A Study of IEEE 802.15.4 Security Framework for Wireless Body Area Network

A Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a collection of low-power and lightweight wireless sensor nodes that are used to monitor the human body functions and the surrounding environment. It supports a number of innovative and interesting applications, including ubiquitous healthcare and Consumer Electronics (CE) applications. Since WBAN nodes are used to collect sensitive (life-critical) information and may operate in hostile environments, they require strict security mechanisms to prevent malicious interaction with the system. In this paper, we first highlight major security requirements and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks in WBAN at Physical, Medium Access Control (MAC), Network, and Transport layers. Then we discuss the IEEE 802.15.4 security framework and identify the security vulnerabilities and major attacks in the context of WBAN. Different types of attacks on the Contention Access Period (CAP) and Contention Free Period (CFP) parts of the superframe are analyzed and discussed. It is observed that a smart attacker can successfully corrupt an increasing number of GTS slots in the CFP period and can considerably affect the Quality of Service (QoS) in WBAN (since most of the data is carried in CFP period). As we increase the number of smart attackers the corrupted GTS slots are eventually increased, which prevents the legitimate nodes to utilize the bandwidth efficiently. This means that the direct adaptation of IEEE 802.15.4 security framework for WBAN is not totally secure for certain WBAN applications. New solutions are required to integrate high level security in WBAN.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, 2 table

IEEE 802.15.4: a Federating Communication Protocol for Time-Sensitive Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been attracting increasing interests for developing a new generation of embedded systems with great potential for many applications such as surveillance, environment monitoring, emergency medical response and home automation. However, the communication paradigms in WSNs differ from the ones attributed to traditional wireless networks, triggering the need for new communication protocols. In this context, the recently standardised IEEE 802.15.4 protocol presents some potentially interesting features for deployment in wireless sensor network applications, such as power-efficiency, timeliness guarantees and scalability. Nevertheless, when addressing WSN applications with (soft/hard) timing requirements some inherent paradoxes emerge, such as power-efficiency versus timeliness, triggering the need of engineering solutions for an efficient deployment of IEEE 802.15.4 in WSNs. In this technical report, we will explore the most relevant characteristics of the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol for wireless sensor networks and present the most important challenges regarding time-sensitive WSN applications. We also provide some timing performance and analysis of the IEEE 802.15.4 that unveil some directions for resolving the previously mentioned paradoxes

A Performance-to-Cost Analysis of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC With 802.15.4e MAC Modes

[EN] The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is one of the widely adopted networking specification for Internet of Things (IoT). It defines several physical layer (PHY) options and medium access control (MAC) sub-layer protocols for interconnection of constrained wireless devices. These devices are usually battery-powered and need to support requirements like low-power consumption and low-data rates. The standard has been revised twice to incorporate new PHY layers and improvements learned from implementations. Research in this direction has been primarily centered around improving the energy consumption of devices. Recently, to meet specific Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements of different industrial applications, the IEEE 802.15.4e amendment was released that focuses on improving reliability, robustness and latency. In this paper, we carry out a performance-to-cost analysis of Deterministic and Synchronous Multi-channel Extension (DSME) and Time-slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) MAC modes of IEEE 802.15.4e with 802.15.4 MAC protocol to analyze the trade-off of choosing a particular MAC mode over others. The parameters considered for performance are throughput and latency, and the cost is quantified in terms of energy. A Markov model has been developed for TSCH MAC mode to compare its energy costs with 802.15.4 MAC. Finally, we present the applicability of different MAC modes to different application scenarios.This work was supported in part by the SERB, DST, Government of India under Grant ECRA/2016/001651.Choudhury, N.; Matam, R.; Mukherjee, M.; Lloret, J. (2020). A Performance-to-Cost Analysis of IEEE 802.15.4 MAC With 802.15.4e MAC Modes. IEEE Access. 8:41936-41950. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2976654S4193641950

Smart guaranteed time-slot allocation algorithm for industrial wireless sensor networks emergency message transmission

This paper is a postprint of a paper submitted to and accepted for publication in IET Wireless Sensor Systems and is subject to Institution of Engineering and Technology Copyright. The copy of record is available at IET Digital LibraryThis paper presents investigation on application of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in wind power generation systems and highlights an important issue associated with the deadline for the delivery of messages among nodes based on the IEEE 802.15.4E standard. Owing to the limits of standard and the power system application requirements, this research proposes a smart guaranteed time slot (S-GTS) allocation algorithm which is based on the urgent/important matrix. This proposed algorithm promotes the utilisation of contention free period in a superframe. Besides, over seven GTSs can be allocated in a superframe, there are only seven GTSs that can be used in the standard. In addition, this study proves the value of BO and SO upper bound is 6 for the WSN application in power systems. Moreover, the network delay of S-GTS performs better than the 16-time-slot mechanism and i-GAME mechanism

Collision-free beacon scheduling mechanisms for IEEE 802.15.4/Zigbee cluster-tree wireless sensor networks

The recently standardized IEEE 802.15.4/Zigbee protocol stack offers great potentials for ubiquitous and pervasive computing, namely for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). However, there are still some open and ambiguous issues that turn its practical use a challenging task. One of those issues is how to build a synchronized multi-hop cluster-tree network, which is quite suitable for QoS support in WSNs. In fact, the current IEEE 802.15.4/Zigbee specifications restrict the synchronization in the beacon-enabled mode (by the generation of periodic beacon frames) to star-based networks, while it supports multi-hop networking using the peer-to-peer mesh topology, but with no synchronization. Even though both specifications mention the possible use of cluster-tree topologies, which combine multi-hop and synchronization features, the description on how to effectively construct such a network topology is missing. This paper tackles this problem, unveils the ambiguities regarding the use of the cluster-tree topology and proposes two collision-free beacon frame scheduling schemes. We strongly believe that the results provided in this paper trigger a significant step towards the practical and efficient use of IEEE 802.15.4/Zigbee cluster-tree networks

Simulating Real-Time Aspects of Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) technology has been mainly used in the applications with low-frequency sampling and little computational complexity. Recently, new classes of WSN-based applications with different characteristics are being considered, including process control, industrial automation and visual surveillance. Such new applications usually involve relatively heavy computations and also present real-time requirements as bounded end-to- end delay and guaranteed Quality of Service. It becomes then necessary to employ proper resource management policies, not only for communication resources but also jointly for computing resources, in the design and development of such WSN-based applications. In this context, simulation can play a critical role, together with analytical models, for validating a system design against the parameters of Quality of Service demanded for. In this paper, we present RTNS, a publicly available free simulation tool which includes Operating System aspects in wireless distributed applications. RTNS extends the well-known NS-2 simulator with models of the CPU, the Real-Time Operating System and the application tasks, to take into account delays due to the computation in addition to the communication. We demonstrate the benefits of RTNS by presenting our simulation study for a complex WSN-based multi-view vision system for real-time event detection

A novel scheme to improve lifetime and real-time support for IEEE 802.15.4 based wireless personal area networks

IEEE 802.15.4 defines the working of physical and media access layers of a Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Network (LR-WPAN). A LR-WPAN is a low cost, low power, and low data-rate network that offers reasonable lifetime and reliable data transfer within a limited range. However, it faces several challenges whilst dealing with applications that are having strict timeliness, energy, and bandwidth requirements. This paper proposes an efficient superframe structure for the MAC layer of IEEE 802.15.4 networks that intends to deal with these challenges by varying the functionalities of Guaranteed Time Slot (GTS) bits. Simulations of different GTS allocation techniques show that our enhanced scheme outperforms the original standard as well as previous techniques in terms of energy consumption, average delay, maximum GTS allocation and reliability

CSMA/CF Protocol for IEEE 802.15.4 WAPNS

[[abstract]]Different emerging IEEE 802.15.4 wireless personal area networks (WPANs) are one solution for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), where applications are restricted by low data rate, short transmission distance, and low power consumption. The frame transmission mechanism of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, which adopts the blind random backoff mechanism, was designed to minimize power consumption. However, it cannot provide satisfactory performance in a realistic hidden-node environment, because it may incur a hidden-node collision chain situation and unexpectedly limit the overall network capacity. For each successful data transmission, any inefficient transmission mechanism will incur prolonged access delay and will consume too much power. Moreover, the current design becomes inefficient as the number of devices significantly increases. As a solution, we propose a new multiple access protocol with improved efficiency at the sublayer between the media access control layer and the physical layer, i.e., a carrier sense multiple access with collision freeze (CSMA/CF) protocol, which comprises a collision resolving scheme and a P-frozen contention strategy. The CSMA/CF protocol can quickly alleviate aggravated collision situations in a hidden-node environment. Such a particular collision phenomenon is denoted as a collision chain problem (CCP). The impact from CCP is thoroughly discussed and analyzed. As confirmed by the results of analysis and performance evaluations, the proposed CSMA/CF protocol can achieve significant performance improvement in energy conservation, access delay reduction, and transmission reliability enhancement.[[notice]]補正完畢[[journaltype]]國

A Beacon and GTS Scheduling Scheme for IEEE 802.15.4 DSME Networks

[EN] The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is one of the widely adopted networking specification for realizing different applications of Internet of Things (IoT). It defines several physical layer options and medium access control (MAC) sublayer protocols for low-power devices supporting low-data rates. One such MAC protocol is the deterministic and synchronous multichannel extension (DSME), which addresses the limitation on the maximum number of guaranteed time slots (GTSs) in 802.15.4-2011 MAC, and provides channel diversity to increase network robustness. However, beacon scheduling in peer-to-peer networks suffers from beacon slot collisions when two or more coordinators simultaneously compete for the same vacant beacon slot. In addition, the standard does not explore DSME-GTS scheduling (DGS) across multiple channels. This article addresses the beacon slot collision problem by proposing a nonconflicting beacon scheduling mechanism using association order (AO). Furthermore, a distributed multichannel DSME-GTS schedule is proposed that optimally assigns DSME-GTSs across different channels. The objective is to minimize the number of times-lots used while maximizing the usage of available channels. Through simulations, the proposed mechanisms' performance is analyzed in terms of energy efficiency, transmission overhead, scheduling efficiency, throughput, and latency and is shown to outperform the other existing schemes.Choudhury, N.; Matam, R.; Mukherjee, M.; Lloret, J. (2022). A Beacon and GTS Scheduling Scheme for IEEE 802.15.4 DSME Networks. IEEE Internet of Things. 9(7):5162-5172. https://doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2021.3110866516251729