Muhammad Usman

Muhammad Usman is a post-doctoral researcher at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), Qatar. He holds a Ph.D. (cum laude) in Information and Communication Technology (Wireless Networks), Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI), University of Trento, Italy., double masters in Telecommunication Engineering, and Communication Networks Engineering (with a focus on the coursework and lab training of optical networks) jointly offered by the University of Trento, Trento, Italy and Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy, and a B.E degree in Electronics Engineering from the National University of Science and Technology (NUST), Islamabad Pakistan, with an honor of Best industry project awarded by rozee.pk in 2008. He was entitled to the university's intellect for the complete duration of his studies at NUST.

His recent work as a post-doctoral researcher at Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), Qatar is mainly focused on multidisciplinary research into multiple dimensions. One dimension he is working on is to propose state-of-art security solutions for wireless networks, including, IoT, wireless body area networks (WBAN), and cyber-physical systems. The second is to build a personalized healthcare ecosystem for patients with diabetes to monitor their daily glucose levels and discover a personalized relation between blood glucose and daily food intake. For the former work, I explored energy-efficient and secure MAC and upper layer solutions in medical implant communication systems (MICS) with a joint collaboration between HBKU, University of Glasgow, UK, and the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

In particular, he tailored his research towards various security dimensions in Internet-of-Things (IoT) mainly based on physical layer security (PLS). In this regard, he is working on a NATO project that aims at exploiting the physical-layer parameters to provide the different security aspects including confidentiality and authentication for IoT applications. Specifically, he is focusing to propose Crypto-less key-establishment protocols for IoT. Crypto-less key-establishment represents a challenging problem in PLS that aims at generating shared secret keys without resorting to any standard crypto primitive.

Research Outputs

Book Chapters

1. Muhammad Usman, Marwa Qaraqe, Muhammad Rizwan Asghar, Imran Shafique Ansari, “Role of D2D Communications in Mobile Health Applications: Security Threats and Requirements”, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2020.

2. Usman Raza, Muhammad Usman, Muhammad Rizwan Asghar, Imran Shafique Ansari, Mahesh Sooriyabandara, and Fabrizio Granelli, “Integrating Public Safety Networks to 5G: Applications and Standards”, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2019.

3. Muhammad Usman, Muhammad Rizwan Asghar, and Fabrizio Granelli. 5G and device-to-device communications at the service of Smart Cities, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2018.

International Journals

4. Muhammad Usman, Marwa Qaraqe, Muhammad Rizwan Asghar, Imran Shafique Ansari, “Mitigating Distributed Denial of Service Attacks in Satellite Networks” Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies, 2020 (Accepted).

5. M. Qaraqe, Muhammad Usman, Kashif Ahmad, A. Sohail, and A. Boyaci, “The Diabetic Buddy: A Diet Regulator and Tracking System for Diabetics”, IET Image Processing, 2020.

6. Muhammad Usman, M. Qaraqe, M. R. Asghar, A. A. Gebremariam, I. S. Ansari, F. Granelli, and Q. Abbasi, "A Business and Legislative Perspective of V2X and Mobility Applications in 5G Networks," in IEEE Access, vol. 8, pp. 67426-67435, 2020.

7. Muhammad Usman, Marwa Qaraqe, Muhammad Rizwan Asghar, and Imran Shafique Ansari, “Process Mining for Learning User Privacy in D2D and IoT Networks” Springer Informatik Spektrum, 2019 (Accepted).

8. Muhammad Usman, M. R. Asghar, I. S. Ansari and M. Qaraqe, "Security in Wireless Body Area Networks: From In-Body to Off-Body Communications," in IEEE Access, vol. 6, pp. 58064-58074, 2018.

9. Muhammad Usman, Muhammad Rizwan Asghar, Imran Shafique Ansari, Fabrizio Granelli and Khalid A. Qaraqe, "Technologies and Solutions for Location-Based Services in Smart Cities: Past, Present, and Future," in IEEE Access, vol. 6, pp. 22240-22248, 2018.

10. Moghaddam, Javad Zeraatkar, Muhammad Usman, and Fabrizio Granelli, "A Device-to-Device Communication based Disaster Response Network." IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking (2018).

11. Gebremariam, Anteneh A., Muhammad Usman, Riccardo Bassoli, and Fabrizio Granelli, "SoftPSN: Software-Defined Resource Slicing for Low-Latency Reliable Public Safety Networks." Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing 2018 (2018).

12. Muhammad Usman, Dzmitry Kliazovich, Fabrizio Granelli, Pascal Bouvry, and Piero Castoldi, “Energy efficiency of TCP: An Analytical Model and its Application to Reduce Energy Consumption of the Most Diffused Transport Protocol”, International Journal of Communication Systems, 2017.

13. Muhammad Usman, Anteneh A. Gebremariam, Usman Raza, and Fabrizio Granelli, “A Software-Defined Device-to-Device Communication Architecture for Public Safety Applications in 5G Networks”, IEEE Access 3:1649 – 1654, 2015.

14. Fabrizio Granelli, Anteneh A. Gebremariam, Muhammad Usman, Filippo Cugini, Veroniki Stamati, Marios Alitska, and Periklis Chatzimisios, “Software Defined and Virtualized Wireless Access in Future Wireless Networks: Scenarios and Standards”, IEEE Communications Magazine 53(6):26-34, 2015.

International Conferences and Workshops

15. Muhammad Usman, Simone Raponi, Marwa Qaraqe, Gabriele Oligeri, “KaFHCa: Key-establishment via Frequency Hopping Collisions” (Under review).

16. Muhammad Usman, Marwa Qaraqe, Muhammad Rizwan Asghar, Imran Shafique Ansari, and Fabrizio Granelli, “Optimizing Energy in WiFi Direct Based Multi-hop D2D Networks”, IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM’20), Virtual, 7-11 December 2020. (Accepted)

17. Muhammad Usman, Saud Althunibat, and Khalid Qaraqe, “Mobility Dependent Hybrid RF/FSO Backhaul in UAV Assisted Cellular Networks”, IEEE 25^th International Workshop on Computer Aided Modeling and Design of Communication Links and Networks (CAMAD,20), Pisa, Italy, pp. 1-6, 2020.

18. Muhammad Usman, Kashif Ahmad, Marwa Qaraqe, “A Food Recognition and Tracking System for Diabetics in the Middle East”, IEEE 5th International Smart Cities Conference (ISC2), October 14-17, Casablanca, Morocco, 2019 (Accepted).

19. Muhammad Usman, Muhammad Rizwan Asghar, Imran Shafique Ansari, Fabrizio Granelli, and Marwa Qaraqe, “Trust-Based DoS Mitigation Technique for Medical Implants in Wireless Body Area Networks”, IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC’19), May 20-24, Shanghai, China, 2019.

20. Anteneh A. Gebremeriam, Muhammad Usman, Marwa Qaraqe, Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the Area of SDN and NFV: A Survey, The IEEE 16^th International Multi-Conference on Systems, Signals and Devices, March 21-24, Istanbul, Turkey, 2019.

21. Muhammad Usman, Muhammad Rizwan Asghar, Imran Shafique Ansari, Marwa Qaraqe, and Fabrizio Granelli, “An Energy Consumption Model for WiFi Direct Based D2D Communications”, IEEE Global Communication Conference (GLOBECOM’18), Abu Dhabi, UAE, 9-13 December 2018 (Accepted).

22. Muhammad Usman, Amira Akhtar, Marwa Qaraqe, and Fabrizio Granelli, “Remote Cloud vs Local Mobile Cloud: A Quantitative Analysis”, IEEE Global Communication Conference (GLOBECOM’18), Abu Dhabi, UAE, 9-13 December 2018 (Accepted).

23. Muhammad Usman, Muhammad Rizwan Asghar, Imran Shafique Ansari, Fabrizio Granelli, Qammer H. Abbasi and Khalid Qaraqe. A Marketplace for Ecfficient and Secure Caching for IoT Applications in 5G Networks, IEEE WCNC, Barcelona, Spain, 2018.

24. Gebremariam, Anteneh A., Mainak Chowdhury, Muhammad Usman, Andrea Goldsmith, and Fabrizio Granelli. "SoftSLICE: Policy-based Dynamic Spectrum Slicing in 5G Cellular Networks." IEEE International Communication Conference (ICC’18), Kansas City, Kansas, USA. 2018.

25. Anteneh A. Gebremariam, Muhammad Usman, Ping Duy, Akihiro Nakaoy, Fabrizio Granelli. Towards E2E Slicing in 5G: A Spectrum Slicing Testbed and its Extension to the Packet Core, Globecom 2017.

26. Muhammad Usman, Muhammad Rizwan Asghar, Imran Shafique Ansari, Fabrizio Granelli and Khalid Qaraqe. Towards Energy Efficient Multi-hop D2D Networks using WiFi Direct, Globecom 2017.

27. Muhammad Usman, Muhammad Rizwan Asghar, Imran Shafique Ansari, and Fabrizio Granelli. Towards bootstrapping trust in D2D using PGP and reputation mechanism, ICC 2017.

28. Javad Zeraatkar Moghaddam, Muhammad Usman, Fabrizio Granelli, and Hamid Farrokhi. Cognitive Radio and Device-to-Device Communication: A Cooperative Approach for Disaster Response, IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), 2016.

29. Muhammad Usman, Dzmitry Kliazovich, Fabrizio Granelli, Pascal Bouvry, and Piero Castoldi. A transport layer approach to improve energy efficiency, IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), p:1 – 6, 2016.

30. Muhammad Usman, Anteneh A Gebremariam, Fabrizio Granelli, and Dzmitry Kliazovich. Software-defined architecture for mobile cloud in device-to-device communication, IEEE 20th International Workshop on Computer Aided Modeling and Design of Communication Links and Networks (CAMAD), p:75 – 79, 2015.