PPNA special issue on “the green, reliability and security of machine-to-machine communications”

Abstract

Machine-to-machine communications is an emerging technology that realizes a system of networks, wireless or wired, possibly distributed across the world, for transmitting events captured by low-end machines such as sensors and smart meters to high-end applications and/or personal appliances, where the events are translated into meaningful information. It embraces several major research fields including wireless sensor networks, vehicular networks, smart grid and RFID, emerging as a promising approach to enabling ubiquitous computing environment. Unlike current world-scale humancentric 3G wireless networks, M2M communication network is characterized by the absence of direct human intervention and the rapid increase in size and is therefore imposed with unique requirements. With ever-decreasing cost of deployment of M2M communication devices and access to public wireless data networks, and also thanks to its potential to support a large number of ubiquitous characteristics and achieving better cost efficiency, M2M communications has quickly become a market-changing force for a wide variety of real-time monitoring applications, such as remote patient monitoring, smart homes, utility management, environmental monitoring and industrial automation. However, the flourishing of M2M communications still hinges on fully understanding and managing the existing GRS challenges, i.e., Green (energy efficiency), Reliability and Security. This special issue includes six state-of-the-art contributions on the GRS aspects of M2M communications. The first paper entitled “An Attack-and-Defence Game for Security Assessment in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks” by Suguo Do, Xiaolong Li, Junbo Du, Haojin Zhu points out that existing risk analysis solutions fail to consider the attack and defense costs and gains in vehicular networks, and thus cannot appropriately model the mutual interaction between the attacker and defender. The authors propose a game theoretical approach for security assessment in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). They consider both of the rational attacker and defender, and adopt the attack-defense tree to model the attacker’s potential attack strategies and the defender’s corresponding countermeasures. To take the attack and defense costs into consideration, they introduce Return On Attack and Return on Investment to represent the potential gain from launching an attack or adopting a countermeasure in vehicular networks. They investigate the potential strategies of the defender and the attacker by modeling it as an attackdefense game. A detailed analysis on its Nash Equilibrium is provided. The second paper entitled “A Social Network Approach to Trust Management in VANETs” by Zhen Huang, Sushmita Ruj, Marcos Cavenaghi, Milos Stojmenovic, and Amiya Nayak presents several limitations of current trust management schemes in VANETs and proposes ways to counter them. The authors identify that the problem of information cascading and oversampling, which commonly arise in social networks, adversely affects trust management schemes in VANETs. They show that simple voting for decision-making leads to oversampling and gives incorrect results in VANETs. To overcome this problem, they propose a new voting scheme, where each vehicle has different votingweight according to its distance from the event. The vehicle that is closer to the event possesses higher weight. X. Li (*) Huawei Technologies Canada, Ottawa, ON K2K 3J1, Canada e-mail: easylix@gmail.com