Research

I am mainly interested in exploring the research areas of systems software and computer networks.

Topics of my research

Systems Software
- Distributed Systems
- Operating Systems
Computer Networks
- Software-Defined Networks
- Wireless Sensor Networks

Research Projects

SDN - VSA Modeling Framework

In this project, we suggest the possibility of leveraging the impact which SDN control applications assert on the network information base (NIB) to reason about the behavior of such applications.
Based on that, we propose SDN-VSA, a framework that models SDN control applications as a set of transformations in a vector space.

Publications:

Mohamed Aslan, and Ashraf Matrawy, “ SDN-VSA: Modeling and Analysis of SDN Control Applications using Vector Spaces, ” in Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2018) - QoS, Reliability, and Modeling Symposium, Kansas City, MO, USA. May 2018. [PDF]
- An errata document was issued for this paper.

Adaptive Consistency for Distributed SDN Controllers

In this project, we introduce the use of adaptive controllers into software-defined networking (SDN), and propose the use of adaptive consistency models in the context of distributed SDN controllers.
Adaptive controllers are controllers that can tune their own configurations in real-time in order to enhance the performance of the applications running on top of them.

Project's web page: https://bitbucket.org/mohaslan/actl
Code repositories:

https://bitbucket.org/mohaslan/actl.git [ web | mirror ]
https://bitbucket.org/mohaslan/libof.git [ web | mirror ]
https://bitbucket.org/mohaslan/libdht.git [ web | mirror ]
https://bitbucket.org/mohaslan/hashtab.git [ web | mirror ]

Publications:

Mohamed Aslan, and Ashraf Matrawy, “ Adaptive Consistency for Distributed SDN Controllers, ” in the Proc. of the 17th International Network Strategy and Planning Symposium (Networks 2016), Montreal, QC, Canada. September 2016. [PDF]
Mohamed Aslan, and Ashraf Matrawy, “ A Clustering-based Consistency Adaptation Strategy for Distributed SDN Controllers, ” arXiv:1705.09050 [cs.NI]. May 2017. [PDF]

Global Network View and Application Performance in SDN

Maintaining an up-to-date global network view is of crucial importance for SDN applications which need to act autonomously. Outdated network views could impact the applications' performance.
In this project, we focus on studying two key factors that can affect the controllers' global network view:

network state collection, and
network state distribution.

Publications:

Mohamed Aslan, and Ashraf Matrawy, “ On the Impact of Network State Collection on the Performance of SDN Applications, ” IEEE Communications Letters, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 5-8, January 2016. [PDF]
Mohamed Aslan, and Ashraf Matrawy, “ Could Network View Inconsistency Affect Virtualized Network Security Functions?, ” in Proc. of the 3rd IEEE Workshop on Security and Privacy in the Cloud (SPC 2017), Las Vegas, NV, USA. October 2017. [PDF]
Mohamed Aslan, and Ashraf Matrawy, “ Maintaining an Up-to-date Global Network View in SDN, ” arXiv:1612.04944 [cs.NI]. December 2016. [PDF]

WiEmu - The WSN Emulator

WiEmu is an open-source distributed agent-based high fidelity software emulator/simulator for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks.
With WiEmu, you can evaluate your network architecture, topology and/or protocols as if they are running on real test-beds.

Project's web page: http://wiemu.sourceforge.net/
Code repository:

svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/wiemu/code/trunk [web]

Publications:

Sherin M. Youssef, M. Abou El-Nasr and Mohamed Aslan, “ WiEmu: The Design and Implementation of a Flexible Agent-based Scalable Network Emulator for Wireless Sensor Networks, ” in the 2012 International Conference on Network and Computer Science (ICNCS 2012), Hong Kong, China. March 2012.