Ahmed Khaled

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Papers by Ahmed Khaled

Energy Savings in Very Large Cloud-IoT Systems

Open J. Internet Things, 2019

Opposite to the original cloudlet approach in which an edge is utilized to bring the cloud and it... more Opposite to the original cloudlet approach in which an edge is utilized to bring the cloud and its benefits closer to the applications, in cloud- and edge-connected IoT systems where the applications are deployed and run in the cloud, we exploit the edge somewhat differently, either by bringing the physical world and its data up closer to the cloud or by caching parts of the applications down closer to the physical world. Aggressive optimizations seeking substantial IoT energy savings are needed to maintain the scalability of large-scale IoT deployments and to stay within cloud cost constraints (avoiding costly elasticity when working with a budget limit). In this paper, we present a novel optimization approach that relies on the simple principle of minimizing all movements: movements of data from the IoT up to the Edge and Cloud, and movements of application fragments from the cloud down to the edge and the IoT itself. Our approach is novel in that it involves and utilizes the dyna...

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The Importance of Being Thing Or the Trivial Role of Powering Serious IoT Scenarios

2019 IEEE 39th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), 2019

In this article, we call for a "Walk Before You Run" adjustment in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) r... more In this article, we call for a "Walk Before You Run" adjustment in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) research and development exercise. Without first settling the quest for what thing is or could be or do, we run the risk of presumptuous visions, or hypes, that can only fail the realities and limits of what is actually possible, leading to customers and consumers confusion as well as market hesitations. Specifically, without a carefully-designed Thing architecture in place, it will be very difficult to find the "magic" we are so addicted and accustomed to-programming! Programming the IoT, as we once programmed the mainframe, the workstation, the PC and the mobile devices, is the natural way to realize a fancy IoT scenario or an application. Without Thing architectures and their enablement of new programming models for IoT-we will continue to only envision fancy scenarios but unable to unleash the IoT full potential. This article raises these concerns and provides a view into the future by first looking back into our short history of pervasive computing. The article focuses on the domain of "Personal" IoT and will address key new requirements for such Thing architecture. Also, practicing what we preach, we present our ongoing efforts on the Atlas Thing Architecture showing how it supports a variety of thing notions, and how it enables novel models for programmability.

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Maat

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 2019

As the Internet of Things (IoT) proliferates, the potential for its opportunistic interaction wit... more As the Internet of Things (IoT) proliferates, the potential for its opportunistic interaction with traditional mobile apps becomes apparent. We argue that to fully take advantage of this potential, mobile apps must become things themselves, and interact in a smart space like their hardware counterparts. We present an extension to our Atlas thing architecture on smartphones, allowing mobile apps to behave as things and provide powerful services and functionalities. To this end, we also consider the role of the mobile app developer, and introduce actionable keywords (AKWs)---a dynamically programmable description---to enable potential thing to thing interactions. The AKWs empower the mobile app to dynamically react to services provided by other things, without being known a priori by the original app developer. In this paper, we present the mobile-apps-as-things (MAAT) concept along with its AKW concept and programming construct. For MAAT to be adopted by developers, changes to the ex...

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IoTility: Architectural Requirements for Enabling Health IoT Ecosystems

IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing, 2019

The increasing ubiquity of the Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to drastically alter th... more The increasing ubiquity of the Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to drastically alter the way healthcare systems are utilized at home or in a care environment. Smart things offer new ways to assist in general patient wellness, such as promoting an active and healthy lifestyle and simplifying treatment management. We believe smart health things bring new requirements not typically addressed in traditional IoT systems, and that an architecture targeting these devices must address such requirements to fully utilize their potential and safe usage. We believe such an architecture will help improve adoption and efficacy, closing gaps between the variety of emerging health IoT systems. In this paper, we present a number of requirements we consider integral to the continued expansion of the digital health IoT ecosystem (Health IoT). We consider the current landscape of IoT in relation to these requirements and present solutions that address two pressing requirements: 1) democratizing mobile health apps (giving users control and ownership over their app and data), and 2) making mobile apps act and behave like any other thing in an IoT. We present an implementation and evaluation of these Health IoT requirements to show how health-specific solutions can drive and influence the design of more generalized IoT architectures.

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Interoperable communication framework for bridging RESTful and topic-based communication in IoT

Future Generation Computer Systems, 2019

The promise of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the many visions of unprecedented and transformin... more The promise of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the many visions of unprecedented and transforming IoT applications are challenged by the realities of a highly fragmented ecosystem of devices, standards and industries. Systems research in IoT is shifting priorities to explore explicit "thing architectures" that promote and enable the friction-free interactions of things despite such fragmentations. In this paper, we focus on overcoming lightweight communication protocol fragmentation. We introduce the Atlas IoT communication framework which enables interactions among things that speak similar or different communication protocols. The framework tools up Atlas things with protocol translator "attachments" that could be either hosted on board the Atlas thing platform, or in the cloud. The translator enables the seamless communication between heterogeneous things through a set of well-defined interfaces. The proposed framework supports seamless communication among the widely adopted Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), Representational State Transfer (REST) over Hypertext Transfer protocol HTTP, and the Message Queue Telemetry Transport protocol (MQTT). Our framework is carefully designed to facilitate interoperability among heterogeneously communicating things without taxing the performance of things that are homogenously communicating. The framework itself utilizes the topic concept and uses a meta-topic hierarchy to map out and guide the translations. We present the details of the Atlas IoT communication framework and give a detailed benchmarking study to measure the energy consumption and code footprint characteristics of the different aspects of the framework on real hardware platforms. In addition to basic characterizations, we compare our framework to the Eclipse Ponte framework and show how our framework is advantageous in energy consumption and how it is unique in that it does not tangibly penalize the homogeneous communication case.

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Energy Savings in Very Large Cloud-IoT Systems

Open J. Internet Things, 2019

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The Importance of Being Thing Or the Trivial Role of Powering Serious IoT Scenarios

2019 IEEE 39th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), 2019

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Maat

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 2019

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IoTility: Architectural Requirements for Enabling Health IoT Ecosystems

IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing, 2019