Associate Professor

Bio

Dr. Fatma OUTAY is an Associate Professor in the College of Technological Innovation (CIT) at Zayed University, Dubai. She is a senior researcher in Computer Engineering, IoT and Mobile Wireless Networks and Telecommunications. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Paris Sud 11 (France). Dr. Fatma has been An assistant Professor at the high school of Business in Tunisia from 2004 to 2007. In earlier 2006, Dr. Fatma has participated in “Smart Home for elderly people” project as an invited senior researcher at University of Florida before joining the University of Paris Sud 11 as a Lecturer/ATER in 2007. In 2008, She also led an international research project “CMCU: Committee Mixt of Universities Cooperation” in collaboration with the Tunisian Ministry of High Education and EGIDE France which is a key partner of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other institutions.  In 2010, she joined the University of Paris 12 as an Assistant Professor. She joined later Telecoms Sud Paris as a Post Doc researcher in 2011. From 2008 to 2012, during her Ph.D. and Post Doc, Dr. Fatma has participated in several national and international research projects mainly Poseidon and Cariocas in collaboration with Alcatel Lucent, Thales, Orange Labs and other academic institutions in Europe.  Dr. Fatma has published several papers in referred journals and conferences. She is active in the research field by being part of international conferences organization committees, reviewing papers, etc. During her academic Career, Dr. Fatma has been an active member in some Tunisian programs based on national solidarity like the presidential 21-21 program aimed to facilitate the integration of young people and generally all job seekers in the labor market, C2I certification program, ATTR association, etc. Prior to working at Zayed University, Dr. Fatma has joined Bouygues Telecoms in 2012, which is one of the three main Telecoms Operators /ISPs in France, as a “Wi-Fi Expert/Architect“ for three years enabling negotiation of SLA agreements and defining technical support and incident management processes with different contributors and suppliers implementing internal and external processes as per ITIL recommendations.

Office

Dubai Academic City, (Wing E-L1-020)

Phone:

+9714 402 1789

Email:

Teaching Areas

-          Research Methods

-          Communication Networks

-          Computer Networks Foundations

-          Problem Solving and Programming language

-          Management of Information System

-          Wireless Sensor Networks and IoT

-          IT Essentials

-          CCNA

Research and Professional Activities

My research and scholarly interests are rooted in the assertion that research and teaching are vitally and inseparably linked. My scholarly interests lie in Wireless and Mobile Networks concepts and theory. During my PhD studies, my research activities have addressed several concerns regarding Wireless Networks and Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) and their middleware applications such as Service Discovery and Routing Protocols. More specifically, my PhD research project has asserted that integrating service discovery with routing in MANETs, which is known as cross-layer approach, by adopting some optimization techniques, can lead to a reliable and efficient protocol in terms of overhead reduction, energy consumption optimization and service discoverability.

During my PhD, I was also part of two European projects POSEIDON and CARRIOCAS in collaboration with national and European partners, academic and industrial like Thales, Alcatel Lucent and France Telecoms. My contributions to these projects were part of 1) designing and implementing an ultra-high bit rate network reconfigurable according to grid applications connectivity requirements, and 2) developing tools and concepts required to face the increasing complexity of next generation networks that offers wireless Internet services. 

During my Post-Doctoral position at Telecoms Sud Paris, my research activities have focused on QoS provisioning in Home Automated Networks over IEEE 802.11n. Demands for QoS challenging wireless multimedia services are continuously increasing for both professional and entertainment needs. Efficient wireless technologies, able to offer the corresponding throughput and QoS are required. In 2011, the IEEE 802.11n was the latest wireless standard. It introduces many improvements at both Physical and MAC layers. However, and despite the increase of the physical data rate, the large overhead associated with channel access and packet transmission schemes reduces its overall efficiency, mainly at the MAC layer. To this end, we have proposed QoS-HAN: a new scheme for the 802.11n aggregation process. QoS-HAN project was in collaboration with Orange Labs/ France Telecoms and the University Paris 6, and is mainly designed to meet the requirements of multimedia services over Home Automated Networks (HAN). It takes into consideration the size of the packet during aggregation in order to meet the QoS requirements in the Home Automated Networks.

At Zayed University, my research/scholarly agenda has been built upon my past and present scholarship of discovery. The area of investigation I have been interested in is Smart Cities and Wireless Communication research areas and mainly Connected Mobility and Connected Vehicles (CV) as a part of the most challenging ad hoc networks, aiming mainly to enhance driver safety during severe weather conditions and road traffic criticism, and ensure trustful V2V and V2I (Vehicle to Vehicle and Vehicle to Infrastructure) communication in order to avoid the drivers’ misleading in critical situations. Fast enough, and after setting up several international collaborations my research area has been extended to other related directions including and not limited to: 1) Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) aiming to provide innovative services relating to different modes of transport and traffic management and enable users to be better informed and make safer, more coordinated, and smarter use of transport networks. 2) Crowd Sensing and Mobile Apps usage for visibility perception and estimation aiming to contribute towards Roads safety. 3) Futuristic Shared Mobility aiming to increasingly allow the car to become a platform for drivers and passengers to use their transit time for personal activities, which could include the use of novel forms of media and services. 4) IoT, as the vehicle and road safety can be boosted by linking V2V and IoT. 5) UAV Applications in Intelligent Transport Systems and Smart Cities. 6) Combined Augmented Reality (AR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in smart construction field as an urgent cutting-edge solution to decrease costs, optimize operations and maintain standards, especially in the local context of the UAE which is known with its enormous construction sector. 7) Privacy and Security in Connected Vehicles Ecosystems, as the large variety of the IoT technologies not being standardized yet contribute to security issues in this area of the automotive industry.

Referred articles

F Outay, S Galland, N Gaud, A Abbas-Turki. “Simulation of connected driving in hazardous weather conditions: general and extensible multiagent architecture and models”. Elsevier Ltd, Engineering applications of artificial intelligence (2021). Volume 104, Pages 116-129 (Q1 Journal)