Qatar Foundation Annual Research Conference Proceedings Volume 2016 Issue 1

We present a mixed hybrid finite element formulation for modelling subsurface flow and transport. The formulation is fully implicit in time and employs tetrahedron elements for the spatial discretization for the subsurface domain. It comprises all the main physics that dictate the flow behaviour for subsurface flow and transport, since it is developed on, and inherits them from the Automatic Differentiation General Purpose Research Simulator (AD-GPRS) of Stanford University Petroleum Research Institute (SUPRI-B).

Traditionally, the finite volume formulation is the method employed for the computation of fluid dynamics and reservoir simulation, thanks to its local conservation of mass and energy, and straight-forward implementation. However, it requires the use of structural grids and fails in handling high anisotropy inside the material properties of the domain. Also, the method is of a low computational order; the computed local solution in the gird is piecewise constant.

Here, we use the mixed hybrid finite element formulation which is of high order and can handle the high anisotropy for the material properties. It solves the momentum and mass balance equations simultaneously, hence the name mixed. This strongly coupled scheme facilitates the use of unstructured grids which are important for modelling the complex geometry of the subsurface reservoirs. The Automatic Differentiation library of AD-GPRS automatically differentiates the computational variables needed for the construction the Jacobian matrix which consists of the momentum and mass balance unknowns and any presence of wells.

We use two types of tetrahedron elements, Raviart Thomas (RT0) and Brezzi-Douglas-Marini (BDM1), low and high order respectively. The RT0 has one momentum equation per interface, and the BDM1 has three momentum equations per interface assuring second-order flux approximation. Therefore, when compared to the finite volume approach where the Jacobian consists of the mass balance and well unknowns only, the mixed hybrid formulation will eventually have a larger Jacobian (a one order of magnitude for the high order element) which is computationally expensive. However, none the less, the formulation converges numerically and physically better than the finite volume approach, as we show.

The full system is solved implicitly in time to account for the non-linear behaviour of the flow and transport at the subsurface level which is highly pressure, volume, and temperature (PVT) dependent. Therefore, we make use of the already robust PVT formulations in AD-GPRS. We present a carbon dioxide (CO2) sequestration case for the Johnson formation and discuss the numerical and computational results.

This is of crucial important for Qatar and the Middle East where effective reservoir modelling and management requires a robust representation of the flow and transport at the subsurface level using state of the art formulations.

In the literature, Wheeler et al. (2010) employ a multipoint flux mixed finite element approach to eliminate the momentum balance equation form the Jacobian and substitute it by the well-established multipoint flux approximation (MPFA) in the mass balance equation. Since it is based on MPFA, it will still suffer from convergence issues where high anisotropy is present in the material properties. They have recently expanded their work to compositional modelling of fluid, Singh & Wheeler (2014), however they solve the system sequentially in time, where in our method we solve the system fully implicit in time. Sun & Firoozabadi (2009) solve the pressure implicitly and the fluid properties explicitly in time by further decoupling the mass balance equations which decreases the physical representation of the non-linear behaviour of the flow and transport at the subsurface level.

Introduction

Pedestrians are vulnerable road users. In Japan, more than one-third of the fatalities in traffic crashes are pedestrians and most accidents occur as the pedestrians cross a road. To evaluate alternative countermeasures effectively, recently traffic simulation is considered as one of the powerful decision support tools (Shahdah et al. 2015). A very important requirement for a reliable utilization of traffic simulations for the safety assessments is the proper representation of road user behaviors at potential conflict areas. Severe conflicts usually occur when road users fail to predict other users’ decisions and properly react to it. The widely varying behaviors and maneuvers of vehicles and pedestrians may lead to misunderstanding their decisions, which can result in severe conflicts. So far, most existing studies assume constant walk speeds for pedestrians and complete obedience to traffic rules when crossing roads as if they are at walkways. However, it is known that pedestrian behave differently at crosswalks compared to other walking facilities such as sidewalks and walkways. Pedestrians tend to walk faster at crosswalks (Montufar et al. 2007). Furthermore, their compliance to traffic signals vary by traffic conditions and other factors (Wang et al. 2011). Although many studies have analyzed pedestrian behavior including speed at crosswalks, most of them are based on the average crossing speed without considering the speed profile of the crossing process and the variations within. Iryo-Asano et al. (2015) observed from empirical data that pedestrians may suddenly and significantly change their speed on crosswalks as a reaction to surrounding conditions. Such speed changes cannot be predicted by drivers, which can lead to safety hazards. A study of the speed change maneuvers is critical for representing the potential collisions in the simulation systems and evaluating the probability and severity of collisions reasonably. The objective of this study is to quantitatively model the pedestrian speed change maneuvers and integrate the model into traffic simulation for assessing traffic safety.

Pedestrian speed change events as critical maneuver Figure 1 shows an observed pedestrian trajectory with sudden speed change. If there is a turning vehicle approaching the conflict area, the driver may behave based on his expectation of pedestrian arrival time to the conflict area. If the pedestrian suddenly changes his/her speed close to the conflict area, drivers will not be able to predict the new arrival time, which might lead to severe conflicts. Figure 1 demonstrates a real observed example of such speed change. The pedestrian suddenly increased his speed at the beginning of the conflict area, which yielded to the early arrival to the conflict area by 2.0 seconds (Tdif) than expected time assuming that the pedestrian will continue with his/her speed. A turning vehicle cannot predict this early arrival if it exists at the same time. Furthermore, these 2 seconds are large in terms of collision avoidance Iryo-Asano et al. (2015) showed that timings and locations of pedestrians speed changes mainly occur at the entrance to the pedestrian-vehicle conflict area and 2) when there is a large gap between pedestrian's current speed and his/her necessary speed to complete crossing before the end of pedestrian flashing green interval. In this study, further in-depth analysis is conducted by combining the pedestrian data and the information of approaching vehicle trajectories to identify the influencing factors on pedestrians’ sudden speed change events. The probability of speed change is quantitatively modeled as functions of the remaining green time, the remaining length to cross, the current walking speed and other related variables.

Simulation integration for safety assessment

The proposed pedestrian maneuver model is implemented into an integrated simulation model by combining it with a comprehensive turning vehicle maneuver model (Dang et al. 2012). The vehicle maneuver model is dedicated to represent probabilistic nature of drivers’ reaction to road geometry and surrounding road users in order to evaluate user behavior upon traffic safety. It produces speed profiles of turning vehicles considering the impacts of geometry (i.e. intersection angles, setback distance of the crosswalks) and the gap between the expected arrival time of the vehicle and that of the pedestrians at the conflict area. The proposed model allows us to study the dependencies and the interactions between pedestrians and turning vehicle s at crosswalks. Using the integrated traffic simulation, pedestrian-vehicle conflicts are generated and surrogate safety measures, such as Post Encroachment Time and the vehicle speeds at conflict points, are estimated. These measures are used to evaluate the probability and severity of pedestrian-vehicle conflicts. To verify the characteristics of the simulated conflicts, estimated and observed surrogate safety measures at a selected signalized crosswalk are compared through statistical tests.

Conclusions

The consideration of sudden speed change behavior of pedestrians in the simulation environment generates more reliable and realistic pedestrian maneuvers and turning vehicle trajectories, which enables more accurate assessment of pedestrian-vehicle conflicts. This enables the assessment of improvements in the signal control settings and the geometric layout of crosswalks towards safer and more efficient operations. Furthermore, the model is useful for the real-time hazardous conflict event detection, which can be applied to the vehicle safety assistance systems.

This research is supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant No. 15H05534. The authors are grateful to Prof. Hideki Nakamura and Ms. Xin Zhang for providing video survey data.

References

Dang M.T., et al. (2012). Development of a Microscopic Traffic Simulation Model for Safety

Assessment at Signalized Intersections, Transportation Research Record, 2316, pp. 122?131.

Iryo-Asano, M., Alhajyaseen, W., Zhang, X. and Nakamura, H. (2015) Analysis of Pedestrian Speed Change Behavior at Signalized Crosswalks, 2015 Road Safety & Simulation International Conference, October 6th–8th, Orlando, USA.

Montufar, J., Arango, J., Porter, M., and Nakagawa, S. (2007), The Normal Walking Speed of Pedestrians and How Fast They Walk When Crossing The Street, Proceedings of the 86th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board, Washington D. C., USA.

Shahdah U,. et al. (2015), Application of traffic microsimulation for evaluating safety performance of urban signalized intersections, Transportation Research Part C, 60, pp. 96?104.

Wang, W., Guo, H., Gao, Z., and Bubb, H. (2011) Individual Differences of Pedestrian Behaviour in Midblock Crosswalk and Intersection, International Journal of Accident worthiness, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 1–9.

People who are Blind or Visually Impaired (BVI) have one goal in common: navigate through unfamiliar indoor environments without the intervention of a human guide. The number of blind people in the world is not accurately known at the present, however, based on the 2010 Global Data on Visual Impairments, World Health Organization, approximately 285 million people are estimated to be visually impaired worldwide: 39 million are blind and 246 have low vision, 90% in developing countries, with 82% of blind people aged 50 and above. Available extrapolated statistics about blindness in some countries in the Middle East show ∼102,618 in Iraq, ∼5,358 in Gaza strip, ∼22,692 in Jordan, ∼9,129 in Kuwait, ∼104,321 in Saudi Arabia, and ∼10,207 in the United Arab Emirates. These statistics reveal the importance of developing a useful, accurate, and easy to use navigation system to help this large population of disabled people in their everyday lives. Various commercial products are available to navigate BVI people in outdoor environments based on the Global Positioning System (GPS) where the receiver must has a clear view of the sky. Indoor geo-location, on the other hand, is much more challenging because objects surrounding the user can block or interfere with the GPS signal.

In this paper, we present a centralized wireless indoor navigation system to aid the BVI. The system is designed not only to accurately locate, track, and navigate the user, but to also find the safest travel path and easily communicate with the BVI. A centralized approach is adopted because of the lack of research in this area. Some proposed navigation systems require users to inconveniently carry heavy navigation devices; some require administrators to install a complex network of sensors throughout a building; and others are simply impractical in practice. The system consists of four major components: 1) Wireless Positioning Subsystem, 2) Visual Indoor Modeling Interface, 3) Guidance and Navigation Subsystem, and 4) Path-Finding Subsystem. The system is designed not only to accurately locate, track, and navigate the user, but to also find the safest travel path and easily communicate with the BVI.

A significant part of the navigation system is the virtual modeling of the building and the design of the path-finding algorithms, which will be the main focus of this research. Ultimately, the proposed system provides the design and building blocks for a fully functional package that can be used to build a complete centralized indoor navigation system, from creating the virtual models for buildings to tracking and interacting with BVI users over the network.

We propose to present a video demonstration of LiveAR at the ARC'16 conference. For this purpose, we have prepared three demo videos, which can be found in the submission files. These video demos show the effectiveness and efficiency of LiveAR running on video streams containing a diverse set of human actions. Additionally, the demo also exhibits important system performance parameters such as latency and resource usage.

LiveAR is a novel system for recognizing human actions, such as running and fighting, in a video stream in real time, backed by a massively-parallel processing (MPP) platform. Although action recognition is a well-studied topic in computer vision, so far most attention has been devoted to improving accuracy, rather than efficiency. To our knowledge, LiveAR is the first that achieves real-time efficiency in action recognition, which can be a key enabler in many important applications, e.g., video surveillance and monitoring over critical infrastructure such as water reservoirs. LiveAR is based on a state-of-the-art method for offline action recognition which obtains high accuracy; its main innovation is to adapt this base solution to run on an elastic MPP platform to achieve real-time speed at an affordable cost.

The main objectives in the design of LiveAR are to (i) minimize redundant computations, (ii) reduce communication costs between nodes in the cloud, (iii) allow a high degree of parallelism and (iv) enable dynamic node additions and removals to match the current workload. LiveAR is based on an enhanced version of Apache Storm. Each video manipulation operation is implemented as a bolt (i.e., logical operator) executed by multiple nodes, while the input frame arrive at the system via a spout (i.e., streaming source). The output of the system is presented on screen using FFmpeg.

Next we briefly explain the main operations in LiveAR. The dense point extraction bolt is a first step for video processing, which has two input streams: the input video frame and the current trajectories. The output of this operator consists of dense points sampled in the video frame that are not already on any of the current trajectories. In particular, LiveAR partitions the frame into different regions, and assigns one region to a dense point evaluator, each running in a separate thread. Then, the sampled coordinates are grouped according to the partitioning, and routed to the corresponding dense point evaluator. Meanwhile, coordinates on current trajectories are similarly grouped by a point dispatcher, and routed accordingly. Such partitioning and routing minimizes network transmissions as each node is only fed the pixels and trajectory points it needs.

The optic flow generation operator is executed by multiple nodes in parallel similarly to the dense point extractor. An additional challenge here is that the generation of optic flows involves (i) comparing two frames at consecutive time instances and (ii) multiple pixels in determining the value of the flow in each coordinate. (i) means that the operator is stateful, i.e., each node must store the previous frame and compare with the current one. Hence, node additions and removals (necessary for elasticity) become non-trivial as a new node does not immediately possess the necessary states to work (i.e., pixels on the previous frame) on its inputs. Regarding (ii), each node cannot simply handle a region in the frame, as is the case in the dense point extractor, as the computation at one coordinates relies on the surrounding pixels. Our solution in LiveAR is to split the frame into overlapping patches; each patch contains a partition of the frame, as well as the pixels surrounding the partition. This design effectively reduces the amount of network transmissions, thus improving system scalability.

Lastly, the trajectory tracking operator involves three inputs: the current trajectories, the dense points detected from the input frame, and the optic flows of the input frame. The main idea of this operator is to “grow” a trajectory, either an existing one or a new one starting at a dense point, by adding one more coordinate computed from the optic flow. Note that it is possible that the optic flow indicates that there is no more coordinate on this trajectory in the input frame, ending the trajectory. The parallelization of this operator is similar to that of the dense point extractor, except that each node is assigned trajectories rather than pixels and coordinates. Grouping of the trajectories is performed according to their last coordinates (or the newly identified dense points for new trajectories).

Alice is a visualization software for introducing computational thinking and programming concepts in the context of creating 3D animations. Our research aims to introduce computational thinking and problem solving skills in the middle schools in Qatar. To make this aim accessible, we have adapted the Alice software for a conservative Middle Eastern culture, developed curricular materials, and provided professional development workshops for teachers and students in the Middle East. There is a trend for countries, to evaluate curriculum from other cultures, and then try to bring the successful curriculum to their own school systems. This culture is a result of societies beginning to realize the importance of education and knowledge. Qatar's efforts towards building knowledge-based society and upgrading their higher education infrastructure are proofs of this realization. The challenge is to recognize that although a strong curriculum is necessary, simply porting a successful curriculum to a different environment is not sufficient to guarantee success. Here we share our attempt to take a tool with associated curriculum that has been very successful in several countries in the West, and apply it in an environment with very different cultures and social values.

The Alice ME project is targeted at middle school (grades 6–8) teachers and students in the Middle East. The overall goal of the project is to adapt the Alice 2 software to the local cultures, develop new instructional materials appropriate for local systems, and test the effectiveness of the Alice approach at the middle school level. The “Alice approach” – using program visualization to teach/learn analytic, logical, and computational thinking, problem solving skills and fundamental programming concepts in the context of animation – remains the same.

In the formative phase of this project, our goal was to understand the environment and local culture and evaluate the opportunities and challenges. The lessons learned in this phase are being used to formulate the future direction of our research. Although the Middle Eastern countries are rapidly modernizing, the desire to maintain traditional norms is strong. For this reason, we compiled two lists of models. One list was of existing models in the Alice gallery that are not appropriate for the Middle Eastern culture. Qatar (and Middle East in general) is a religious society that follows conservative norms in dress for both men and women. The second was a list of models that would be interesting and relevant to the Qatari society. These two lists helped us determine those models that might be modified, removed, or added to the gallery. We found that Qatar is a cultural society with a lot of emphasis on local customs. Local hospitality, religion, and traditional professions like pearl diving, fishing, and police officers have special place in society. We also discovered that people in general and boys in particular, have a special respect for camels and the desert.

We created the curriculum in collaboration with one private school and the Supreme Education Council. Creating artifacts in isolation and expecting the educational systems to adopt them is not a prudent approach. Due to this collaboration, we learned that a majority of existing ICT and computing curriculum is based on step-by-step instructions that students are expected to follow and reproduce. There is a lack of stress on student learning, creativity, and application.

Most ICT teachers in Qatar, both in public and private schools, are trained ICT professionals. At the same time, most of these teachers are not familiar with program visualization tools such as Alice and have not taught fundamental programming concepts in their classes. As a result, the need for professional development workshops is urgent. We have conducted several workshops for teachers to help them use Alice during the pilot study of the curriculum. During these workshops, we focus on two main concepts – learning to use Alice as a tool, and learning to teach computational thinking using Alice.

We have piloted the curriculum, instructional materials, and the new 3-D models in the Alice gallery for middle school students in one private English school and two public Arabic schools. The pilot test involved more than 400 students in the three schools combined. During the pilot testing, we conducted a survey to obtain initial feedback regarding the 3D models from the Middle East gallery (students have access to all models that are part of Alice's core gallery). Through these surveys, we learned that those objects that students use in everyday life were more popular when it came to using models in Alice.

As part of the curriculum to teach computational thinking using Alice as a tool, we have created several artifacts which are made available to the schools. These items include:

Academic plan for the year

Learning out comes for each lecture, PowerPoint presentation, class exercises, and assessment questions

Student textbook – One English book for grade 8, one Arabic textbook for grade 8 and one Arabic textbook for grade 11.

One of the most important skills that is essential for building the future generation is critical thinking. Although, we are currently only looking at the acceptability of the newly created 3-D models and usability of our curriculum and instructional material, we are still curious about the effectiveness of this curriculum in teaching computational thinking. We analyzed the results of an exam conducted at a local school and it was observed that students in grade 7 with Alice based curriculum performed better than those in grade 9 on the same exam. This exam was designed to measure the critical thinking skill in problem solving without any reference to Alice. We hope that this result is directly related to the students' experience with Alice, as it works on making the students think about the problem from different perspectives. We acknowledge that still more formal work needs to be done in order to support our hypothesis.

This academic year (2015–2016), Alice based curriculum is being used in Arabic in six independent schools and in English in four private English schools. There are more than 1400 students currently studying this content.

Due to the universal use of technology and its pervasive connection to the world, organisations have become more exposed to frequent and various threats (Rotvold, 2008).Therefore, organisations today are giving more attention to information security as it has become a vital and challenging issue. Mackay (2013) noted that the significance of information security, particularly information security policies and awareness, is growing due to the increasing use of IT and computerization. Accordingly, information security presents a key role in the internet era of technology. Gordon & Loep (2006) stated that information security involves a group of actions intended to protect information and information systems. It involves software, hardware, physical security and human factors, where each element has its own features. Information security not only secures the organisation's security but the complete infrastructure that enables the information's use. Organisations are facing an increase in daily security breaches, especially information that is more accessible to the public as the threat becomes greater. Therefore security requirements need to be tightened.

Information security policies control employees' behavior as well as securing the use of hardware and software. Organisations benefit from implementing information security policies as it helps them to classify their information assets and define the importance of the information assets to the organisation (Canavan, 2003). Information security policy as a number of principles, regulations, methodologies, procedures and tools created to secure the organisation from threats. Boss and Kirsch (2007) stated that employees' compliance with information security polices has become an important socio-organizational resource. Information security policies are applied in organisations to provide the employees with guidelines to guarantee information security.

Herold (2010) expressed the importance for organisations to have constant training programmes and educational awareness to attain the required result from the implementation of an information security policy. Security experts' emphasise the importance of security awareness programmes and how they improve information security as a whole. Nevertheless, implementing security awareness in organisations is a challenging process as it requires actively interacting with an audience that usually does not know the importance of information security (Manke, 2013). Organisations tend to use advanced security technologies and constantly train their security professionals, while paying little attention on enhancing the security awareness of employees and users. This makes employees and users the weakest link in any organization (Warkentin & Willison, 2009).

In the last ten years, the state of Qatar has witnessed remarkable growth and development of its civilization, having embraced information technology as a base for innovation and success. The country has perceived tremendous improvement in the sectors of health care, education and transport (Al-Malki, 2015). Information technology plays a strategic role in building the country's knowledge based economy. Due to the country's increasing use of internet and being connected to the global environment, Qatar needs to adequately address the global threats arising from the internet. The global role of Qatar in world politics has led Qatar to not just face the traditional threats from hackers, but more malicious performers such as terrorists, organized criminal networks and foreign government spying. Qatar has faced a lot of discomfort with some countries which try to breach the county's security. Qatar Computer Emergency Response Team (Q-CERT) who is responsible of addressing the state's Information Security needs stated “As Qatar's dependence on cyberspace grows, its resiliency and security become even more critical, and hence the needs for a comprehensive approach that addresses this need” (Q-CERT, 2015). Therefore Q-CERT established National Information Assurance policy (NIA), which is an information security policy designed to help both government and private sectors in Qatar, to protect their information and enhance their security. Nevertheless the NIA policy has not been implemented still in any organization in Qatar. This is due to the barriers and challenges of information security in Qatar such as culture and awareness, which make the implementation of information security policies a challenging approach.

As a result, the scope of this research is to investigate information security in Qatar. There are many solutions for information security, some are technical and others are non-technical, such as security policies and information security awareness. This research focusses on enhancing information security through non-technical solutions, in particular information security policy. The aim of this research is to enhance information security in organizations in Qatar by developing a comprehensive Information Security Management System (ISMS) that considers the country-specific and cultural factors of Qatar. ISMS is a combination of policies and frameworks which ensure information security management (Rouse, 2011). This information security management approach is unique to Qatar as it considers Qatar culture and country specific factors. Although there are a lot of international information security policies available, such as ISO27001 but this research shows that sometimes these do not address the security needs particular to the culture of the country. Therefore there was a need to define a unique ISMS approach for Qatar.

To accomplish the aim of this research the following objectives must be achieved.

1. To review literature on information security in general and in Qatar in particular.

2. To review international and local information security standards and policies.

3. To explore the NIA policy in Qatar and compare it with others in the region and internationally.

4. To define problems with implementing information security policies and NIA policy in particular in organisations in Qatar.

5. To provide recommendations for the new version of the NIA policy.

6. To assess the awareness of employees on information security.

7. To assess the information security process in organisations in Qatar.

8. To identify the factors which affect information security in Qatar including culture and country specific factors.

9. To propose an ISMS for Qatari organisations taking into consideration the above factors.

10. To define a process for organisations to maintain the ISMS.

11. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed ISMS.

To achieve the aim of this research, different research methodologies, strategies and data collection methods will be used, such as literature review, surveys, interviews and case study. The research undergoes three phases, currently the researcher has completed phase one of the research which analyses the field of information security and highlights the gaps in the literature that can be investigated further in this research. It also examines the country factors that affect information security and the implementation of such information security policies. While undertaking interviews with experts in the field of information technology, information security, culture and law, to identify the situation of Information Security in Qatar, and the factors which might affect the development of Information Security in Qatar including the cultural effect, legal and political issues. In the following two years, the researcher will complete phase two and three of the research. During phase two the researcher will measure the awareness of employees and their knowledge of information security and information security policies in particular. The finding will help the researcher in completing phase three which involves investigating further the NIA policy and a real implementation of ISMS in an organisation in Qatar, and analyses the main findings to finally providing recommendations for improving NIA policy.

In conclusion, the main contribution of this research is to investigate the NIA policy and the challenges facing its implementation, and then define an ISMS process for the policy to assist organisations in Qatar in implementing and maintaining the NIA policy. The research is valuable since it will perform the first real implementation of the NIA policy in an organisation in Qatar taking advantage of the internship the researcher had with ICT. The research will move the policy from paper-based form into a real ISMS system and oversees it in reality in one of the organizations.

Information security, National Information Assurance policy, Information Security Management System, Security Awareness, Information Systems

References

Rotvold, G. (2008). How to Create a Security Culture in Your Organization. Available: http://content.arma.org/IMM/NovDec2008/How_to_Create_a_Security_Culture.aspx. Last accessed 1st Aug 2015.

Manke, S. (2013). The Habits of Highly Successful Security Awareness Programs: A Cross-Company Comparison. Available: http://www.securementem.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Habits_white_paper.pdf. Last accessed 1st Aug 2015.

Al-Malki. (2015). Welcome to Doha, the pearl of the Gulf. Available: http://www.itma-congress-2015.com/Welcome_note_2.html. Last accessed 4th May 2015.

Rouse, M. (2011). Information security management system (ISMS). Available: http://searchsecurity.techtarget.in/definition/information-security-management-system-ISMS. Last accessed 22th Aug 2015.

Q-CERT. (2015). About Q-CERT. Available: http://www.qcert.org/about-q-cert. Last accessed 1st Aug 2015.

Warkentin, M., and Willison, R. (2009). “Behavioral and Policy Issues in Information Systems Security: The Insider Threat,” European Journal of Information Systems (18:2), pp. 101–105.

Mackay, M. (2013). AN EFFECTIVE METHOD FOR INFORMATION SECURITY AWARENESS RAISING INITIATIVES. International Journal of Computer Science & Information Technology. 5 (2), p 63–71.

Gordon, L. A. & Loep, M. P. (2006). Budgeting Process for Information Security Expenditures. Communications of the ACM. 49 (1), p 121–125.

Herold. R (2010). Managing an Information Security and Privacy Awareness and Training Program. New York: CRC Press.

Boss, S., & Kirsch, L. (2007). The Last Line of Defense: Motivating Employees to Follow Corporate Security Guidelines. International Conference on Information Systems. unknown (unknown), p 9–12.

Canavan, S. (2003). An Information Security Policy Development Guide for Large Companies. SANS Institute.

In broadband communications, the long channel delay spread, defined as the duration in time, or samples, over which the channel impulse response (CIR) has significant energy, is too long and results in a highly-frequency-selective channel frequency response. Hence, a long CIR can spread over tens, or even hundreds, of symbol periods and causes impairments in the signals that have passed through such channels. For instance, a large delay spread causes inter-symbol interference (ISI) and inter-carrier interference (ICI) in multi-carrier modulation (MCM). Therefore, long finite impulse response (FIR) equalizers have to be implemented at high sampling rates to avoid performance degradation. However, the implementation of such equalizers is prohibitively expensive as the design complexity of FIR equalizers grows proportional to the square of the number of nonzero taps in the filter. Sparse equalization, where only few nonzero coefficients are employed, is a widely-used technique to reduce complexity at the cost of a tolerable performance loss. Nevertheless, reliably determining the locations of these nonzero coefficients is often very challenging.

In this work, we first propose a general framework that transforms the problem of design of sparse single-input single-output (SISO) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) linear equalizers (LEs) into the problem of sparsest-approximation of a vector in different dictionaries. In addition, we compare several choices of sparsifying dictionaries under this framework. Furthermore, the worst-case coherence of these dictionaries, which determines their sparsifying effectiveness, are analytically and/or numerically evaluated. Second, we extend our framework to accommodate SISO and MIMO non-linear decision-feedback equalizers (DFEs). Similar to the sparse FIR LEs design problem, the design of sparse FIR DFEs can be cast into one of sparse approximation of a vector by a fixed dictionary whose solution can be obtained by using either greedy algorithms, such as Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP), or convex-optimization-based approaches, with the former being more desirable due to its low complexity. Third, we further generalize our sparse design framework to the channel shortening setup. Channel shortening equalizers (CSEs) are used to ensure that the cascade of a long CIR and the CSE is approximately equivalent to a target impulse response (TIR) with much shorter delay spread. Channel shortening is essential for communication systems operating over highly-dispersive broadband channels with large channel delay spread. Fourth, as an application of recent practical interest for power-line communication (PLC) community, we consider channel shortening for the impulse responses of medium-voltage power-lines (MV-PLs) with length of 10 km and 20 km to reduce the cyclic prefix (CP) overhead in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) and, hence, improves the data rate accordingly. For all design problems, we propose reduced-complexity sparse FIR SISO and MIMO linear and non-linear equalizers by exploiting the asymptotic equivalence of Toeplitz and circulant matrices, where the matrix factorizations involved in our design analysis can be carried out efficiently using the fast Fourier transform (FFT) and inverse FFT with negligible performance loss as the number of filter taps increases.

Finally, the simulation results show that allowing for a little performance loss yields a significant reduction in the number of active filter taps, for all proposed LEs and DFEs design filters, which in turn results in substantial complexity reductions. The simulation results also show that the CIRs of MV-PLs with length of 10 km and 20 km can be shortened to fit within the broadband PLC standards. Additionally, our simulations validate that the sparsifying dictionary with the smallest worst-case coherence results in the sparsest FIR filter design. Furthermore, the numerical results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach compared to conventional sparse FIR filters in terms of both performance and computational complexity. Acknowledgment: This work was made possible by grant number NPRP 06-070-2-024 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation). The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.

Due to rapid growth in traffic demands and the number of subscribers, the transmit energy consumption becomes critical, both environmentally and economically. Increasing energy efficiency for wireless networks is the main goal for the 5G network research. The research community has proposed promising solutions supporting green communication techniques. However, energy efficiency can also be enhanced in a different way. We can get energy from the renewable sources, which can compensate (totally or partially) the traditional power consumption from the power grid. Energy harvesting has emerged as a promising technique which helps to increase the sustainability of wireless networks. In this paper, we investigate energy efficient antenna selection schemes for a MIMO relay powered by a hybrid energy source (from grid or through RF energy harvesting). We try to utilize the large number of antennas efficiently for both data decoding and energy transfer. Then, we formulate an optimization problem and provide the optimum antenna selection scheme such that the joint power consumption (source and relay power) is minimized while meeting the rate requirements. The problem is categorized as a mixed non-linear integer and non-convex, i.e., prohibitively complex. We propose two special cases of the general problem, Fixed Source Power Antenna Selection (FSP-AS), in which we assume a fixed source power and control the antenna selection only, and All Receive Antenna Selection (AR-AS), in which we choose to turn all receiving antennas ON. Finally, we introduce two less complex heuristics, Decoding Priority Antenna Selection (DP-AS) and Harvesting Priority Antenna Selection (HP-AS). Finally we compare our work with the Generalized Selection Combiner (GSC) scheme used in some previous works.

The main contributions of our work can be summarized as follows:

(1) We introduce the energy harvesting technique as an effective way to improve the energy efficiency by using it as a substitute for the grid energy.

(2) In addition to the transmitted energy, we model the circuit power as an important part of the total energy consumption which can affect the energy efficiency.

(3) We make a possibility to turn each antenna ON or OFF individually, so we can turn off only the antennas we don't need to save the energy as much as possible.

(4) We introduce two special case schemes, each of them care about a special type of energy consumption, FSP-AS scheme cares more about the circuit energy, while the

AR-AS concentrates mainly on the transmitted energy.

(5) We also propose two heuristics to accommodate the complexity of the target problem. We evaluate the performance for the proposed schemes numerically. Our key performance indicator (KPI) is the joint power consumed in both the source and the relay. The simulation results show the gain of our optimal scheme in terms of energy efficiency, which can be up to 80% as compared to solutions proposed in the literature. Our developed heuristics show reasonable performance at small rate with almost no gap with the optimal scheme at higher target rates. In our future work, we will consider modeling more than one source and destination nodes and extend this model to include interference scenarios.

Harvesting of vibration energy from the ambient environment, such as vibrations experienced by bridges due to vehicle movements, wind, earthquakes, has become an essential area of study by many scientists aiming to design new systems which can improve self-powered network sensors in wireless sensor networks (WSN), thus providing a more efficient system that does not require the human involvement.

One of the essential components of WSN systems is the sensor node. It is used to continuously send/receive information to monitor a certain behavior targeted by the application; for example, to monitor bridge infrastructure's health. Sometimes, sensors are programmed and adjusted to send useful data for monitoring 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This configuration harms the sensors' batteries and shortens their lives, since sending/receiving data consumes power and leads to the reduction of the batteries' voltage levels. Due to this fact, energy harvesting is critical to maintaining long-term batteries that can recharge themselves from the available ambient harvested energy and eliminate the need for human involvement in replacing or recharging them in their specified locations in the network.

Recent structural health monitoring systems (SHM), in civil infrastructure environments, have focused heavily on the use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) due to their efficient use of wireless sensor nodes. Such nodes can be fixed onto any part of the infrastructure, such as bridges, to collect data remotely for monitoring and further processing. However, the drawback of using such sensor networks relies mainly on the finite life-time of their batteries. Due to this problem, the concept of harvesting energy from the ambient environment became more important. Ensuring efficient battery usage would have a great benefit in maximizing overall systems functionality time and ensures efficient use of natural energy resources like solar, wind and vibration energies.

This work aims to study the feasibility of using a piezoelectric vibration energy harvester to extend overall battery life using a single, external, super-capacitor component which is serving as a storage unit for the harvested energy. The methodology followed in this work states the general direction of the flow of energy in a sensor node which can be summarized into the following:

1 Piezoelectric Vibration Energy Harvester: This module was used to convert mechanical energy of the vibrations from the ambient environment to electrical energy.

2 Energy Harvesting Circuit: This circuit is responsible for the power conditioning, enabling the circuit to output energy to the sensors under certain threshold criteria.

3 Energy Storage: This the super-capacitor served to store harvested energy.

4 Energy Management Scheme: The scheme proposed by this work under the energy requirements and constraints of the sensor nodes in order to conserve batteries voltage level to extend sensors' batteries lives.

5 Wireless Sensors Nodes: Each sensor node type has specific energy requirements that must be recognized so that it can be adequately powered and turned on using the harvested energy.

The main contribution of this work is a proposal of an energy management scheme which ensures that the harvested energy being provided to the harvester circuit must be greater than the energy output that is going to be consumed by the sensor. This proposed scheme has proved the feasibility of using impact vibrations for efficient energy harvesting and subsequently increase the battery life time needed to turn on the wireless sensor nodes.

Furthermore, as a future direction of work, to increase the amount of harvested energy, hybrid power sources can be explored by combining more than one energy source from the ambient environment, such as solar and vibration energy.

Critical and public safety operations require real-time communication from the incident area(s) to the distant operations command center going through the evacuation and medical support areas. Data transmitted throughout such type of network is extremely useful for decisions makers and operations' conducting. Therefore, any delay in communication may cause lives' loss. Above all, the existing infrastructure communication systems (PSTN, WiFi, 4/5 G, etc.) can be damaged and is often not available solution. An alternate option is to deploy autonomous tactical network at unpredictable location and time. However, in this context there are many challenge especially how to effectively rout or disseminate the information. In this paper, we present behavior of varied multi-hops routing protocols evaluated in a disaster-simulated scenario with different communication technologies (i.e. WiFi IEEE 802.11; WSN IEEE 802.15.4; WBAN IEEE 802.15.6). Studied routing strategies are classified: Ad hoc proactive and reactive protocols, geographic-based and gradient-based protocols. To be realistic, we have conducted our simulations by considering a Mall in Doha city in the State of Qatar. Moreover, we have generated a mobility trace to model the rescue teams and crowd movements during the disaster. In conclusion, extensive simulations showed that WiFi IEEE 802.11 is the best wireless technology to consider in an emergency urban with the studied protocols. On the other hand, gradient based routing protocol performed much better especially with WBAN IEEE 802.15.6.

Keyword: Tactical Ad-hoc Networks; Public Safety and Emergency; Routing Protocols; IEEE 802.11; IEEE 802.15.4; IEEE 802.15.6; Performance Evaluation

I. Introduction

Public safety is a worldwide governments' concern. It is a special continuous reactive set of studies, operations and actions in order to predict plan and perform a successful reaction in a disaster case. Coupled with the raise of number and variety of disasters, not only the economies and infrastructures are affected, but significant number of human lives. With regards to the emergency response to these disasters, the role of existing Public Safety Network (PSN) infrastructures (e.g. TETRA, LTE) is extremely vital. However, it is anticipated that, during and after the disasters, existing PSN infrastructures can be flawed, oversaturated or completely damaged. Therefore, there is a growing demand for ubiquitous emergency response system that could be easily and rapidly deployed at unpredictable location and time. Wherefore Wearable Body Area Networks (W-BAN) is a relevant candidate that can play a key role to monitor the physiological status of involved workforces and the affected individuals. Composed by small and low-power devices connected to a coordinator, WBAN communication architecture relies on three levels: On-Body (or intra-Body), Body-to-Body (or inter-Body) and off-Body communication networks.

In disaster scenarios, the network connectivity and data is a challenging problem due to the dynamic mobility and harsh environment [1]. It is envisioned that, in case of unavailable or out-of-range network infrastructures, the WBANs coordinators along with WBANs sensors can exploit cooperative and multi-hop body-to-body communications to extend the end-to-end network connectivity. The Opportunistic and Mobility Aware Routing (OMAR) scheme is an on-body routing protocol proposed in one of our earlier works [2].

A realistic mobility model is also a major challenge related to the simulations. To the best knowledge of the authors, no comparable study in disaster context is conducted by considering a realistic disaster mobility pattern.

In this paper, we investigate varied classes of multi-hop Body-to-Body routing protocols using a realistic mobility modeling software provided by Bonn University in Germany [3]. The mobility pattern is exploited by the WSNET simulator as a mobility trace of the nodes moving during and after the disaster. Note here that individuals are considered mobile nodes in the scenario. In the conducted simulations, each iteration, one communication technology configuration is selected (i.e. WiFi IEEE 802.11; WSN IEEE 802.15.4; WBAN IEEE 802.15.6), then simulations are ran with the routing protocols (i.e. proactive, reactive, gradient-based and geographical-based). This strategy provides a vision not only on the behavior of the routing protocols in the disaster context, but evaluates the communication technologies in such case also. For proactive, reactive, gradient-based and geographical-based routing protocols, Optimized Link State Routing protocol version 2 (OLSRv2) [4], Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODVv2) [5], Directed Diffusion (DD) [6] and Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) [7] protocols are selected respectively

The remainder of this abstract is organized as follows. In section II, we present briefly the disaster scenario considered. In section III, we explain the results of the simulations. Finally, in Section IV, we conclude and discuss perspectives.

II. Landmark disaster scenario

we are investigating a disaster scenario (fire triggering) in the “Landmark” shopping mall. The mobility model used is generated by the BonnMotion tool. We assume that the incident is caused by fire into two different locations. Rescuers are immediately called to intervene. We consider that firefighters are divided into 3 groups of vehicles with 26 firefighters in each group. Medical emergency teams that probably could reach the mall just after the incident, are consisting of 6 ambulances with 5 medical staff in each ambulance (30 rescuers in total).

Civilians could also help rescuers and they are also considered in the mobility trace generation. Injured individuals are transported from the incident areas to the patients waiting for treatment areas to get first aids. Then, they will be transported to the patients clearing areas where they will be either put under observation or evacuated to hospitals by ambulance or helicopter. A tactical command center conducting the operations is represented by WSNET is an event-driven simulator for wireless networks. WSNET is able to design, configure and simulate a whole communication stack from the Physical to the Application Layer. We benefit from these features to vary the payload with the selected MAC and routing layer in each iteration. These combinations provided a deep review on the possible communication architecture to consider in disaster operations. The following section describes the outcome of these extensive simulations.

III. Performance evaluation

The main difference between the disaster and any other scenario is the emergency aspect. All flowing data in the network is considered highly important. The probability of packets that did not reach the destination must be zero. For this reason, our evaluation is regarded to the Packet Reception rate (PRR). Likewise, a delayed packet is such like an unreceived packet. That's why we consider the delay as decisive factor. Similarly, the energy consumption is also observed.

The following table summarizes the obtained results.

In terms of average PRR, WiFi IEEE 802.11 is convincingly better than the two counterparts combined with all the routing protocols. GPSR has a considerable PRR with WBAN IEEE 802.15.6, but the location information of the nodes is considered as known. Regarding the delay, DD is particularly efficient with WiFi and WBAN.

To conclude, DD is an efficient routing protocol to consider in case of Indoor operations, while GPSR is most relevant in Outdoor operations where locations can be obtained from GPS.

IV. Conclusion

Disasters are growing remarkably worldwide. The existing communication infrastructures are not considered a part of the communication recuing system. Consequently, to monitor deployed individuals (rescue teams, injured individuals, etc.) data should be forwarded throughout these individuals (WBANs) to reach a distant command center. In order to evaluate the performance of diverse multi-hop routing protocols, we have conducted extensive simulations on WNSET using a realistic mobility model. The simulations showed that all evaluated routing protocols (i.e.AODVv2, OLSRv2, DD and GPSR) has the best PRR with the WiFi technology. While, DD was found to be the most efficient with the WBAN technology. GPSR also could be considered when the location information is available.

Acknowledgment

The work was supported by NPRP grant #[6-1508-2-616] from the Qatar National Research Fund which is a member of Qatar Foundation. The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.

References

[1] M. M. Alam, D. B. Arbia, and E. B. Hamida, “Device-to-Device Communication in Wearable Wireless Networks,” 10th CROWNCOM Conf., Apr-2015.

[2] E. B. Hamida, M. M. Alam, M. Maman, and B. Denis, “Short-Term Link Quality Estimation for Opportunistic and Mobility Aware Routing in Wearable Body Sensors Networks,” WIMOB 2014 2014 IEEE 10th Int. Conf. Wirel. Mob. Comput. Netw. Commun. WiMob, pp. 519–526, Oct-2014.

[3] N. Aschenbruck, “BonnMotion: A Mobility Scenario Generation and Analysis Tool.” University of Osnabruuck, Jul-2013.

[4] T. Clausen, C. Dearlove, P. Jacquet, and U. Herberg, “RFC7181: The Optimized Link State Routing Protocol Version 2” Apr-2014.

[5] C. Perkins, S. Ratliff, and J. Dowdell, “Dynamic MANET On-demand (AODVv2) Routing draft-ietf-manet-dymo-26.” Feb-2013.

[6] C. Intanagonwiwat, R. Govindan, and D. Estrin, “Directed diffusion: a scalable and robust communication paradigm for sensor networks,” pp. 56–67, 2000.

[7] B. Karp and H. T. Kung, “GPSR: Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing for Wireless Networks,” Annu. ACMIEEE Int. Conf. Mob. Comput. Netw. MobiCom 2000, no. 6, 2000.