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  • <p>Power management is becoming the central issue in embedded systems that must carry their own power source and cannot rely on a power outlet on the wall. Without power, the system is useless. In the consumer space such as mobile communication, the consequence may be minor; however, in the so-called hard real-time embedded systems, energy lack means a failure that can cost millions and even human lives.<p><p>Energy management is a central problem in real-time systems design, in particular for embedded wireless devices. The research axe is two-fold. The first project is carried out in order to minimize the energy consumption and maximize the lifetime achieved as in classical battery operated devices. On the other hand, the second project is devoted to emerging harvesting systems which need to operate perennially thanks to the environmental energy. In such systems, the consumed energy comes at the same time from the computing nodes and the supports of transmission/reception.<p>The overall objective of the RTES group is to design, with from a system point of view, energy efficient, fault tolerant, and reliable algorithms for real-time embedded systems subject to failure in order to guarantee specified performances. We consider uniprocessor and multiprocessor systems (under hard and weakly-hard constraints). The suggested algorithms are designed not only to schedule real-time tasks under energy constraints in normal operation but also in situations where some transient faults occur and disturb the system's performance. Our goal is thus to guarantee timely execution of applications and proper Quality of Service (QoS) to end-users by suitably exploiting both the processor and the available ambient energy and allowing a better toleration of transient failures.<p>To design a real-time embedded system, it is necessary to have an accurate model of the system. One innovation of the group is to develop such models (system model, source model and energy model), including the faulty components and their effects, considering the multi-physical and energetic characteristics with different levels of abstraction and complexity adapted to the considered objectives.<p>We consider all stages of the embedded system design: modelling the system, analysing the system’s model properties, design control and finding optimal scheduling algorithms.

    RTES Project

    Real-Time Embedded Systems

  • <p>For the past decades, we have experienced an aggressive technology scaling due to the tremendous advancements of Integrated Circuit technology. As massive integration continues, the power consumption of the IC chips exponentially increases which further degraded the system reliability. This in turn poses significant challenges to the design of real-time autonomous systems.
<p>In this project, we target the problem of designing advanced real-time scheduling algorithms that are subject to timing, energy consumption and fault-tolerant design constraints.
To this end, we first investigated the problem of developing scheduling techniques for uniprocessor real-time systems that minimizes energy consumption while still tolerating up to k transient faults to preserve the
system's reliability.
<p>Then, we consider the problem of power management problem of fault-tolerant real-time scheduling in energy harvesting systems based on the EDF scheme. The power management is achieved via dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) and fault tolerance are achieved via checkpoint scheme. Later, and due to the unpredictability of energy harvesting methods, an online checkpointing mechanism is proposed that further adapts the number and places of checkpoints and scales the speed reduction factors based on the dynamic slack time.
Experimental results have to be done in 2 types: First, a simulator will be done to evaluate the proposed algorithms against the previous schedulers. Then, a real-model is designed with wireless sensors that works according to the proposed approaches with the aim to test the energy savings and reliability.

    FTES Project

    Fault-Tolerant Embedded Systems.

  • The continued increase in the requirements and complexity of networks and applications represents a big challenge in many aspects including network management. If not properly managed, computer networks might become overwhelmed with huge amounts of uncontrolled traffic, which would affect the overall network performance and even a disruption in the services. Identifying Internet traffic applications is centric to many network security and management tasks. In fact, Identifying traffic is a first step towards detecting anomalies for policy enforcement purposes (e.g. Intrusion prevention systems, firewalls) and for monitoring purposes (e.g. Application usage and monitoring systems).<p><p>The primary research goals are directed toward traffic identification and classification used in modern computers networks for security and monitoring purposes. This project aims at providing an analytical review of existing traffic identification methods by suggesting a systematic multilevel taxonomy, assessing existing payload inspection methods, and proposing novel enhancements and approaches based on traffic features.

    NeTr Project

    Network Traffic Identification

  • Covert communication channels (SCC) have been used for hundreds of years to transmit information. Today, the ubiquity of the Internet and computer networks provides a new dimension to this concept, greatly facilitating communications and enabling new ways to hide data in the multiple layers of used protocols. According to the National Computer Security Center, a CCE is a communication channel that has the ability to transfer information in a manner that violates the system's security policy, what constitutes an attack. Multiple may be the purpose of this type of channels, such as the leakage of data, support for intrusive activities, controlling botnets, dissemination and updating of malware or evasion of security mechanisms, among others. Surprisingly, these channels also have legitimate uses as those related to management activities or updating antivirus signatures.<p>In this scenario, the tunneling based SCC are particularly relevant today, for its novelty, wide use and relatively simple deployment. In tunneled SCC, (guest) data protocol payloads are encapsulated in another protocol (host) in order to circumvent security controls associated with the host protocol and / or hide the activity. For example, one can mention those based on widely used protocols such as ICMP, DNS, or HTTP channel.<p>The simplest and most effective countermeasure is to filter the traffic for the host protocol. Obviously, in the case of basic protocols for network operation, like DNS, or widely used ones, such as HTTP, this approach is not feasible. It is needed, therefore, to detect the presence of covert channels and to identify the corresponding packets to selectively filter them.<p>Existing techniques for this detection have limitations that prevent their successful application in practice, most have been developed ad hoc for very specific scenarios, being generally based on relatively simple rules or classifiers. Also, they do not consider the possible existence of covert legitimate traffic, which further limits their applicability.<p>The aim of this project is the implementation and adequacy of the above techniques to the problem of detecting encapsulated SCC proposing generic solutions, but with special emphasis on the DNS tunnels. These currently represent a serious threat, as has been described for use in command and control channels of botnets and for the dissemination and updating of malware. It is also widely used to gain unauthorized access to Internet through captive portals, which, in addition to security risks, generates operating costs and losses to the operators. These costs will be evaluated with the cooperation of RadioKable.

    NetSec Project

    Network Security (Covert communication channels).

  • Nowadays, IoT is involved in many business oriented sceneries such as smart factories and smart supply chains. From business point of view, IoT becomes an opportunity at a mass scale. In fact, with billions of sensors and actuators providing data and conducting actions, many new business services can be proposed such as Remote Fabrication, remote configuration, remote diagnostics, maintenance, and technical support, to cite few. <p>Despite these advantages and opportunities, up to date no reliable frameworks and infrastructures have been designed to that can operate IoT based business oriented scenarios. This is due to the heterogeneous and disparate nature of IoT devices and their associated services, not to mention the privacy preservation, Security, and system governance in such massively decentralized environments.<p>One good candidate to resolve some of these issues is blockchain infrastructure. Blockchain is a technology that provides a distributed ledger of transactions on a network that is secure, tamper-proof, and accessible by each peer on the network. It is shared transactions, distributed over a network of members, made up of series of data blocks, each by itself contains a set of transactions. Blocks are electronically chained together and locked with cryptography, and a public record of every transaction is established. The more blocks there are, the less the probability that block can be altered. <p>Actually, blockchain has many advantages such as their fully decentralization nature, data integrity, transparence, trust-free and anonymity. To these we can add Smart Contracts concept which is equivalent to digitization of the legal contract but it is implemented, deployed and executed within blockchain environment. In fact, smart contracts are lines of code that are stored on a blockchain and automatically execute when predetermined terms and conditions are met. To establish the terms, participants to a blockchain platform must determine how transactions and their data are represented, agree on the rules that govern those transactions, explore all possible exceptions, and define a framework for resolving disputes. It’s usually an iterative process that involves both developers and business stakeholders.<p>However, blockchains have not designed to be operated in IoT based industrial environments due to their drawbacks in this context: resource greedy, mining delay, scalability. This is considered today as a real brake for their use in IoT based industrial context. One good alternative that preserves the BC advantages while overcoming many of the mentioned drawbacks is Tangles:  Tangle is a new distributed ledger technology inspired  from blockchain and create its own version of decentralized network. In general, a tangle-based platform works in the following way: Instead of the global blockchain, there is a DAG (diret acyclic graph) that we call the tangle. The transactions issued by nodes constitute the site set of the tangle graph, which is the ledger for storing transactions.																						   <p>In the first part of this project, we consider both blockchain and tangle and we establish a comprehensive comparative study (experimental and state of the art) of the existing blockchain and tangle protocols, technologies and platforms that are used to date and their usability in IoT Business and industrial context.<p>The second part will focus on designing and implementing a new reliable platform that take into account IoT based industrial scenarios requirements by combining Tangle and BC . Tangle is mainly designed to address the BC issues when it comes to scalability and transaction fees (especially in micropayments). Unlike blockchain structure, tangle is made from robust mathematically background called DAG. It is a stochastic process where transactions get attached to the distributed ledger at Poissonian times, and the attachment's locations are chosen by means of random walks on that graph. The target of this project in the second part is to study the combination of BC and tangle in one platform that will lead basically to high performance and scalability, other than providing double layer of security for dataset.

    BCTech Project

    Blockchain Technology Project

  • We develop new quantum blockchain protocols and examine their validations on the current state of the art quantum computers. We compare the proposed/developed protocol with the existing protocols in terms of their efficiency, security, and flexibility to the current quantum chips to be implemented successfully. We link the proposed quantum blockchain protocols to many different quantum cryptographic protocols and enhance their security and efficiency. We develop realistic protocols that can be easily applied to the tech industry for various purposes and help them achieve their security system stronger. A few modifications to the protocols can lead to an application for the finance industry for securing the transactions.

    QBT Project

    Quantum Blockchain Technology Project.

LENS Researchers

Our Clients
Hussein EL Ghor

Hussein El Ghor received the engineering degree from the Lebanese University, Lebanon in 2002. He also received the Ph.D. degree in automatics and applied informatics from the University of Nantes, France in 2012. He is currently an associate professor in the Faculty of Technology, Lebanese University. He is also the director of the LENS Laboratory. His current research interests include scheduling and power management for real-time energy harvesting applications.

Our Clients
Jawad Khalife

Jawad Khalife born in Lebanon, 1980, holds a PhD degree in telecommunications networks, University of Granada (UGR), Spain, 2016, he works as a Network Engineer in the Lebanese university, Beirut, Lebanon and teaches in several universities. His current research interests covers enhancing traffic classification methods in security.

Our Clients
Amjad Hajjar

Amjad S. Hajjar was born on May 12, 1964 in Chehim, Lebanon. He obtained his engineering diploma in electricity and electronics from the Lebanese university in 1986, and his Ph.D in computer-aided design (CAD) from the university of Paris-VI in 1992. He is currently assistant professor at the faculty of engineering of the Lebanese University. His fields of interest in research are peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, traffic analysis and P2P activity detection.

Our Clients
Nizar Hamadeh

Nizar Hamadeh received his master degree in computer science from the American university of Education 2014.He gets his Ph.D.in computer engineering from University d’Angers-, France. His research interests in data mining techniques to predict forest fires model and manage a natural disaster: forest fires. He also participated in many international conferences. In addition he congratulates the Lebanese University Council for the scientific achievements.

Our Clients
Rola El Osta

Rola received the Master degree in Engineering of Communication Networks from the Lebanese University and Saint-Joseph University, Lebanon in 2007. She also received the Ph.D. degree in automatics and applied informatics from the University of Nantes, France in 2017. She is currently an instructor at the Faculty of Technology, Lebanese University. Her research interests span real-time scheduling with particular emphasis on energy harvesting systems.

Our Clients
Rafic Hage Chehade

received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Lille 2, France, in 1989. His doctoral thesis was on medical instrumentation. From 1990 to 1997, he was teaching in the University of Lille 1 and Ecole d’ingenieurs HEI. He joined the Lebanese University in 1997 and is currently an Associate Professor in the Institute of Technology of Saida. His research interests include digital communication and embedded technology.

Our Clients
Ali Karouni

Ali Karouni received his degree in electrical and electronics engineering from the Faculty of Engineering, Lebanese University in 2009. He also received his master degree in industrial control from the Ecole Doctorale des Sciences et de Technologie (EDST)-Lebanese University in collaboration with Université de Technologie de Compiegne-France in 2010. He then was granted a diploma of master in renewable energies from Saint Joseph University-Faculty of Engineering ESIB-Lebanon in collaboration with EDST-Lebanese University. In 2014, he obtained his PhD in Engineering Sciences -Informatique et Applications- from the Université d’Angers-France collaborated with EDST-Lebanese University. Currently, he is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Technology, Lebanese University. His research interests include data mining, multi-agent systems, pattern recognition, decision theory, optimization and cooperative intelligent systems.

Our Clients
Zeinab Hassan Farhat

Zeinab Hassan Farhat graduated with a university degree in Network and Computer Engineering from lebanese University (Institute of Technology) in 2007. She holds a Master's degree in Communication and Computer Engineering from the AUL in 2014. In 2020, she obtained a PhD in Computer Science from the Higher Institute of Doctorate in Science and Technology of the Lebanese University . Currently She os lecturer at the Faculty of Technology of the Lebanese University. Her Research interests include data mining, multi-agent systems and intelligence systemts.

Our Clients
Mohamad Hijazi

Mohamad Hijazi received the master degree in engineering from the Lebanese International University, Lebanon in 2019. He is now working as a research assistant in the LENS laboratory and seeking for a Ph.D. in computer and communication engineering. His current research interests include applying machine learning and neural network techniques in network traffic and network security.

NEWS AND EVENTS

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  • <p>Manar Sayah defended her master project entitled <strong>DNS Traffic Classification</strong> under the supervision of <strong>Hussein EL GHOR</strong>. 
							<p>Date : Tuesday 08 December 2020, 11h00, Conference room at Faculty of Technology.

<p>Jury members :

<p>Professor Bilal Hussein - President
<p>Dr. Haissam Hajjar, Responsible of ISE master - Rapporter

    08 December 2020

    Master Defense of Manar Sayah

  • <p>Chirine Bassil defended her master project entitled <strong>Clustering Routing Protocol for Homogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks Powered by Renewable Energy Sources</strong> under the supervision of <strong>Hussein EL GHOR</strong>. 
							<p>Date : Thursday 09 September, 11h00, Conference room at Faculty of Technology.

<p>Jury members :

<p>Professor Mohamed Hajjar, Dean of the Faculty of Technology - President
<p>Dr. Haissam Hajjar, Responsible of ISE master - Rapporter

    09 Spetember 2020

    Master Defense of Chirine Bassil

  • Hussein Hellani presented a paper entitled <strong>On BlockChain Technology: Overview of Bitcoin and Future Insights</strong> in the 2018 IEEE International Multidisciplinary Conference on Engineering Technology, Beirut, Lebanon.

    14 November 2018

    Presentation of a paper in IMCET 2018 Conference.

  • <p>Lamees defended her master project entitled <strong>Energy-Efficient Fault-Tolerant Scheduling for Hard Real-Time Systems</strong> under the supervision of <strong>Hussein EL GHOR</strong>. 
							<p>Date : Thursday 1 November, 09h30, Conference room at Faculty of Technology.

<p>Jury members :

<p>Professor Mohamed Hajjar, Dean of the Faculty of Technology - President
<p>Dr. Haissam Hajjar, Responsible of ISE master - Rapporter

																									
							<img src=

    1 November 2018

    Master Defense of Lamees Abou Darwish

  • Youssef defended his master project entitled <strong>Energy-Oriented Scheduling for Reconfigurable Multichannel WSNs under Real-time and QoS</strong> under the supervision of <strong>Hussein EL GHOR</strong>. 
				  <p>Date : Thursday 1 November, 09h30, Conference room at Faculty of Technology.

<p>Jury members :

<p>Professor Mohamed Hajjar, Dean of the Faculty of Technology - President
<p>Pr. Rafic Hage Chehade, GRIT Department - Rapporter

				  <img src=

    4 October 2018

    Master Defense of Youssef Rammal

  • We start working on a new project entitled <strong>Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) Improvements over Blockchain and Tangle</strong>.

    1 March 2018

    Announcement of a new research project about Blockchain Technology.

  • Rola El Osta (STR team) defended her PhD thesis entitled <strong>Contribution to real time scheduling for energy autonomous systems</strong> under the co-direction of <strong>Hussein EL GHOR</strong>																						   							<p><br></p>Date : 26 October, 14 h 30 min - 17 h 00 min, IUT Carquefou, salle D1/26.																						   <p><br></p>																						   <p>Jury members :<p>M. Mathieu JAN (Ingénieur de Recherche, HDR au CEA, Rapporteur)<p>M. Daniel CHILLET (Professeur à l’université de Rennes 1, Rapporteur)<p>M. Abdelhamid MELLOUK (Professeur à l’université de Paris 12, Examinateur)<p>M. Hussein EL GHOR (Maître de conférences à l’IUT de Saida – Université libanaise, Examinateur)<p>M. Rafic HAGE (Professeur à l’IUT de Saida – Université libanaise, Examinateur)<p>Mme Maryline CHETTO (Professeure à l’université de Nantes, Directrice de thèse).															   																						   <p><br></p>Abstract:<p>Nowadays, renewable energy harvesting such as that envisaged for many wireless things, allows the quasi-perpetual systems operation without human intervention because it works without periodic recharging of battery.From an energy point of view, the design of this type of autonomous system becomes more complex since this process has in addition a behavior constrained by time, and particularly has to meet latest timing deadlines. As with any real-time system, an unavoidable problem is to find a dynamic scheduling mechanism able of considering jointly two key constraints: time and energy. In this thesis, we focus on scheduling of mixed tasks consisting of periodic tasks and soft aperiodic tasks without deadline, by providingappropriate solutions for the following question: how to serve aperiodic tasks in order to minimize their response time without challenging the feasibility of periodic tasks. We consider a single-frequency uniprocessor system, powered by an energy reservoir which is charged through an ambient energy source. In this context, four new aperiodic task servers were proposed, based on the optimal scheduler ED-H. A theoretical analysis was performed with validation by a simulation study.</p><p><br></p> To download the pdf of the thesis report, please follow the following link

    26 October 2017

    PhD Thesis defense of Rola El Osta.

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