Solution For Sensor Networks Research Articles

A study of vulnerabilities of wireless sensor network

The low computing power of sensors and especially their limited energy are obstacles to the deployment of advanced techniques, and many of the researchers are still searching for better solutions, which can accommodate security, would meld lifetime and a good latency of sensors. We have to remember that they are not the only secure solution in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The level of security and the vulnerability of a wireless sensors network depend on the application that we have to deploy. We suggest a few techniques in this paper. In future work, we may research to prolong the lifetime of the battery in the WSN by applying a solar mate in order to provide backup to the energy of power supply when it comes to drain.

Energy‐efficient multi‐level and distance‐aware clustering mechanism for WSNs

SummaryMost sensor networks are deployed at hostile environments to sense and gather specific information. As sensor nodes have battery constraints, therefore, the research community is trying to propose energy‐efficient solutions for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to prolong the lifetime of the network. In this paper, we propose an energy‐efficient multi‐level and distance‐aware clustering (EEMDC) mechanism for WSNs. In this mechanism, the area of the network is divided into three logical layers, which depends upon the hop‐count‐based distance from the base station. The simulation outcomes show that EEMDC is more energy efficient than other existing conventional approaches. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Advances in ambient intelligence technologies

This special issue contains selected papers from the 3rd International Conference on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies (ANT 2012), which was held at Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, August 27–29, 2012. The conference attracted a large number of scientific papers that contributed to the state-of-the-art in the areas of pervasive and ambient information systems. All the papers selected for this special issue have undergone two rounds of rigorous review process. Based on the reviewers’ feedback, seven papers were selected for publication from eight best papers invited from ANT 2012. The accepted papers cover interesting works on new developments in ambient intelligence such as adaptable intelligence systems, smart environments, body area networks, and network security. The first paper by Zhang, Khedri, and Jaskolka, ‘‘An Aspect-Oriented Language for Feature Modeling’’, proposes a new language called AO-PFA for developing ambient systems. Built on top of Product Family Algebra (PFA) and by using the aspect-oriented technology, AOPFA offers capabilities in dealing with unpredictable changes in ambient applications. The paper by Hoelzl, Kurz, and Ferscha, ‘‘Goal Oriented Recognition of Composed Activities for Reliable and Adaptable Intelligence Systems’’, focuses on activity and context recognition, an important research topic for adaptable ambient intelligence systems. The paper proposes a goal oriented approach to dynamically create and instantiate models to recognize high level composed activities in an opportunistic way. The paper by Li, He, and Arora, ‘‘ThermoNet: FineGrain Assessment of Building Comfort and Efficiency’’, describes ThermoNet, a hybrid wireless sensor network solution for monitoring and optimizing energy consumption of the Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning systems in large buildings. The paper reports some interesting findings based on the data collected from a realworld environment. The paper by Menon, Jayaraman, and Govindaraju, ‘‘Probabilistic Spatio-Temporal Retrieval in Smart Spaces’’, deals with uncertainties of object tracking in smart spaces. The paper proposes a data model that supports computation of probabilities of spatio-temporal queries giving the uncertainty of the location of an occupant. The paper by Knapen et al., ‘‘Exploiting GraphTheoretic Tools for Matching in Carpooling Applications’’, studies carpooling for commuting and proposes a Global CarPooling Matching Service (GCPMS) that provides advice on how to combine commuting trips by carpooling. In order to evaluate the matching performance of the GCPMS, a multi-agent system is also developed and some initial experimental results are reported. The paper by Khan et al. ‘‘A New Patient Monitoring Framework and Energy-Aware Peering Routing Protocol (EPR) for Body Area Network Communication’’, proposes a new architecture of Body Area Networks for indoor hospital environments. The paper presents an EPR for reducing the traffic load and energy consumption while increasing the number of packets successfully delivered to the destinations. The final paper by Beitollahi and Deconinck, ‘‘ConnectionScore: A Statistical Technique to Resist Application-Layer DDoS Attacks’’, describes a Q. Z. Sheng J. Ma School of Computer Science, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia e-mail: qsheng@cs.adelaide.edu.au

ThermoNet: fine-grain assessment of building comfort and efficiency

Understanding the performance of the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system in large buildings is a prerequisite for optimizing their energy efficiency. Fine grain performance analysis has not, to our knowledge, received adequate attention thus far. To address this issue we evaluate the thermal comfort and the energy efficiency of a relatively modern HVAC system in a large building based on building-wide high-fidelity environmental data collected via a wireless sensor network over 12 months. Access to fine grain information reveals temporal and spatial dynamics that help quantify the level of (non-)compliance with the system’s control objective and the building’s thermal comfort standards: we find over-conditioning at multiple time scales which offers opportunities for reduced operating cost, and identify building anomalies and ill-conditioned rooms that need maintenance. The paper moreover describes ThermoNet, our hybrid wireless sensor network solution for monitoring a legacy building, which uses duty cycling and adaptive power control to achieve high data yield with low power consumption.

Design and Research of Low-Energy Consumption Sensor Nodes in a Smart-Scene System

This paper introduces an application of wireless sensor network based on the ZigBee -- the Smart-Scene system. In-depth analysis of factors of invalid power consumption, a functional separated sink node is designed and a DPM (Dynamic Power Management) schema of dynamic node based on event-driven is proposed. The schema is used in Smart-Scene system and the experimental results indicate it is high feasibility and reduce energy consumption. This method will become an effective solution for wireless sensor network.

Characterizing the communication in the Amazon rainforest: towards a realistic simulation

Abstract Many literature papers evaluate solutions in wireless sensor networks by simulation experiments. However, little attention is given to the adequacy of the simulator propagation models to the environment in which such solutions are employed. This can lead to imprecise or inconsistent results in relation to the real world. This paper presents a methodology for adjusting the parameters of these models. In particular, we present experimental results for rainforest environments, which can be the goal of many sensor networks monitoring applications. The impact of the proposed approach is shown by evaluating a localization solution. The results show that this procedure is necessary for a higher fidelity of simulation experiments.

Wireless Networking Credibility, Device Interoperability and Other Important Issues to Take into Consideration for the Deployment of a Homecare Service Provision Model

The proposed article aims to provide a discussion on the issue of the utilization of wireless technologies, for the deployment of monitoring wireless personal area sensor networks for the unobtrusive monitoring of patients, aiming to answer some of the fundamental questions raised by this, including which is the most appropriate technology for such a networking architecture, what is the best topology for home monitoring wireless sensor network solutions, and what is the performance of the wireless networking technologies. In addition, it aims to initiate some brainstorming as regards how many interoperability protocols are actually need, presenting the strong and weak points of most of the current interoperability standards utilized in the field of homecare, with emphasis on the encoding and formatting of ECG waveforms. Last but not least it aims to pinpoint other important issues in the field of homecare, such as legal and safety issues which are worth of consideration.

On reactive routing protocols in ZigBee wireless sensor networks

AbstractZigBee is the primary standard solution for wireless sensor networks, implementing the Ad hoc On‐Demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocol in the network layer and supported by the standard IEEE 802.15.4. This study is focused on mesh topologies and the critical problems encountered when AODV is executed in conjunction with the Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance protocol. These problems are mainly related to the packet overhead required to carry out route creation. To perform preliminary experiments to be able to implement AODV in a real network, a new metric is proposed herein. This metric uses fuzzy logic to help in the decision‐making process. The objective of the fuzzy routine is to determine, during the route‐discovery process, the best node to forward request/reply packets, with the aim of reducing packet overhead and energy consumption. Moreover, minor changes are also added to the discovery procedure of AODV to improve the performance of the route‐creation process. This intelligent version of AODV has provided promising experimental results, greatly reducing the number of packets required, with the consequent energy saving while selecting the best nodes to be part of the routes.

Secure ad hoc trust initialization and key management in wireless body area networks

The body area network (BAN) is a key enabling technology in e-healthcare. An important security issue is to establish initial trust relationships among the BAN devices before they are actually deployed and generate necessary shared secret keys to protect the subsequent wireless communications. Due to the ad hoc nature of the BAN and the extreme resource constraints of sensor devices, providing secure as well as efficient and user-friendly trust initialization is a challenging task. Traditional solutions for wireless sensor networks mostly depend on key predistribution, which is unsuitable for a BAN in many ways. In this article, we propose group device pairing (GDP), a user-aided multi-party authenticated key agreement protocol. Through GDP, a group of sensor devices that have no pre-shared secrets establish initial trust by generating various shared secret keys out of an unauthenticated channel. Devices authenticate themselves to each other with the aid of a human user who performs visual verifications. The GDP supports fast batch deployment, addition and revocation of sensor devices, does not rely on any additional hardware device, and is mostly based on symmetric key cryptography. We formally prove the security of the proposed protocols, and we implement GDP on a sensor network testbed and report performance evaluation results.

Scalable Distributed Address Assignment for Low Rate Wireless Personal Area Network

IEEE 802.15.4 protocol provides a low data rate and low energy consumption solution for wireless sensor networks which are the basis of the Internet of Things. However, the variable topology of wireless networks requires high flexibility and robustness to be achieved by network configuration mechanisms. In this paper, a Scalable Distributed Address Assignment Mechanism (SDAAM) is designed, which adopts adaptive approach to handle the variability present in the topology of wireless networks. In the proposed approach, every newly arrived node can be correctly configured regardless of the current network topology so that it can communicate with other nodes within the same network. Another important advantage of SDAAM is its handling of unexpected events which may arise due to migration or departure of nodes in the network. Detailed description about SDAAM is presented and its effectiveness and high flexibility is demonstrated based on the simulation program.

TI CC2530 상의 Z-Stack 이식 및 UART 구현

Wireless sensor networks consist of resource constraint devices which typically send data measured by sensors attached to the end devices towards a coordinator. One of the best solution for wireless sensor networks is ZigBee, where it is wireless standard introduced for low power, low cost wireless communication with moderate data rates. In this paper, we present porting of Z-Stack and implementation of UART on the TI CC2530. We show that our implemented board works correctly in terms of transmitting and receiving data via serial port.

Secure Authentication Framework in Wireless Sensor Networks

nodes in the wireless sensor networks collect data from their environment. Sometimes these data are valuable for the networks and also confidential. So it is important to prevent unauthorized access of those data. The preventive measure can be done through the authentication. In this paper, we propose an authentication framework that authenticates both the users of the network and sensor nodes based on the Identity-Based Signature (IBS) scheme. IBS uses the ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography) based digital signature algorithm (DSA) to sign a message and verify the signature on a message for a wireless sensor networks. This authentication framework register a new user and sensor node, authenticate a user and sensor node, and finally establishes a session key between sensor nodes and between sensor node and the user depends on the authenticating parties. Node and user revocation is handled in this authentication framework. Finally we made a comparison with other existing security solutions in wireless sensor networks and able to make a conclusion that the protocol provides confidentiality and integrity of the data; and also achieves better computational, communicational performance and energy efficiency due to the use of more efficient IBS algorithms based on ECC than those based on RSA.

Toward ubiquitous mobility solutions for body sensor networks on healthcare

The use of electronic health (eHealth) technologies in healthcare improves the quality of health services furnished to patients. The application of these technologies helps physicians and other health professionals to pursue early detection of abnormal status on patients' health. Body sensor networks are a type of wireless sensor networks aimed to be deployed on persons in order to collect physiological parameters for healthcare monitoring purposes. These BSNs are composed by several small sensors placed along patient's body, and capable to send (wirelessly) the collected health parameters to remote providers. BSNs need to operate every time and everywhere to transmit these important parameters to healthcare providers or automatic system to detect any anomaly in the patient health status. To provide this continuous monitoring of patients, it is mandatory to provide mobility support for the BSN so it can always be connected to some gateway to the Internet and therefore to back-end health providers. Several mechanisms with mobility support for mobile devices have been provided. However, the mobility support of a whole BSN has not been fully addressed. This article overviews available handover mechanisms used for wireless sensors mobility and proposes a new ubiquitous mobility approach for BSNs in healthcare. A case study with this new handover mechanism developed for a hospital infirmary is presented and highlights the gain of performances of the proposed solution.

Deploying mobile nodes for maximal energy matching in WSNs

AbstractThis paper proposes a self‐stabilizing distributed algorithm for deploying mobile nodes with loaded energy to the stationary nodes by considering the energy those stationary nodes need. The goal is to deploy mobile nodes to appropriate locations for energy supplements such that the network lifetime can be extended. The problem of maximizing the lifetime is NP‐hard. Therefore, it is unrealistic to search for an optimal solution in sensor networks. In this paper, we design several simple rules for mobile nodes and stationary nodes separately in order to find a feasible solution. Simple rules are especially suitable and necessary for low computability sensor networks. Our algorithm is simple and distributed. We prove that our method is stable and has good performance. Simulations show its efficiency too. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Dynamic Clustering with Relay Nodes (DCRN): A Clustering Technique to Maximize Stability in Wireless Sensor Networks with Relay Nodes

With the growing popularity of wireless sensor networks, network stability has become a key area of current research. Different applications of wireless sensor networks demand stable sensing, coverage, and connectivity throughout their operational periods. In some cases, the death of just a single sensor node might disrupt the stability of the entire network. Therefore, a number of techniques have been proposed to improve the network stability. Clustering is one of the most commonly used techniques in this regard. Most clustering techniques assume the presence of high power sensor nodes called relay nodes and implicitly assume that these relay nodes serve as cluster heads in the network. This assumption may lead to faulty network behavior when any of the relay nodes becomes unavailable to its followers. Moreover, relay node based clustering techniques do not address the heterogeneity of sensor nodes in terms of their residual energies, which frequently occur during the operation of a network. To address these two issues, we present a novel clustering technique, Dynamic Clustering with Relay Nodes (DCRN), by considering the heterogeneity in residual battery capacity and by removing the assumption that relay nodes always serve as cluster-heads. We use an essence of the underlying mechanism of LEACH (Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy), which is one of the most popular clustering solutions for wireless sensor networks. In our work, we present four heuristics to increase network stability periods in terms of the time elapsed before the death of the first node in the network. Based on the proposed heuristics, we devise an algorithm for DCRN and formulate a mathematical model for its long-term rate of energy consumption. Further, we calculate the optimal percentage of relay nodes from our mathematical model. Finally, we verify the efficiency of DCRN and correctness of the mathematical model by exhaustive simulation results. Our simulation results reveal that DCRN enhances the network stability period by a significant margin in comparison to LEACH and its best-known variant.

Jamming in underwater sensor networks: detection and mitigation

Underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) can be deployed for sensing the environment in oceanographic columns and other water bodies in which they are deployed. The peculiar characteristic of the underwater medium, coupled with the queer nature of the sound waves in water, poses an enigmatic problem for UWSN researchers. In this study, the authors focus on the problem of UWSN jamming, which is a popular type of denial-of-service attack. The existing jamming detection solutions for sensor networks are primarily targeted towards the terrestrial ones. In this work, the authors study the unique characteristics of jamming in UWSN, and propose a protocol, known as underwater jamming detection protocol (UWJDP), to detect and mitigate jamming in underwater environments. The results show that if the packet delivery ratio (PDR) is less than or equal to 0.8, the authors have the maximum probability of detecting jamming. The jamming detection ratio is around 2–11% more for the said PDR.

Analysis of location privacy solutions in wireless sensor networks

Extensive work has been done on the protection of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) from the hardware to the application layer. However, only recently, the privacy preservation problem has drawn the attention of the research community because of its challenging nature. This problem is exacerbated in the domain of WSNs owing to the extreme resource limitation of sensor nodes. In this study the authors focus on the location privacy problem in WSNs, which allows an adversary to determine the location of nodes of interest to him. The authors provide a taxonomy of solutions based on the power of the adversary and the main techniques proposed by the various solutions. In addition, the authors describe and analyse the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches. Finally, they discuss some open challenges and future directions of research.

IRIS: Integrated data gathering and interest dissemination system for wireless sensor networks

This paper presents IRIS, an integrated interest dissemination and convergecasting solution for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The interest dissemination protocol is used to build and maintain the network topology and for task/instruction assignment, while convergecasting implements data gathering at the network sink. Convergecasting heavily exploits cross-layering in that MAC and routing operation are performed jointly and relay selection is based on flexible cost functions that take into account information from different layers. The definition of the IRIS cost function enables tradeoff between key end-to-end performance metrics. In addition, it provides mechanisms for supporting efficient network behavior such as in-network data aggregation or processing. Energy usage is minimized by exploiting density estimation, sleeping modes and duty cycle control in a distributed and autonomous manner and as a function of the traffic intensity. Finally, IRIS is self adaptive, highly localized and imposes limited control overhead. IRIS performance is evaluated through ns2 simulations as well as through experiments on a WSN testbed. Comparative performance results show that IRIS outperforms previous cross-layer solutions. The flexibility introduced by the IRIS cross-layer approach results in higher robustness than that of well-known approaches such as BoX-MAC and CTP.

Performance Analysis of IEEE 802.15.4/Zigbee Standard Under Real Time Constraints

In recent years, very interesting researches are concentrated to develop several protocols for Wireless sensor networks (WSN) and to explore WSN in various scenarios. The standardization of the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol as a flexible communication solution for low-rate wireless sensor networks leads to the widespread deployment of this technology in many potential applications with different requirements especially in industrial automation. The IEEE 802.15.4 specifies physical and media access control layers that could be optimized to ensure low-power consumption and to guarantee real-time constraints by using its guaranteed time slot (GTS) mechanism and enabling Beacon mode. Our focus in this paper is on real-time capabilities and reliability. We analyzed and compared the performance of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard using OMNET++ Simulator. Among the objectives of our study is to outline which degree the standard accomplish real time requirements. Different application scenarios were been evaluated. The analysis gives a full understanding of the behavior of the IEEE 802.15.4 access mechanism concerning data delivery delay, goodput, throughput and packet errors rate metrics. We have focused on single sink scenarios and we have analyzed some network performance according to nodes number. Our simulation results pave the way for an efficient dimensioning and deploying of an IEEE 802.15.4 cluster.

Cross-layer based security solutions for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) were often used to collect sensitive data and the entire network was particularly vulnerable to various threats at different layers of the protocol stack. With this in mind, there was need to improve security solutions that were inevitable and advantageous to the successful deployment of the wireless sensor networks. The vast research conducted to provide security solutions against various attacks in the WSNs so far was based on the layered approach. In this study, we emphasized that the layered approaches have noticeable shortcomings such as the redundancy and/or inflexibility of the security solutions, which made the layers security solutions often inefficient and inadequate. It was, however, beneficial to construct the security approach for the WSNs based on cross-layer interaction between all components in different layers of the protocol stack. Consequently, these new approaches surely gave a new direction towards the issue of security for wireless sensor networks. The outline of the existing cross layer security schemes in literature was presented, while some new novel security solutions were proposed. More so, the synopsis of the proposed cross-layer based comprehensive security framework (CLBCSF) as the framework model for hierarchical clustering wireless sensor networks was also presented. Nonetheless, the open problems in this area were debated too. Key words: Immunity cross-layer solutions, wireless sensor networks, layered approach, security, energy efficiency, key management, security framework model, intrusion detection.