An objective based classification of aggregation techniques for wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks have gained immense popularity in recent years due to their ever increasing capabilities and wide range of critical applications. A huge body of research efforts has been dedicated to find ways to utilize limited resources of these sensor nodes in an efficient manner. One of the common ways to minimize energy consumption has been aggregation of input data. We note that every aggregation technique has an improvement objective to achieve with respect to the output it produces. Each technique is designed to achieve some target e.g. reduce data size, minimize transmission energy, enhance accuracy etc. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of aggregation techniques that can be used in distributed manner to improve lifetime and energy conservation of wireless sensor networks. Main contribution of this work is proposal of a novel classification of such techniques based on the type of improvement they offer when applied to WSNs. Due to the existence of a myriad of definitions of aggregation, we first review the meaning of term aggregation that can be applied to WSN. The concept is then associated with the proposed classes. Each class of techniques is divided into a number of subclasses and a brief literature review of related work in WSN for each of these is also presented

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

Fuzzy TOPSIS-based Secure Neighbor Discovery Mechanism for Improving Reliable Data Dissemination in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) being an indispensable entity of the Internet of Things (IoT) are found to be more and more widely utilized for the rapid advent of IoT environment. The reliability of data dissemination in the IoT environment completely depends on the secure neighbor discovery mechanism that are utilized for effective and efficient communication among the sensor nodes. Secure neighbor discovery mechanisms that significantly determine trustworthy sensor nodes are essential for maintaining potential connectivity and sustaining reliable data delivery in the energy-constrained self organizing WSN. In this paper, Fuzzy Technique of Order Preference Similarity to the Ideal Solution (TOPSIS)-based Secure Neighbor Discovery Mechanism (FTOPSIS-SNDM) is proposed for estimating the trust of each sensor node in the established routing path for the objective of enhancing reliable data delivery in WSNs. This proposed FTOPSIS-SNDM is proposed as an attempt to integrate the merits of Fuzzy Set Theory (FST) and TOPSIS-based Multi-criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approach, since the discovery of secure neighbors involves the exchange of imprecise data and uncertain behavior of sensor nodes. This secure neighbor is also influenced by the factors of packet forwarding potential, delay, distance from the Base Station (BS) and residual energy, which in turn depends on multiple constraints that could be possibly included into the process of secure neighbor discovery. The simulation investigations of the proposed FTOPSIS-SNDM confirmed its predominance over the benchmarked approaches in terms of throughput, energy consumption, network latency, communication overhead for varying number of genuine and malicious neighboring sensor nodes in network

A two‐step authentication framework for Mobile ad hoc networks

The lack of fixed infrastructure in ad hoc networks causes nodes to rely more heavily on peer nodes for communication. Nevertheless, establishing trust in such a distributed environment is very difficult, since it is not straightforward for a node to determine if its peer nodes can be trusted. An additional concern in such an environment is with whether a peer node is merely relaying a message or if it is the originator of the message. In this paper, we propose an authentication approach for protecting nodes in mobile ad hoc networks. The security requirements for protecting data link and network layers are identified and the design criteria for creating secure ad hoc networks using several authentication protocols are analyzed. Protocols based on zero knowledge and challenge response techniques are presented and their performance is evaluated through analysis and simulation

An enhanced Multipath Strategy in Mobile Ad hoc Routing Protocols

The various routing protocols in Mobile Ad hoc Networks follow different strategies to send the information from one node to another. The nodes in the network are non static and they move randomly and are prone to link failure which makes always to find new routes to the destination. This research mainly focused on the study of the characteristics of multipath routing protocols in MANETS. Two of the multipath routing protocols were investigated and a comparative study along with simulation using NS2 was done between DSR and AODV to propose an enhanced approach to reach the destination maintaining the QoS. A possible optimization to the DSR and AODV routing protocols was proposed to make no node to be overburdened by distributing the load after finding the alternate multipath routes which were discovered in the Route discovery process. The simulation shows that the differences in the protocol highlighted major differences with the protocol performance. These differences have been analyzed with various network size, mobility, and network load. A new search table named Search of Next Node Enquiry Table (SONNET) was proposed to find the best neighbor node. Using SONNET the node selects the neighbor which can be reached in less number of hops and with less time delay and maintaining the QoS