A Comprehensive Survey of Potential Game Approaches to Wireless Networks

Potential games form a class of non-cooperative games where unilateral improvement dynamics are guaranteed to converge in many practical cases. The potential game approach has been applied to a wide range of wireless network problems, particularly to a variety of channel assignment problems. In this paper, the properties of potential games are introduced, and games in wireless networks that have been proven to be potential games are comprehensively discussed.Comment: 44 pages, 6 figures, to appear in IEICE Transactions on Communications, vol. E98-B, no. 9, Sept. 201

A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201

Lotus: Serverless In-Transit Data Processing for Edge-based Pub/Sub

Publish-subscribe systems are a popular approach for edge-based IoT use cases: Heterogeneous, constrained edge devices can be integrated easily, with message routing logic offloaded to edge message brokers. Message processing, however, is still done on constrained edge devices. Complex content-based filtering, the transformation between data representations, or message extraction place a considerable load on these systems, and resulting superfluous message transfers strain the network. In this paper, we propose Lotus, adding in-transit data processing to an edge publish-subscribe middleware in order to offload basic message processing from edge devices to brokers. Specifically, we leverage the Function-as-a-Service paradigm, which offers support for efficient multi-tenancy, scale-to-zero, and real-time processing. With a proof-of-concept prototype of Lotus, we validate its feasibility and demonstrate how it can be used to offload sensor data transformation to the publish-subscribe messaging middleware

AONT-LT: a Data Protection Scheme for Cloud and Cooperative Storage Systems

We propose a variant of the well-known AONT-RS scheme for dispersed storage systems. The novelty consists in replacing the Reed-Solomon code with rateless Luby transform codes. The resulting system, named AONT-LT, is able to improve the performance by dispersing the data over an arbitrarily large number of storage nodes while ensuring limited complexity. The proposed solution is particularly suitable in the case of cooperative storage systems. It is shown that while the AONT-RS scheme requires the adoption of fragmentation for achieving widespread distribution, thus penalizing the performance, the new AONT-LT scheme can exploit variable length codes which allow to achieve very good performance and scalability.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, to be presented at the 2014 High Performance Computing & Simulation Conference (HPCS 2014) - Workshop on Security, Privacy and Performance in Cloud Computin

Keep it fresh: Reducing the age of information in V2X networks

The freshness of information is of the utmost importance in many contexts, including V2X networks and applications. One measure of this metric is the Age of Information (AoI), a notion recently introduced and explored by several authors, often with specific reference to vehicular networks. With this work, we explore the possibility of reducing the AoI of multi-hop information flooding in V2X networks exploiting the properties of the Eigenvector Centrality (EvC) of nodes in the topology, and the possibility that each node computes it exploiting only local information and very easy computations, so that each node can autonomously adapt its own networking parameters to redistribute information more efficiently. Starting from theoretical bounds and results, we explore how they hold in urban-constrained topologies and compare the AoI achieved exploiting EvC with the AoI achievable without this optimization of the nodes' behavior. Simulation results show a meaningful improvement without using additional resources and without the need of any global coordination

Performance Improvement of Secret Key Generation Scheme in Wireless Indoor Environment

The Secret Key Generation (SKG) scheme that exploits the reciprocity and uniqueness of wireless channel between two users plays a significant part in a new increasing distributed security system. The scheme performance can be distinguished based on the low value of Key disagreement Rate (KDR), the high value of Key Generation Rate (KGR), as well as the fulfillment of the NIST randomness standard. The previous SKG scheme has a high KDR due to a direct quantization of a measurement result of the Received Signal Strength (RSS). To overcome the above issue, we conduct a pre-processing of measurement result before quantization with the Kalman method. The pre-process is carried out to improve the channel reciprocity between two legitimate users with the objective to reduce the bit mismatch. Through an experiment, we propose a new quantization scheme called a Modified Multi-Bit (MMB) that uses a multi-bit system on every level of quantization. The test results show that the proposed combination of preprocessing and the MMB scheme has a better performance compared to the existing schemes in terms of KDR and KGR. The Secret Key generated by our scheme also fulfills the NIST randomness standard

Asymptotic Laws for Joint Content Replication and Delivery in Wireless Networks

We investigate on the scalability of multihop wireless communications, a major concern in networking, for the case that users access content replicated across the nodes. In contrast to the standard paradigm of randomly selected communicating pairs, content replication is efficient for certain regimes of file popularity, cache and network size. Our study begins with the detailed joint content replication and delivery problem on a 2D square grid, a hard combinatorial optimization. This is reduced to a simpler problem based on replication density, whose performance is of the same order as the original. Assuming a Zipf popularity law, and letting the size of content and network both go to infinity, we identify the scaling laws and regimes of the required link capacity, ranging from O(\sqrt{N}) down to O(1)

WiSHFUL : enabling coordination solutions for managing heterogeneous wireless networks

The paradigm shift toward the Internet of Things results in an increasing number of wireless applications being deployed. Since many of these applications contend for the same physical medium (i.e., the unlicensed ISM bands), there is a clear need for beyond-state-of-the-art solutions that coordinate medium access across heterogeneous wireless networks. Such solutions demand fine-grained control of each device and technology, which currently requires a substantial amount of effort given that the control APIs are different on each hardware platform, technology, and operating system. In this article an open architecture is proposed that overcomes this hurdle by providing unified programming interfaces (UPIs) for monitoring and controlling heterogeneous devices and wireless networks. The UPIs enable creation and testing of advanced coordination solutions while minimizing the complexity and implementation overhead. The availability of such interfaces is also crucial for the realization of emerging software-defined networking approaches for heterogeneous wireless networks. To illustrate the use of UPIs, a showcase is presented that simultaneously changes the MAC behavior of multiple wireless technologies in order to mitigate cross-technology interference taking advantage of the enhanced monitoring and control functionality. An open source implementation of the UPIs is available for wireless researchers and developers. It currently supports multiple widely used technologies (IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15.4, LTE), operating systems (Linux, Windows, Contiki), and radio platforms (Atheros, Broadcom, CC2520, Xylink Zynq,), as well as advanced reconfigurable radio systems (IRIS, GNURadio, WMP, TAISC)