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

Partition-Based GTS Adjustment for Wireless Sensor Networks

The personal area network (PAN) coordinator can assign a guaranteed time slot (GTS) to allocate a particular duration for requested devices in IEEE 802.15.4 beacon-enabled mode. The main challenge in the GTS mechanism is how to let the PAN coordinator allocate time slot duration for the devices which request a GTS. If the allocated devices use the GTS partially or the traffic pattern is not suitable, wasted bandwidth will increase, which degrades the performance of the network. In order to overcome the abovementioned problem, this paper proposes the Partitioned GTS Allocation Scheme (PEGAS) for IEEE 802.15.4 networks. PEGAS aims to decide the precise moment for the starting time, the end, and the length of the GTS allocation for requested devices taking into account the values of the superframe order, superframe duration, data packet length, and arrival data packet rate. Our simulation results showed that the proposed mechanism outperforms the IEEE 802.15.4 standard in terms of the total number of transmitted packets, throughput, energy efficiency, latency, bandwidth utilization, and contention access period (CAP) length ratio

DynaMO—Dynamic Multisuperframe Tuning for Adaptive IEEE 802.15.4e DSME Networks

Recent advancements in the IoT domain have been pushing for stronger demands of Qualityof-Service (QoS) and in particular for improved determinism for time-critical wireless communications under power constraints. The IEEE 802.15.4e standard protocol introduced several new MAC behaviors that provide enhanced time-critical and reliable communications. The Deterministic Synchronous Multichannel Extension (DSME) is one of its prominent MAC behaviors that combines contention-based and contentionfree communication, guaranteeing bounded delays and improved reliability and scalability by leveraging multi-channel access and CAP reduction. However, DSME has a multi-superframe structure, which is statically defined at the beginning of the network. As the network evolves dynamically by changing its traffic characteristics, these static settings can affect the overall throughput and increase the network delay because of improper allocation of bandwidth. In this paper, we address this problem, and we present a dynamic multi-superframe tuning technique that dynamically adapts the multi-superframe structure based on the size of the network. This technique improves the QoS by providing 15-30% increase in throughput and 15-35% decrease in delay when compared to static DSME networksinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A Survey of Low Duty Cycle MAC Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

22 page(s

A novel superframe structure and optimal time slot allocation algorithm for IEEE 802.15.4–based Internet of things

IEEE 802.15.4 standard is specifically designed for a low-rate and low-processing Internet of things (IoT) applications and offers guaranteed time slots. A beacon-enabled IEEE 802.15.4 consists of a superframe structure that comprises of the contention access period and contention-free period. During contention-free period, nodes transfer their data using guaranteed time slots without any collision. The coordinator node receives data transmission requests in one cycle and allocates guaranteed time slots to the nodes in the next cycle. This allocation process may cause large delay that may not be acceptable for few applications. In this work, a novel superframe structure is proposed that significantly reduces guaranteed time slots allocation delay for the nodes with data requests. The proposed superframe structure comprises of two contention access periods and one contention-free period, where contention-free period precedes both contention access periods with reduced slot size. In addition, the knapsack algorithm is modified for better guaranteed time slots allocation by allowing more guaranteed time slots requesting nodes to send their data as compared to the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The simulation and analytical results show that the proposed superframe structure reduces the network delay by up to 80%, increases contention-free period utilization up to 50%, and allocates guaranteed time slots up to 16 nodes in a single superframe duration. © The Author(s) 2020.1