Arbitration: Legislation, Scope, and Functioning in Pakistani Legal System a Pragmatic Approach in Law and Sharī‘ah

This study investigates the case of arbitration in the modern states in general and in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in particular, as a self-binding, amicable mode of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR). It starts with arbitration’s meaning, history and evolutional background and discusses them as preliminaries and entrance to the main topic. The study debates Pakistani legislation on the subject, with special focus on the Arbitration Act, 1940. It examines the functioning of arbitration in Pakistani legal system, detects the flaws and areas of improvement therein, and most significantly, suggests proposals for required amendments in the relevant laws. In this connection, the equivocal nature of ADR provisions in some statutes other than Arbitration Act, has been specially highlighted.  As per requirement of the Article 2(A) of the Constitution 1973, some inconsistencies of the laws on the subject with Sharī‘ah have also been traced. The issue of qualifications of arbitrators (hakams) has been detected as the main subject of inconsistency between law and Sharī‘ah, resulting in substantial and effective bearings. A similar inconsistency, comparatively with a lesser effect, has been noted in arbitration of family disputes regarding fixation of number of arbitrators and the hail from families of the disputing spouses. While investigating all these issues, an analytical-cum comparative strategy has been followed. The conclusion contains a concise brief on comparison between Sharī‘ah and law on the subject and a package of proposed amendments in the gray areas.

Energy Efficient Grid Based Hybrid Network Deployment Approach in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are becoming ubiquitous in everyday life due to their applications in weather forecasting, surveillance, implantable sensors for health monitoring, Internet of Things (IoT) and other plethora of applications. WSN is equipped with hundreds and thousands of small sensor nodes for monitoring and surveillance of a targeted region. As the size of a sensor node decreases, critical issues such as limited energy, computation time and limited memory become even more challenging. In such case, network lifetime mainly depends on efficient use of available resources. Organizing nearby nodes into clusters make it convenient to manage each cluster as well as the overall network efficiently. WSN empower applications for critical decision-making through collaborative computing, communication and distributed sensing. However, they face several challenges due to their peculiar use in a wide variety of applications. One of the inherent challenges with any battery operated sensor is the efficient consumption of energy and its effect on network lifetime. The topology management becomes very important as nodes are often distributed randomly that leads to uneven distribution of load. In addition, cluster head selection plays an important role in enhancing network lifetime and improving energy efficiency. Inappropriate selection of Cluster Head (CH) may lead to high network overheads resulting in early battery depletion affecting overall network lifetime. The sensor node selected as CH is responsible for both inter and intra cluster communication, therefore, it consumes more energy as compared to other cluster nodes. Thus, it is very important to select an optimal node as CH and to efficiently rotate the CH role periodically to avoid network partitioning problem. In this research work, a novel Grid based Hybrid Network Deployment (GHND) approach for WSN is proposed to ensure energy efficiency and load balancing. The new merge and split technique that evenly distributes the nodes across the network for maximizing energy efficiency and network lifetime. The proposed method is compared with existing state-of-the-art energy efficient cluster and grid-based techniques on the basis of energy efficiency, scalability and network lifetime. An extensive set of simulations and experiments reveal that the proposed method outperforms existing state of the art techniques such as LEACH and PEGASIS in terms of load balancing, network lifetime, and energy consumption. Moreover, the cluster head selection problem is resolved with a multi-criteria decision modeling using the Analytical Network Process (ANP). A mathematical framework is developed that takes into account various parameters such as residual energy level, distance from neighboring nodes, centroid distance, number of times a nodes has been cluster head and whether a node is merged or not, for efficient selection of cluster head. In the ANP model, these mentioned parameters are pairwise compared to obtain the weights through the supermatrix. The supermatrix is transformed in to a limit matrix that reports priority weights for all criteria parameters. These priority weights are further used to optimize the criteria list for efficient cluster head selection by eliminating low weight parameters ultimately minimizing computational complexity of the ANP process. The sensitivity analysis of the proposed ANP based scheme has been carried out to check the stability of parameters and relative importance in CH selection process.