Al-Rafidain Engineering Journal (AREJ)

The traditional centralized cloud computing paradigm confronts several problems, including a lack of capacity, high latency, and network failure, due to the rapid expansion of IoT (Internet of Things) applications. Fog Computing brings cloud computing and IoT devices closer to addressing these issues. Instead of transferring IoT data to the cloud, the Fog allows local processing and storage of IoT data in IoT devices. Fog Computing offers services with a quicker response time and higher quality than the cloud. Therefore, Fog Computing may be considered the greatest option for enabling the IoT to provide efficient and secure services to many IoT users. In this paper, we define the term "Fog Computing," examine its architecture  and list its features. We also talk about other related work and emphasize it.

Industrial IoT (Industrial IoT) is a new promising technology which can be used to increase the amount of productions with high qualities. Industrial IoT technologies guarantee full control to the processes remotely through the internet which can reduce the number of workers in the field. As a result, this can reduce the percentage of worker injuries and accidents in addition to the total costs. The Industrial IoT systems are attractive targets to attackers. For this reason, these systems require high levels of security since such levels have direct effects on physical devices which may be dangerous on human life and safety. To   guarantee high level of security, a combination between Information Technologies (IT) and Operation Technologies (OT) with new innovative methods should take place. In this paper, many new technologies and security methods are reviewed with their possible attacks in order to provide Industrial IoT infrastructure designers with the required information to take them into consideration. Also, differences and convergences between both classical Information Technology (IT) and operational Technology (OT) and their relations to the Industrial IoT systems are investigated with the possible attacks on each layer of the IT and the OT.

In a larger sense, "green computing" refers to strategies and procedures for creating, utilizing, and disposing of computer resources in three ways: maintaining total computing performance, minimizing the impact on the environment, and maintaining overall computing performance. This entails using less dangerous materials, getting the most usage possible out of a product while using the least amount of energy possible, as well as making old items and the garbage more reusable, recyclable, and biodegradable. Many businesses are making efforts to lessen the negative effects of activities on the environment. The framework Convention on Climate Change of the United Nations (UNFCC)is a global environmental agreement whose goal is to keep greenhouse gas emissions stable to a degree that would prevent adverse anthropogenic interference with the environment. Sustainable development entails growth that doesn't jeopardize the needs of coming generations. That is achieving human development goals while protecting the ecosystems and natural resources that are essential to civilization. The relevance of green computing for sustainable development is emphasized in this paper's assessment of many significant recent studies on the subject.

To highlight issues and challenges of the Load Balancing Algorithm (LBA) in the context of cloud computing. The authors of this work discussed load balancing and the load balancing problems in cloud computing, how to solve them, the basic techniques used to maintain load over the cloud, and the benefits and drawbacks of these algorithms. Furthermore, the static and dynamic load balancing strategies are compared. Load balancing methods in the cloud for data centers must avoid VM overload/low load, which is a challenge in cloud computing. Load balancing mechanisms aid in the management of workloads. The primary goal of load balancing among machines is to spread workloads and computing resources across one or more servers while lowering energy consumption and maximizing resource usage. Cloud computing is a type of computing in which scalable resources are made available on-demand and are frequently virtual, as in an online service. For a variety of reasons, including cost saving, speed, efficiency, performance, and security, cloud computing has recently become a popular choice for individuals and enterprises. Cloud computing uses the Internet to deliver a variety of services to a company's computers and devices. These resources can include data storage, databases, servers, networks, and software, among other tools and applications. In this paper, developers and researchers must design and construct a load balancer e for parallel and distributed cloud systems.

The Iraqi political arena has witnessed a dramatic change after the year of 2003. It moved from the dominated republican system to a democratic system. This movement in the political system has affected the situation in Iraq in terms of economic, education, industrial, trading, to mention a few. This paper analyses the Iraqi parliament representatives’ affiliations in terms of their coalitions they formed in the elections. Moreover, this study tries enabling us to deeply understand how the Iraqi parliament representatives are connected to each other and the relations among them. It also provides us with information on how different provinces adopted different coalitions regardless their religion and other tendencies. Several political networks were generated and visualized based on the concepts of complex networks. Each network represents a particular political aspect of the current Iraqi parliament. This study also reveals a new trend of forming coalitions in Iraq and the strategy followed by the representatives in attaching to coalitions. Finally, we believe this is the first kind of work that uses this approach of analysis in understanding the trend of Iraqi politicians.

Wireless communication network (WCN) technologies are charming solutions to bolster the conventional electrical substations with the intention of take the fashion of smart substation such as reduction in equipment, minimize the maintenance costs, flexibility, and expansion. However, the harsher challenge facing WCN employing in the electrical substation is the real time protection of substation automation system (SAS) for the high voltage devices in terms of the latency and the reliability in particular the substations of old topologies. This work suggests WCN including special types of the intermediate devices (Switched-Access Points (S-AP) and Multi Wireless Domain- Access Point (MWD-AP)) to address the expected packets congestion by creating independent wireless channels domains offering wireless channels reliability in such network topology that deals with real time data traffic (RT) and the non-real time data traffic (NRT). Riverbed modeler is adopted to simulate the model of the electrical substation network due to the rich tools of communication networks in term of industry environment. The results indicate, the suggested WCN can handle the hard real time requirements of protection from latency and data reliability points of view in case of basic capacity of 802.11a/n standards at the level of ≤ 4 msec and high data reliability.

The IEEE 802.16e standard includes several features that aid data capacity. When dealing with real-time applications such as video conference services, however, it quickly depletes its resources. The quality of the video, on the other hand, is a crucial factor for the user. There is a tradeoff between the video quality and the resources available. In this paper the influence of frame length on video applications was investigated by examining the effect of four frame lengths (5, 10, 15, and 20 mSec) on the Packet Delay Variation, End-to-end packet delay, traffic sent and received with modulation type 64QAM and high quality of video conference application are used. The optimal frame length was found to be 10 milliseconds, with the Packet Delay Variation being the smallest, the Packet End-to-End Delay being the shortest, and the number of received packets being equal to the number of sent packets.

In this paper an efficient Real-Time Voice over Wireless sensor network (VoWSN) platform based on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system to be used in emergency scenarios is proposed, implemented and evaluated. The workflow principle of the proposed system is depending on a Category Transformation Protocol (CTP) that transforms system category gradually from network dependent ASR system with a full dictionary and language model (i.e. large vocabulary) to fully embedded ASR system with customized dictionary and language model (i.e. small vocabulary ). Moreover, a comparison study has been performed between our proposed VoWSN based ASR system and a VoWSN based streaming system. This comparison is performed to elaborate the gains achieved when sending the text of the voice signal instead of sending the voice signal. Additionally, the Voice over IoTs (VoIoTs) system has been evaluated utilizing Voice streaming or ASR system to evaluate the system performance when connecting to the Internet.