An Energy Aware and Secure MAC Protocol for Tackling Denial of Sleep Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks which form part of the core for the Internet of Things consist of resource constrained sensors that are usually powered by batteries. Therefore, careful energy awareness is essential when working with these devices. Indeed,the introduction of security techniques such as authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data, can place higher energy load on the sensors. However, the absence of security protection c ould give room for energy drain attacks such as denial of sleep attacks which have a higher negative impact on the life span ( of the sensors than the presence of security features. This thesis, therefore, focuses on tackling denial of sleep attacks from two perspectives A security perspective and an energy efficiency perspective. The security perspective involves evaluating and ranking a number of security based techniques to curbing denial of sleep attacks. The energy efficiency perspective, on the other hand, involves exploring duty cycling and simulating three Media Access Control ( protocols Sensor MAC, Timeout MAC andTunableMAC under different network sizes and measuring different parameters such as the Received Signal Strength RSSI) and Link Quality Indicator ( Transmit power, throughput and energy efficiency Duty cycling happens to be one of the major techniques for conserving energy in wireless sensor networks and this research aims to answer questions with regards to the effect of duty cycles on the energy efficiency as well as the throughput of three duty cycle protocols Sensor MAC ( Timeout MAC ( and TunableMAC in addition to creating a novel MAC protocol that is also more resilient to denial of sleep a ttacks than existing protocols. The main contributions to knowledge from this thesis are the developed framework used for evaluation of existing denial of sleep attack solutions and the algorithms which fuel the other contribution to knowledge a newly developed protocol tested on the Castalia Simulator on the OMNET++ platform. The new protocol has been compared with existing protocols and has been found to have significant improvement in energy efficiency and also better resilience to denial of sleep at tacks Part of this research has been published Two conference publications in IEEE Explore and one workshop paper

DFCV: A Novel Approach for Message Dissemination in Connected Vehicles using Dynamic Fog

Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) has emerged as a promising solution for enhancing road safety. Routing of messages in VANET is challenging due to packet delays arising from high mobility of vehicles, frequently changing topology, and high density of vehicles, leading to frequent route breakages and packet losses. Previous researchers have used either mobility in vehicular fog computing or cloud computing to solve the routing issue, but they suffer from large packet delays and frequent packet losses. We propose Dynamic Fog for Connected Vehicles (DFCV), a fog computing based scheme which dynamically creates, increments and destroys fog nodes depending on the communication needs. The novelty of DFCV lies in providing lower delays and guaranteed message delivery at high vehicular densities. Simulations were conducted using hybrid simulation consisting of ns-2, SUMO, and Cloudsim. Results show that DFCV ensures efficient resource utilization, lower packet delays and losses at high vehicle densities

Hybrid-Vehcloud: An Obstacle Shadowing Approach for VANETs in Urban Environment

Routing of messages in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) is challenging due to obstacle shadowing regions with high vehicle densities, which leads to frequent disconnection problems and blocks radio wave propagation between vehicles. Previous researchers used multi-hop, vehicular cloud or roadside infrastructures to solve the routing issue among the vehicles, but they suffer from significant packet delays and frequent packet losses arising from obstacle shadowing. We proposed a vehicular cloud based hybrid technique called Hybrid-Vehcloud to disseminate messages in obstacle shadowing regions, and multi-hop technique to disseminate messages in non-obstacle shadowing regions. The novelty of our approach lies in the fact that our proposed technique dynamically adapts between obstacle shadowing and non-obstacle shadowing regions. Simulation based performance analysis of Hybrid-Vehcloud showed improved performance over Cloud-assisted Message Downlink Dissemination Scheme (CMDS), Cross-Layer Broadcast Protocol (CLBP) and Cloud-VANET schemes at high vehicle densities

Fault Tolerant Adaptive Parallel and Distributed Simulation through Functional Replication

This paper presents FT-GAIA, a software-based fault-tolerant parallel and distributed simulation middleware. FT-GAIA has being designed to reliably handle Parallel And Distributed Simulation (PADS) models, which are needed to properly simulate and analyze complex systems arising in any kind of scientific or engineering field. PADS takes advantage of multiple execution units run in multicore processors, cluster of workstations or HPC systems. However, large computing systems, such as HPC systems that include hundreds of thousands of computing nodes, have to handle frequent failures of some components. To cope with this issue, FT-GAIA transparently replicates simulation entities and distributes them on multiple execution nodes. This allows the simulation to tolerate crash-failures of computing nodes. Moreover, FT-GAIA offers some protection against Byzantine failures, since interaction messages among the simulated entities are replicated as well, so that the receiving entity can identify and discard corrupted messages. Results from an analytical model and from an experimental evaluation show that FT-GAIA provides a high degree of fault tolerance, at the cost of a moderate increase in the computational load of the execution units.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1606.0731