg/rtcweb, Accessed on November 20, 2011.
  3. IETF RTCWeb-SIP WG, http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-kaplan-rtcweb-sip-interworking-requirements-01, Accessed on November 20, 2011.

Comments

The CPUT CRDOT

August 25, 2011 at 5:37 am · Filed under Collaborations, General, ICT and Innovation, Research Ideas, Uncategorized

During the last business meeting in my department,  I unfolded the plans to get a software/research group (The CPUT CRDOT) running. Below is the summary of my talk. The CPUT Software House, which is mentioned below, is a group that has been in existence for sometime, but I am hoping that it would ‘absorb’ the CPUT CRDOT.

The CPUT Software House

Introduction
The CPUT Software House is in its premature stage at the moment. Currently referred to as the CPUT Centre for Research and Development in Open Technology (CRDOT), it is made of over 10 students across different levels. It focuses on teaching the students skills required in the industry using Open Technologies. In addition, it collaborates with firms, parastatals and NGOs to provide solutions to their immediate problems. It is currently working with the Material Science Research Group, Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), South Africa to port a health application from the Windows Operating System to the Andriod Operating System. The application, on completion, will run on a mobile device, for example an Internet tablet PC, that runs the Andriod OS.

Online Presence

• The CRDOT has a web presence at http://www.ngportal.com/cputcrdot/.

• In addition, it runs an IRC channel #crdot at the Freenode IRC network (irc.freenode.net).

• Its group mail (Google Group) is at http://groups.google.com/group/cputcrdot.

• It is in the process of moving it application servers to a local server (in South Africa) at the IP 196.211.3.108.

Partners
The centre is also closely working with various research groups and communities around the globe, such as the Serval Community, Flinder’s University, Australia; the CDOT, Seneca College, Canada and the VillageTelco, South Africa.

In closing, the centre is working hard to expand in terms of getting more students involved, getting additional servers, which will reside in the school and having a laboratory of its own in the school.

Comments

Porting a Win. 32 App on Andriod

July 23, 2011 at 3:21 pm · Filed under Collaborations, General, ICT and Innovation, Mozilla Talks, Research Ideas, Technologies (Mobicents, Mozilla, Pandaboard e.t.c.)

I am looking for a student who is interested in porting a health application from a Win. 32 OS (Desktop Ed.) to Andriod. The mobile OS Andriod is fast moving to netbooks [1] and tablet PCs. It is an ‘open-source’ component-based OS for mobile devices, most notably phones.It is gaining momentum on the x86 processor devices, while still competing with other mobile OSs, such as iOS and Win CE, which run on ARM processor devices.Trivial computations on a x86 CPU can consume huge resources on an ARM CPU even when both CPUs have the same speed/clock. The overhead is worth noting in ARM processor devices.

There are a number of efforts to access or run a Win. 32 app on Andriod. The task has been accomplished in the Linux OS environment with the availability of programs, such as WINE. And virtualization is another way of accessing a Win. 32 app on a Linux box. Although work is underway to access or run a Win. 32 app on Andriod, there is no package or solution in the public domain to say the task has been accomplished. A virtual PC client for ARM devices on a smartphone might work. Another solution would be to write a PC program that could convert a Win. 32 app .exe to Android .apk. It would have to decompile the windows package, recompile and repackage to Android. Hence, the ways of accessing or running a Win. 32 app on Andriod would include using a middleware (like Wine), a virtualization client and a program that recompiles the Win. 32 app for Andriod.

Any student interested in this project should please contact me. The project will be funded by the CSIR Materials Science and Manufacturing, South Africa

 

References:
1. http://www.android-x86.org/

Comments (1)

Our VillageTelco Paper in The EURASIP WCN Journal

May 17, 2011 at 7:57 am · Filed under Collaborations, Conferences, Excellence, ICT and Innovation, Mozilla Talks, Research Ideas, Technologies (Mobicents, Mozilla, Pandaboard e.t.c.)

Below is the acceptance email Paul and I got on the VT paper after making the required minor changes.

Dear Dr. Adeyeye,

The review of the Research Article EURASIP JWCN/967260 titled “The
Village Telco Project: A Reliable and Practical Wireless Mesh Telephony
Infrastructure,” by Michael Adeyeye and Paul Gardner-Stephen submitted
to EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, has been
completed, and I am pleased to inform you that your manuscript has now
been accepted for publication in the journal.

Thank you again for submitting your manuscript to EURASIP Journal on
Wireless Communications and Networking.

Best regards,

Yuh Shyan Chen
yschen{at}mail.ntpu.edu.tw

Comments (3)