Low-power Wireless Communication Protocols Research Articles

A Survey on the Security Challenges of Low-Power Wireless Communication Protocols for Communicating Concrete in Civil Engineerings.

With the increase in low-power wireless communication solutions, the deployment of Wireless Sensor Networks is becoming usual, especially to implement Cyber-Physical Systems. These latter can be used for Structural Health Monitoring applications in critical environments. To ensure a long-term deployment, battery-free and energy-autonomous wireless sensors are designed and can be powered by ambient energy harvesting or Wireless Power Transfer. Because of the criticality of the applications and the limited resources of the nodes, the security is generally relegated to the background, which leads to vulnerabilities in the entire system. In this paper, a security analysis based on an example: the implementation of a communicating reinforced concrete using a network of battery-free nodes; is presented. First, the employed wireless communication protocols are presented in regard of their native security features, main vulnerabilities, and most usual attacks. Then, the security analysis is carried out for the targeted implementation, especially by defining the main hypothesis of the attack and its consequences. Finally, solutions to secure the data and the network are compared. From a global point-of-view, this security analysis must be initiated from the project definition and must be continued throughout the deployment to allow the use of adapted, updatable and upgradable solutions.

Communication protocols evaluation for a wireless rainfall monitoring network in an urban area

Rainfall monitoring networks are key elements for the development of alerts and prediction models for communities at risk of flooding during high intensity rainfall events. Currently, most of these networks send the precipitation measurement to a data center in real-time using wireless communication protocols, avoiding travel to the measurement site. An Early Warning System (EWS) for pluvial flash floods developed in Barranquilla (Colombia), used the GPRS protocol to send rain gauge data in real-time to a web server for further processing; however, this protocol has a high consumption of energy and also high maintenance costs. This article carried out an evaluation in terms of link budget, link profile, energy consumption and devices costs of three low-power wireless communication protocols, Zigbee, LoRaWAN and Sigfox, to determine which one is the most suitable for the EWS of the city of Barranquilla. To perform the evaluation, a wireless sensor network was designed and characterized for Zigbee and LoRaWAN with Radio Mobile tool taking into account the measurement points implemented with GPRS network. The evaluation included the power consumption of Zigbee, LoRaWAN and Sigfox. From the results of simulations, LoRaWAN and Zigbee network has similar radio signal received and the LoRaWAN network obtains the least losses per path. As for power consumption, the LoRaWAN devices has the lowest energy consumption, as well as, the LoRaWAN network sensor nodes are cheaper. Finally, the protocol with the best general performance was LoRAWAN, since complies with the communication, consumption and cost requirements.

Overview of ISM Bands and Software-Defined Radio Experimentation

Wireless systems using low-power wireless communication protocol are rapidly gain popularity in the license-free industrial scientific, and medical (ISM) frequency bands. One such emerging trend in ISM frequency bands is home automation. Historically, all the home devices were once unconnected, today are now being connected either by a wired or wireless connection. The low-power wireless communication protocols enable integration of all the digital home devices into a single system and enhance end user product experience. The rapid prototyping of these end user product using programmable radio system such as software-defined radio (SDR) has been the game-changer in the field of home automation. In this article, we present an overview of popular ISM bands in different regions of the world. Furthermore, we analyze the signals from the wireless electric switch using a software-defined radio in 433 MHz ISM band.

Implementation and analysis of Wireless Flexible Time-Triggered protocol

During the last few years, wireless low-power communications experienced an increasing coexistence and traction as a result of the higher demand posed by power constrained applications. On the other hand, this increasing wireless coexistence is a growing concern and Low-power wireless communication protocols have been shown to experience a significant timeliness and reliability degradation under certain interference profiles. Therefore, the support of real-time communications over license-free bands in open environments, encompassing multiple real-time stations with an unknown number of unconstrained stations, is a challenging task. Provided that this impairment has hindered their wide adoption in demanding real-time scenarios, the Wireless Flexible Time Triggered (WFTT) protocol has been recently proposed targeting applications with stringent timeliness requirements. This protocol works on the medium access determinism granted by the bandjacking technique in open environments, where different technologies may contend for the medium. Besides providing a deeper definition of the WFTT architecture and protocol operation, this paper presents a thorough analysis addressing its specifications, implementation feasibility and testbed based results. These provide strong evidence that the WFTT protocol is able to support real-time communications, even in environments affected by high levels of interference from neighboring contention-based communication technologies such as Wi-Fi.

A privacy-preserving smart parking system using an IoT elliptic curve based security platform

Since the initial visions proposed in the SmartDust project fifteen years ago, Wireless Sensor Networks have seen a tremendous development, leading to the realization of the Internet of Things (IoT). Today, there is a large variety of hardware and software to choose from that is easy to set up and use. Even though there is an increasing number of real-world applications that employ large deployments of IoT devices, the wireless nature of communication in combination with the low-end capabilities of the devices raises security and privacy issues that have not been properly addressed. Considering also that sensor node brands are very different in their capabilities, providing a single solution is very challenging.In this paper we adopt Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) as an attractive alternative to conventional public key cryptography, such as RSA. ECC is an ideal candidate for implementation on constrained devices where the major computational resources, i.e., speed, memory are limited and low-power wireless communication protocols are employed. That is because it attains the same security levels with traditional cryptosystems using smaller parameter sizes. We provide a generic implementation of ECC that runs on different host operating systems, such as Contiki, TinyOS, iSenseOS, ScatterWeb and Arduino. Furthermore, it runs on smartphone platforms such as Android and iPhone and also any linux based systems (e.g., raspberryPi). Our implementation does not contain any platform-specific specializations, allowing a single implementation to run natively on heterogeneous networks.We look into the Smart Parking application domain and provide a solution that protects the privacy of the users by totally avoiding the exchange of confidential information. We also show how to protect a user’s privacy by adapting the tool of zero knowledge proofs (ZKP) with our ECC implementation. We study the performance of our system in an real-world outdoor IoT testbed and analyze the execution time and network overhead for each available hardware platform. Our code is available as open source software and can be used from developers who wish to achieve certain levels of security and privacy in their applications.