Postdoc Research Position Application Farah Kandah

Research center on wireless communications and networking at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA Wireless@VT /
Farah Kandah /

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Cover letter Farah Kandah

Dear Members of the Search Committee,

I am writing in response to your advertisement for the Postdoc Research Position at the research center on wireless communications and networking at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA. I am currently a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science department at North Dakota State University at Fargo, ND, and will complete my degree in summer 2011. I respectfully submit this letter of application, for I believe my experiences and commitment to research and teach make me well qualified to meet the needs of this position.

Through the PhD degree, my course work has covered a wide range of topics in computer science. My research in wireless networks area with my major advisor Dr. Weiyi Zhang, has provided me with the opportunity to understand wireless systems as well as improve their performance by providing better network designs to avoid the previous designs shortcomings. My research interests and experience span a wide range of topics in wireless networks from stationary wireless networks to mobile ad-hoc networks. Since 2009, I published seven papers and six more papers submitted to internationally reputable journals and conferences, such as WILEY Security and Communication Networks journal, ACM/Springer Mobile Networks & Applications (MONET) journal, IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM 2010 and 2011) and IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC). Some of my publications can be found at

As a lecturer at the Hashemite University in JORDAN, I have gained valuable experience in teaching and supervising undergraduate students. In addition to classroom instruction, I served as a major advisor for students in their graduate projects, where I provided them with appropriate research topics, edited and evaluated their work. Through my career as a lecturer, I taught many courses in computer science and information technology fields, from basic programming to networks design.

I hope my qualifications and my research and teaching experience are a good match with what you're looking for. I am very interested in this position. Please kindly contact me via phone or email if you have any questions. I enclosed my teaching and research statements.

Thank you for your valuable time.

Sincerely,

Farah Kandah

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Research Statement Farah Kandah

Research Statement

Farah Kandah

Wireless networks have attracted much research attention in studying their performance lately due to their potential of easy deployment and use in a wide variety of terrains as well as the relative low cost. Despite this significant attention, the performance of these networks today leaves much to study. To support the potential advantages and wide-scale deployment of wireless networking technology, some questions need to be addressed. How much satisfied are the users with the provided service? How good is the quality of service? Is the network secure? Can users trust the network and communicate with confidence? Network's users are more interested in using a network with fewer interruptions, small transmission delays as well as believing that their data is safe and secure. Through my research, I tried to answer these questions. My work strongly relies on providing well-designed schemes, techniques, algorithms, and solutions to solve problems and improve the performance of wireless networks as well as providing secure transactions and communications among network's users by eliminating and mitigating adversaries' attacks. My research interests and experience span a wide range of topics in wireless ad-hoc network from stationary wireless networks to mobile ad-hoc networks. Because of the strong interdisciplinary nature of my research, I have developed a rich network of collaborations with researchers in the wireless networks field. Below is an overview of my research initiatives.

Past Research: My thesis work focus on providing a well wireless mesh network design by considering three design factors, interference influence, network reliability/survivability and secure key management. This thesis work aims to improve the network throughput, guarantee the network reliability and survivability as well as secure the network against malicious eavesdropping attacks. Recent researches have shown that interference can make a significant impact on the performance of wireless networks. Using multiple channels instead of a single channel has been shown to be able to improve the network throughput dramatically in such networks, where the interference influence in the network can be reduced by assigning channels to the network interface cards in a common neighborhood to be as different as possible. Thus, allowing multiple simultaneous transmissions within the neighborhood as well as increasing the network capacity. Without network topology, it is impossible to assign channels on the edges and calculate the network interference. On the other hand, different channel assignments can include different network topologies. To achieve this, we provided an interference-aware topology scheme that seeks a network topology and a channel assignment such that the induced network topology has the minimum network interference among all 2-connected topologies, while provides a better network capacity.

Due to the large number of users and the emergence of real time multimedia applications, providing reliability has become one of the critical issues in wireless ad-hoc networks. Multipath routing instead of a single path has been shown to be able to provide better reliability and quality of service. Due to the limited network resources, the interference influence in the network might not be easy to eliminate. Therefore, my coauthors and I aimed to embrace the network interference for better protection performance. Thought our research we observed that any two primary paths should not use the interfered links because the interference will reduce bandwidths of both primary paths. Moreover, since any primary path and its protection path will never transmit at the same time, we planned to use the links that are interfered with the links on the primary paths for protections. On the other hand, each protection path is reserved (not actively used) for a request in the case of failure in the primary path. Therefore, it is possible to use a same link as a part of protection for multiple primary paths if some criteria are satisfied. Our proposed scheme seeks to provide each user's request with a pair of link-disjoint primary and protection paths, while consuming minimum number of free links in the network.

In the final part of my dissertation research, I focused on security issues in wireless networks. With more attention on wireless networks lately, the security issues become more important and urgent for managing and deploying in such networks. The flexible deployment and the broadcast nature of wireless networks make them suffer from a variety of security attacks [15, 16]. Eavesdropping attack is a network layer attack aims on capturing packets transmitted by others' computers and reading the data contents to extract sensitive information (passwords and confidential information). Through the dissertation research, we realized that the way in which keys assigned to/among all the nodes in the network could affect the network in making it resistant or vulnerable to malicious attacks. We observed that previous key management schemes did not consider the effect of sharing the same keys between nodes within 2-hop distance. We in our work proposed the malicious eavesdropping attack and showed how it can affect the network taking advantage of sharing the keys within 2-hop distance from the compromised node. To mitigate/eliminate this attack we, in our work, proposed a new key management scheme taking into consideration the 2-hop distance in assigning keys among nodes in the network.

Current research

A. Malicious attack in Mobile ad-hoc networks.

Previous studies showed that the flexible deployment nature and the lack of fixed infrastructure make Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) suffer from a variety of security attacks. In this work, we proposed the misleading routing attack (MIRA), which is different from the well-known gray/black hole attacks. This proposed attack aims to consume the source waiting time to make the source node time out before it receives the ACK. In addition, it aims to overload the network by increasing the number of unexpected routing packets generated in the network. Through simulations, we show that the existence of an adversary in the network that launches a misleading routing attack will degrade packet transmissions in the network as well as increase the number of lost packets in the network.

B. Colluding attack in Mobile ad-hoc networks.

The growth of laptops, personal digital assistant (PDA) and 802.11/Wi-Fi wireless networking have made mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) and machine-to-machine (M2M) popular research topics recently. With more attention on M2M and MANETs lately, the security issues become more important and urgent for management and deployment in such networks. In this work, we showed how an adversary can utilize a colluding attack in MANET by injecting malicious nodes in the network, while hiding their identities from other legitimate nodes. These injected nodes will work together to generate a severe attack in the network, which aims to create a collision at an arbitrary node, which in turn will result in making the attacked node unable to receive or relay any packet. As a result this node could be wrongly reported as having a malicious behavior by any other node in the same neighborhood, or it might be reported as unreachable if it is a destination node. To mitigate/eliminate the effect of the colluding injected attack in the network, we proposed a novel monitoring verification scheme.

C. Secured Cost-effective Multi-Cloud Storage in Cloud Computing.

The end of this decade is marked by a paradigm shift of the industrial information technology towards a pay-per-use service business model known as cloud computing. Cloud data storage redefines the security issues targeted on customer's outsourced data (data that is not stored/retrieved from the costumer’s own servers). Since cloud service providers (SP) are separate market entities, data integrity and privacy are the most critical issues that need to be addressed in cloud computing. We observed that, from a customer’s point of view, relying upon a solo SP for his outsourced data is not very promising. In addition, if the data is distributed among the available SPs in such a way that no less than a threshold number of SPs can take part in successful retrieval of meaningful data, this might provide better privacy as well as ensure data availability with a little more cost paid. In this paper, we propose an economical distribution of data among the available SPs in the market, to provide customers with data availability as well as secure storage.

D. Community-based Adaptive Trust Model in Ad-hoc Networks.

Recent studies have shown that it is hard to provide a consistent protocol for ensuring accountability of trusted and untrusted nodes in ad-hoc distributed networks. The situation becomes worse when malicious nodes act together in collusion. In this work, we proposed a community-based adaptive trust model to mitigate the colluding effect created by adversaries. Our proposed model seeks a robust community structure that has high trust values for the nodes in the same community, as well as minimizing the trust between legitimate and malicious nodes. Through simulation, we showed that our proposed model out performed previous models in providing a trusted community structure for ad-hoc network, even in presence of large number of colluding malicious nodes.

Future Research: Due to the fast growth of wireless networks, interesting commercial applications of multi-hop wireless networks have emerged. Therefore, wireless networks have witnessed a significant deployment and research activities. Due to the large number of users, offering Internet connectivity by the use of wireless networks became a popular choice, since it allows a fast, easy and inexpensive network deployment. However, providing a better network performance is in demand. Providing users with better quality of service is a demand to maintain the network users. Reliability, availability and survivability are hot research topics that attracted many researchers recently. In my future research plans, I intend to work in this area, by providing well-designed schemes and techniques that seek an improvement in the performance of wireless networks.

With more attention on wireless networks lately, the security issues become more important and urgent for management and deployment in such networks, where the flexible deployment nature and the lack of fixed infrastructure make these networks suffer from a variety of security attacks, where the existence of such attacks might hold back the potential advantages and wide scale deployment of this promising technology. For my future research, I would be interested in providing security guarantees in such networks, to allow users to access the network and communicate with confidence and safe manner.

Cognitive radio networks have attracted much research attention lately, due to its ability in utilizing the limitation in resources in wireless networks through the use of cognitive radio devices.These devices have shown their ability in sensing, identifying and taking advantage of the unused spaces in the spectrum to use them in communications. Provide security in such networks is in demand, since any existence of an adversary in the network who can compromise any of those devices might harm the network,in such away where the adversary can benefit himself from the better use of the spectrum. I would be interested in studying these networks and provide secure guarantees for users as well as provide new and well-designed schemes to improve the network performance.

I believe my research experience qualifies me to apply or be a part in applying for funding, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), Research Coordination Networks (RCN) program, which seeks new ideas for implementing novel networking strategies and techniques, as well as the Department of Defense funds.In addition, my research experience qualifies me also to seek research funds from multiple private sector companies such as Microsoft,IBM, and HP.

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Teaching Statement Farah Kandah

Teaching Statement

Farah Kandah

Developing new educational materials and techniques as well as teaching and working with students are my primary reasons for seeking an academic career. The essential components of an academic career are teaching and mentoring. I believe that teaching should be seen as a discipline in which the role of the professor adopts in response to the level, progress and feedback of the student(s) being taught. A teacher is first and foremost an educator. However, at times the teacher must act as a leader, mentor, a role model or even a peer for the benefit of the student.

My teaching philosophy views education in its many forms as an integral part of both personal and social development. Some students are curious and eager to learn who are easy to teach, but unfortunately not all students in the classroom are in the same state of mind. To deal with this, I believe that engaging students in the learning process is the best solution in such a scenario. Students must be active participants in the learning process, rather than passive receivers and observers. Also providing students with a set of clear and realistic goals improve their thinking and their solving techniques. Challenging and achievable goals gives the motivation for the students to respond in a better manner. Difficult assignments are frustrating and intimidating, while extremely easy assignments are boring, allow students to become careless, and do not give the students any sense of accomplishment.

Previous experience:

From 2005 until 2008, I worked as a lecturer at the Hashemite University in JORDAN. Through my three years span I taught many undergraduate courses from basic computer science concepts up to computer networks fundamentals. At the early stages of my career, I taught basic computer skills including Windows and Microsoft office. These courses were required for freshman students by all the departments in the university and not just the Computer Science department. I dealt with different students who have different interests in computer science in general. I managed the learning process through interacting with students and encourage them to ask questions and discuss different topics related to the course topics.

I taught programing languages courses (C, C++ and JAVA) for the sophomorestudents. I managed to promote the student level of thinking and came up with different solutions for different given problems, through providing them with examples, homework and classroom quizzes. I carried out the learning process of the programming languages through make the student to become familiar with the syntax and semantics of the programming languages that they are studying. Beside the programming languages, I taught advanced computer science and information systems fundamentals.

I taught junior and senior students computer networks fundamentals, TCP/IP protocols and computer network design. My research experience in wireless networks, make me well-prepared to teach such courses. Through these courses I encouraged the students to read recent publications and make sure they understand the problems studied in these publications and discuss future ideas for improving previous works or propose new solution. Through my career I supervised many senior students’ undergraduate projects. Besides working as a lecturer, I served as a course coordinator for computer networks and object oriented programming courses as well as provide syllabus for these courses. Also I served as the major advisor for undergraduate students on courses registration process and academic maters.