2,206 research outputs found
Timeliness: A New Design Metric and a New Attack Surface
As the landscape of time-sensitive applications gains prominence in 5G/6G
communications, timeliness of information updates at network nodes has become
crucial, which is popularly quantified in the literature by the age of
information metric. However, as we devise policies to improve age of
information of our systems, we inadvertently introduce a new vulnerability for
adversaries to exploit. In this article, we comprehensively discuss the diverse
threats that age-based systems are vulnerable to. We begin with discussion on
densely interconnected networks that employ gossiping between nodes to expedite
dissemination of dynamic information in the network, and show how the age-based
nature of gossiping renders these networks uniquely susceptible to threats such
as timestomping attacks, jamming attacks, and the propagation of
misinformation. Later, we survey adversarial works within simpler network
settings, specifically in one-hop and two-hop configurations, and delve into
adversarial robustness concerning challenges posed by jamming, timestomping,
and issues related to privacy leakage. We conclude this article with future
directions that aim to address challenges posed by more intelligent adversaries
and robustness of networks to them
Markov Decision Processes with Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of autonomous and resource-limited
devices. The devices cooperate to monitor one or more physical phenomena within
an area of interest. WSNs operate as stochastic systems because of randomness
in the monitored environments. For long service time and low maintenance cost,
WSNs require adaptive and robust methods to address data exchange, topology
formulation, resource and power optimization, sensing coverage and object
detection, and security challenges. In these problems, sensor nodes are to make
optimized decisions from a set of accessible strategies to achieve design
goals. This survey reviews numerous applications of the Markov decision process
(MDP) framework, a powerful decision-making tool to develop adaptive algorithms
and protocols for WSNs. Furthermore, various solution methods are discussed and
compared to serve as a guide for using MDPs in WSNs
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