Cloud computing provides flexibility, reliability, and scalability to its consumers. Applications that run on Cloud are now more resource hungry than ever, and the need is constantly growing. The number of Cloud applications with diverse nature is growing, expecting greater performance in low cost. Fulfilling the quality of service (QoS) demands of such diverse applications is a challenging task and requires efficient network architectures, robust scheduling schemes, powerful and adaptable routing algorithms, reliable resource management, effective data exchange policies, and QoS improvement policies. Research community endeavors to provide solutions to various challenges faced by Cloud computing. These solutions must be tested thoroughly before their implementation in a real Cloud. Simulation seems a viable choice for testing a solution in different scenarios. There are a number of simulators available, focusing on certain aspects of Cloud while neglecting others. Their generalized implementation of the Cloud ignores various critical factors, such as networking characteristics, consequently affecting the tests and results of a solution. To tackle these issues, simplify simulation process, and provide the detailed implementation of the Cloud, we present Nutshell: a novel Cloud simulator that makes it easy to model, simulate, and experiment new Cloud solutions. Salient features offered by Nutshell include 1) provision of a platform for modeling and simulating Cloud infrastructure, 2) built-in essential components and helpers to create new architectures, 3) pre-built data center architectures, 4) plug-in-based architecture, 5) communication protocols, 6) pre-built virtual machine scheduler, 7) addressing schemes, 8) user applications, 9) virtual machines, 10) Job splitting, and 11) simulation data collection and exporting.
Category: Publications
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Android-Based Verification System for Banknotes
With the advancement in imaging technologies for scanning and printing, production of counterfeit banknotes has become cheaper, easier, and more common. The proliferation of counterfeit banknotes causes loss to banks, traders, and individuals involved in financial transactions. Hence, it is inevitably needed that efficient and reliable techniques for detection of counterfeit banknotes should be developed. With the availability of powerful smartphones, it has become possible to perform complex computations and image processing related tasks on these phones. In addition to this, smartphone users have increased greatly and numbers continue to increase. This is a great motivating factor for researchers and developers to propose innovative mobile-based solutions. In this study, a novel technique for verification of Pakistani banknotes is developed, targeting smartphones with android platform. The proposed technique is based on statistical features, and surface roughness of a banknote, representing different properties of the banknote, such as paper material, printing ink, paper quality, and surface roughness. The selection of these features is motivated by the X-ray Diffraction (XRD) and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) analysis of genuine and counterfeit banknotes. In this regard, two important areas of the banknote, i.e., serial number and flag portions were considered since these portions showed the maximum difference between genuine and counterfeit banknote. The analysis confirmed that genuine and counterfeit banknotes are very different in terms of the printing process, the ingredients used in preparation of banknotes, and the quality of the paper. After extracting the discriminative set of features, support vector machine is used for classification. The experimental results confirm the high accuracy of the proposed technique.
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Nutshell: Cloud Simulation and Current Trends
Cloud computing has experienced enormous popularity and adoption in many areas, such as research, medical, web, and e-commerce. Providers, like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have deployed their cloud services for use. Cloud computing pay-as-you-go model, on demand scaling, and low maintenance cost has attracted many users. The widespread adoption of cloud paradigm upshots various challenges. The legacy data center and cloud architectures are unable to handle the escalating user demands. Therefore, new data center network architectures, policies, protocols and topologies are required. However, new solutions must be tested thoroughly, before deployment within a real production environment. As the experimentation and testing is infeasible in the production environment and real cloud setup, therefore, there is an indispensable need for simulation tools that provide ways to model and test applications, and estimate cost, performance, and energy consumption of services and application within cloud environment. Simulation tools providing cloud simulation environments currently are limited in terms of features and realistic cloud setups, focus on a particular problem domain, and require tool-specific modeling, which can be frustrating and time consuming. This paper aims to provide a detailed comparison of various cloud simulators, discuss various offered features, and highlight their strengths and limitations. Moreover, we also demonstrate our work on a new cloud simulator “Nutshell”, which offers realistic cloud environments and protocols. The Nutshell is designed to diminish flaws and limitations of available cloud simulators, by offering: (a) multiple datacenter network architectures, like three-tier, fat-tree, and dcell, (b) fine grained network details, (c) realistic cloud traffic patterns, (d) congestion control strategies and analysis, (e) energy consumption, (f) cost estimation, and (g) data center monitoring and analysis. Flexibility to stretch the architectures to simulate smart city IT infrastructure.