arXiv subjects

Farokh Bastani

Publications and source records attributed to Farokh Bastani.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

OmniDroneX: An LLM-Assisted Holistic Drone-as-a-Service Ecosystem

Despite rapid advances in UAV technologies, current deployments remain limited due to several gaps in UAV systems research. To address these challenges, we propose OmniDroneX, a unified Drone-as-a-Service ecosystem, in which drones are transitioned from fixed function platforms into dynamically composable entities that can be integrated with external infrastructures to offer omni-capabilities. OmniDroneX bridges low-level physical primitives with high-level mission intent through a unified vendor-agnostic interface (libUAV) and a formal physical-service abstraction model (PT-SOA). A core innovation is the diverse application of large language models (LLMs) across multiple layers of the OmniDroneX architecture. LLMs are used to assist in identifying and formalizing primitive device functions and abstract service definitions, supporting automated service composition and workflow generation, and enabling interactive, natural-language mission specification and refinement. OmniDroneX also incorporates important categories of composition techniques that are essential in dynamic UAV systems, including physical layer composition for drone capability augmentation, as well as spatiotemporal, functional, collaborative, exception-aware, and QoS-based service compositions. Collectively, these features allow OmniDroneX to serve as a foundation for scalable, resilient, and self-evolving UAV ecosystems operating in complex and dynamic environments.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Pruning Blockchain Protocols for Efficient Access Control in IoT Systems

We consider access control for IoT systems that involves shared accesses to the IoT devices as well as their data. Since IoT devices are dispersed all over the edge of the Internet, traditional centralized access control has problems. Blockchain based decentralized access control is thus the new solution trend. However, existing blockchain based access control methods do not focus on performance issues and may incur a high communication overhead. In this paper, we develop a Pruning Blockchain based Access Control (PBAC) protocol to cutdown the unnecessary message rounds and achieve high efficiency in access validations and policy management. The protocol includes a shortcut and a Role and Device Hierarchy-Based Access Control (R&D-BAC) approaches for different environment settings. To realize the PBAC protocol, it is necessary to carefully engineer the system architecture, which is also discussed in the paper. Experiments demonstrate the efficacy of the PBAC protocol, specifically, the shortcut mechanism reduces access time by approximately 43%, and R&D-BAC outperforms traditional blockchain based RBAC by more than two folds.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2024

Collaborative Access Control for IoT -- A Blockchain Approach

The Internet of Things (IoT) necessitates robust access control mechanisms to secure a vast array of interconnected devices. Most of the existing IoT systems in practice use centralized solutions. We identify the problems in such solutions and adopt the blockchain based decentralized access control approach. Though there are works in the literature that use blockchain for access control, there are some gaps in these works. We develop a blockchain embedded access control (BEAC) framework to bridge the gaps. First, blockchain based solutions for access control require an enabling P2P network while existing P2P overlays do not support some required features. We develop a novel P2P infrastructure to seamlessly support our BEAC framework. Second, most of the works consider blockchain based access control for a single access control model, and we develop a generic blockchain mechanism and show that it can support the embedding of various access control models. Finally, existing works adopt existing blockchain mechanisms which may incur a high communication overhead. We develop a shortcut approach to improve the number of message rounds in the access protocol. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our system, showing that the shortcut mechanism can reduces access time by approximately 43%.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2022

TLETA: Deep Transfer Learning and Integrated Cellular Knowledge for Estimated Time of Arrival Prediction

Vehicle arrival time prediction has been studied widely. With the emergence of IoT devices and deep learning techniques, estimated time of arrival (ETA) has become a critical component in intelligent transportation systems. Though many tools exist for ETA, ETA for special vehicles, such as ambulances, fire engines, etc., is still challenging due to the limited amount of traffic data for special vehicles. Existing works use one model for all types of vehicles, which can lead to low accuracy. To tackle this, as the first in the field, we propose a deep transfer learning framework TLETA for the driving time prediction. TLETA constructs cellular spatial-temporal knowledge grids for extracting driving patterns, combined with the road network structure embedding to build a deep neural network for ETA. TLETA contains transferable layers to support knowledge transfer between different categories of vehicles. Importantly, our transfer models only train the last layers to map the transferred knowledge, that reduces the training time significantly. The experimental studies show that our model predicts travel time with high accuracy and outperforms many state-of-the-art approaches.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

IoT Data Discovery: Routing Table and Summarization Techniques

In this paper, we consider the IoT data discovery problem in very large and growing scale networks. Through analysis, examples, and experimental studies, we show the importance of peer-to-peer, unstructured routing for IoT data discovery and point out the space efficiency issue that has been overlooked in keyword-based routing algorithms in unstructured networks. Specifically, as the first in the field, this paper investigates routing table designs and various compression techniques to support effective and space-efficient IoT data discovery routing. Novel summarization algorithms, including alphabetical, hash, and meaning-based summarization and their corresponding coding schemes, are proposed. We also consider routing table design to support summarization without degrading lookup efficiency for discovery query routing. The issue of potentially misleading routing due to summarization is also investigated. Subsequently, we analyze the strategy of when to summarize to balance the tradeoff between the routing table compression rate and the chance of causing misleading routing. For the experimental study, we have collected 100K IoT data streams from various IoT databases as the input dataset. Experimental results show that our summarization solution can reduce the routing table size by 20 to 30 folds with a 2-5% increase in latency compared with similar peer-to-peer discovery routing algorithms without summarization. Also, our approach outperforms DHT-based approaches by 2 to 6 folds in terms of latency and traffic.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2021

Into Summarization Techniques for IoT Data Discovery Routing

In this paper, we consider the IoT data discovery problem in very large and growing scale networks. Specifically, we investigate in depth the routing table summarization techniques to support effective and space-efficient IoT data discovery routing. Novel summarization algorithms, including alphabetical based, hash based, and meaning based summarization and their corresponding coding schemes are proposed. The issue of potentially misleading routing due to summarization is also investigated. Subsequently, we analyze the strategy of when to summarize in order to balance the tradeoff between the routing table compression rate and the chance of causing misleading routing. For experimental study, we have collected 100K IoT data streams from various IoT databases as the input dataset. Experimental results show that our summarization solution can reduce the routing table size by 20 to 30 folds with 2-5% increase in latency when compared with similar peer-to-peer discovery routing algorithms without summarization. Also, our approach outperforms DHT based approaches by 2 to 6 folds in terms of latency and traffic.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

Summarization in Semantic Based Service Discovery in Dynamic IoT-Edge Networks

In the last decade, many semantic-based routing protocols had been designed for peer-to-peer systems. However, they are not suitable for IoT systems, mainly due to their high demands in memory and computing power which are not available in many IoT devices. In this paper, we develop a semantic-based routing protocol for dynamic IoT systems to facilitate dynamic IoT capability discovery and composition. Our protocol is a fully decentralized routing protocol. To reduce the space requirement for routing, each node maintains a summarized routing table. We design an ontology-based summarization algorithm to smartly group similar capabilities in the routing tables and support adaptive routing table compression. We also design an ontology coding scheme to code keywords used in the routing tables and query messages. To complete the summarization scheme, we consider the metrics for choosing the summarization candidates in an overflowing routing table. Some of these metrics are novel and are difficult to measure, such as coverage and stability. Our solutions significantly reduce the routing table size, ensuring that the routing table size can be bounded by the available memory of the IoT devices, while supporting efficient IoT capability lookup. Experimental results show that our approach can yield significantly lower network traffic and memory requirement for IoT capability lookup when compared with existing semantic-based routing algorithms including a centralized solution, a DHT-based approach, a controlled flooding scheme, and a cache-based solution.

cs.NI↗