The proposed project is intended to develop a testbed facility for evaluating the performance of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS). The CPS technology consists of a network of small wireless computing devices integrated with computational, communicational, and sensory elements to sense data from the surrounding. The countries like US, China, and Japan are heavily investing in the CPS technology to design intelligent and energy efficient control systems for numerous domains, such as aerospace, automotive, chemical processes, civil infrastructure, energy, healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, entertainment, consumer appliances, and safety critical applications. Similar efforts are underway in developing countries like India and Bangladesh where the CPS technology is utilized for agriculture and water quality management. 

To model various environmental factors and genotype phenotype associations affecting the maize hybrid breeding, to simulate maize hybrids under such factors and to select superior maize hybrids that can be tested on-field.

The central problem with the current field based research methodologies for maize breeding is that it is time and resource consuming. The results of a single maize breed are obtained after continuous field work of 4-5 months. The process of maize breed analysis can be modeled and simulated in quick time with the help of computer based simulations. Current crop simulators are not open source, not user friendly, and do not incorporate all of the factors affecting the maize breed.

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have gained considerable popularity in very less time because of their self-healing, self-organizing, and self-configuring nature. WMNs are considered to be favorable for applications like broadband home networking, community networks, enterprise networking, metropolitan area networks, transportation systems, building automation, and security surveillance systems. WMNs are destined to provide high throughput and minimum packet delay and for these purposes multiple channels are used. Channel assignment, load balancing, and interference avoidance are some of the main challenges of multi-channel WMNs.

Main purpose of this research is to enhance the overall throughput of the network and minimize packet loss and delay. To do so, we propose routing and channel assignment schemes, which use node’s level information for node association and level assignment. Both the schemes work together and they are designed to minimize interference and balance the load among nodes. Performance of the proposed schemes is checked on the basis of varying offered load, different number of nodes, and different number of gateways. Simulation results show enhanced throughput with high packet delivery ratio, and minimal packet loss and delay as compared to existing schemes.

Energy consumption of ICT sector has sky-rocketed in recent years. Nowadays data centers are a major component of ICT sector. The number and size of the data centers has shown rapid growth. Internet giants like Google, IBM and Microsoft home large data center for cloud computing, internet applications, video and content sharing, and service hosting purposes. Data centers are also deployed by large organizations to home IT services. Various studies on energy consumption of data centers point out to the need of energy efficiency in such environments. Carbon footprint of ICT equipment is also a major concern as ICT devices emit large amount of CO2. The heat generated from these densely populated data centers needs large cooling units to keep their temperatures in operational range. These cooling units add to the total energy consumption and have their own carbon footprint.

Our contribution in this work is providing the motivation for the study of energy-efficiency in data center, highlighting the research issues, providing a data center simulation environment and a green data center resource scheduling approach, and providing a solution to the issue of high end-to-end delay regarding causal data in data centers.

Our contribution in the field of energy-efficiency in large-scale systems results in:
 Motivation for such study
 Research issues in the field of energy-efficiency in large-scale systems
 Simulation environment for energy-efficient data centers
 Data Center Energy-Efficient Resource Scheduling algorithm (DCEERS)
 Reducing the delay of causal data while ensuring energy-efficiency in data centers
 Studying the effects of DCEERS on network parameters.

CloudNetSim++, a modeling and simulation toolkit to facilitate simulation of distributed datacenter architectures, energy models, and high speed data centers' communication network. The CloudNetSim++ is designed to allow researchers to incorporate their custom protocols and, applications, to analyze under realistic data center architectures with network traffic patterns.

Infrastructure plays a pivotal role in the development of a country. A strong, affordable, and efficient infrastructure is critical for a country’s economic sustenance and prosperity. In Pakistan, lack of proper planning, inefficient resource utilization, unavailability of technical expertise, increase in population, and uncontrolled urbanization have overtaxed significantly the existing infrastructure, such as roads, railways, water resources, sewerage systems, electricity, gas, and fuel. The country is passing through severe energy crises which has marked negative effect on economy, hence larger population below the poverty line. According to a World Bank report highlighting key issues that hampered economic activities in Pakistan, there are huge deficiencies in public sector capacity to build and operate infrastructure[1].

The goal of this proposal is to improve Pakistan’s infrastructure using modern technologies by establishing a low cost testbed facility for design and testing of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) at the COMSATS Institute of Information Technology (CIIT), Abbottabad. A Cyber Physical System (CPS) is an integrated platform that is typically composed of computational, communicational, and   sensory elements functioning in concert to control and monitor various physical processes/systems[2]. A CPS is typically deployed as a network of interacting elements with physical input/output (I/O). In many advanced countries, CPS has been realized as a promising and inexpensive technology for qualitative improvement in design, manufacturing, and control of various industrial and domestic infrastructures[3]. The diverse applications of CPS include (but not limited to): (a) agriculture management, such as monitoring of soil moisture, salinity, plant diseases, and crop water requirements, (b) automotive transportations, such as road surface condition monitoring and landslide prediction, (c)industrial monitoring, (d) economization of energy through automation, (e) environmental monitoring, such as air pollution and water quality, (f) buildings’ structural health monitoring,(g) disaster prevention through early predictions, (h) pervasive health monitoring using small size Body Area Networks, and (i) controlling safety critical processes, such as nuclear plants, industrial boilers, and aerospace.

Countries like United States, China, and Japan are heavily investing in CPS³. Similar efforts are underway in developing countries, such as India and Bangladesh, where the CPS technology is utilized for agriculture and water quality management. Unlike other developing nations, Pakistan is lagging behind in CPS due to the lack of general public awareness, dearth of technical experts, and non-existence of proper design and testing facilities for such systems. To play an active role in global economy, Pakistan needs to have a modern industrial infrastructure for which CPS is pivotal. One of the major challenges faced by Pakistan is shortage of energy. Smart homes featured with intelligent power distribution systems to control the energy consumption are evolving as another useful application of CPS. Such applications will substantially reduce domestic electricity consumption to allow sufficient power for industrial machinery. The losses in terms of economy and human lives caused by natural calamities and man-made disasters in Pakistan are multiplied due to deficiencies in infrastructure and negligence in observance of standard operating procedures. Therefore, it is also necessary to utilize the research outcomes in CPS to improve the functions of disaster management bodies, such as integrated warning, evacuation, and rescue systems. Because there does not exist any such testbed in CIIT, the proposed system will be the first step in the direction.

The novel features of the proposed CPS testbed are:

•      To improve the quality of research in Pakistan, particularly in CIIT to provide more realistic environment for conducting experiments.

•      To serve as a design and testing facility that will allow students to learn how to make good use of CPS technology in infrastructure improvement of Pakistan.

•      To allow researchers from diverse disciplines to perform their experiments on the physical testbed, consequently, obtaining more realistic results compared to software-based simulators. Such experiments will leverage the development of smarter solutions for energy, agriculture, health, and environmental pollution control.

The system will aim at capacity building, human resource development, and strengthening of local industries by creating awareness of CPS technology. The seminars, training workshops, and system demonstrations will be conducted by the PI and his research group to encourage local expertise and manufacturers to build smart equipment for homes and industry, specifically targeting the energy conservation applications, thus improving the quality of life of the general public.

I prepared the proposal and worked as consultant on the project.

A land administration system is a framework established to govern the management of land resources in a particular region or country. This system comprises policies, laws, procedures, and techniques that are utilized to manage land, including land registration, land tenure, and land valuation. Manual maintenance of land records is perennially marred with multiple challenges; double-spending, single point of failure, delays, multiple visits, intentional and unintentional errors by an authorized person, bribes, and lack of transparency. Recently, Blockchain has been conceived as a technology having the potential to implement and enforce critical security requirements in complex cyber-physical systems. With Blockchain, the common issues in revenue systems, such as forgery, falsification, misrepresentation, and human-induced anomalies in records at various stages, can be prevented. However, current LAS based on Blockchain technology do not offer a holistic architecture to address all the shortcomings of centralized LAS. Furthermore, existing state-of-the-art solutions do not account for all the essential features of Blockchain, such as transparency, double-spending prevention, auditability, immutability, and user participation. This seed-grant proposes to address the research issue doublespending in Blockchain based LAS. Moreover, we aim to build a prototype application that demonstrates the immutability and auditability of land records to overcome the challenges of traditional systems. Our proposal is to utilize a decentralized and Blockchain-based system to manage land ownership and data transfer. This innovative technique allows for the management of property ownership aspects, including buying, leasing, mortgage situations, land inheritance, etc., in a ledger system that is publicly verifiable and immutable. The proposed system boasts features such as immutability, ownership and accountability, auditability, user involvement, transparency and efficiency, and prevention of multispending.