FEHCA: A Fault-Tolerant Energy-Efficient Hierarchical Clustering Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Technological advancements have led to increased confidence in the design of large-scale wireless networks that comprise small energy constraint devices. Despite the boost in technological advancements, energy dissipation and fault tolerance are amongst the key deciding factors while designing and deploying wireless sensor networks. This paper proposes a Fault-tolerant Energy-efficient Hierarchical Clustering Algorithm (FEHCA) for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which demonstrates energy-efficient clustering and fault-tolerant operation of cluster heads (CHs). It treats CHs as no special node but equally prone to faults as normal sensing nodes of the cluster. The proposed scheme addresses some of the limitations of prominent hierarchical clustering algorithms, such as the randomized election of the cluster heads after each round, which results in significant energy dissipation; non-consideration of the residual energy of the sensing nodes while selecting cluster heads, etc. It utilizes the capability of vector quantization to partition the deployed sensors into an optimal number of clusters and ensures that almost the entire area to be monitored is alive for most of the network’s lifetime. This supports better decision-making compared to decisions made on the basis of limited area sensing data after a few rounds of communication. The scheme is implemented for both friendly as well as hostile deployments. The simulation results are encouraging and validate the proposed algorithm.articl

Towards Secure Fog Computing: A Survey on Trust Management, Privacy, Authentication, Threats and Access Control

Fog computing is an emerging computing paradigm that has come into consideration for the deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) applications amongst researchers and technology industries over the last few years. Fog is highly distributed and consists of a wide number of autonomous end devices, which contribute to the processing. However, the variety of devices offered across different users are not audited. Hence, the security of Fog devices is a major concern that should come into consideration. Therefore, to provide the necessary security for Fog devices, there is a need to understand what the security concerns are with regards to Fog. All aspects of Fog security, which have not been covered by other literature works, need to be identified and aggregated. On the other hand, privacy preservation for user’s data in Fog devices and application data processed in Fog devices is another concern. To provide the appropriate level of trust and privacy, there is a need to focus on authentication, threats and access control mechanisms as well as privacy protection techniques in Fog computing. In this paper, a survey along with a taxonomy is proposed, which presents an overview of existing security concerns in the context of the Fog computing paradigm. Moreover, the Blockchain-based solutions towards a secure Fog computing environment is presented and various research challenges and directions for future research are discussed

An Energy-efficient Handover Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

The recent advancements in the communication area have enabled the Internet of Things, a paradigm which extends the Internet to everyday objects. The Internet of Things enables many new applications, but also comes with great challenges; effective communication under limited power supply being the perhaps most important one. This thesis presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of an energy-efficient handover algorithm for the main building block in the creation of the Internet of Things: wireless sensor networks. Our low-power handover design is based on a careful breakdown and analysis of the potential power consumption of different components of the handover process. With the scanning part of the process being identified as the main drain of energy, the algorithm is designed to place the majority of the scanning responsibility on the mains powered access points, rather than on the low-power mobile nodes. The proposed algorithm has been implemented and its functionality and low power consumption have been empirically evaluated. We show that the design can reduce the energy consumption by several orders of magnitude compared to existing handover algorithms for wireless sensor networks. In addition, interesting fading effects were discovered in a sparsely deployed network scenario with limited access point coverage; most likely due to multipath propagation. For this case the handover performance was greatly reduced, relative our more normal coverage scenario. While these results illustrate that the absolute energy savings will differ from scenario to scenario, the potential energy savings made possible by the proposed algorithm significantly reduce the battery requirements of the devices in the emerging landscape of the Internet of Things; potentially even opening the door for new devices to connect

An Energy-efficient Handover Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

The recent advancements in the communication area have enabled the Internet of Things, a paradigm which extends the Internet to everyday objects. The Internet of Things enables many new applications, but also comes with great challenges; effective communication under limited power supply being the perhaps most important one. This thesis presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of an energy-efficient handover algorithm for the main building block in the creation of the Internet of Things: wireless sensor networks. Our low-power handover design is based on a careful breakdown and analysis of the potential power consumption of different components of the handover process. With the scanning part of the process being identified as the main drain of energy, the algorithm is designed to place the majority of the scanning responsibility on the mains powered access points, rather than on the low-power mobile nodes. The proposed algorithm has been implemented and its functionality and low power consumption have been empirically evaluated. We show that the design can reduce the energy consumption by several orders of magnitude compared to existing handover algorithms for wireless sensor networks. In addition, interesting fading effects were discovered in a sparsely deployed network scenario with limited access point coverage; most likely due to multipath propagation. For this case the handover performance was greatly reduced, relative our more normal coverage scenario. While these results illustrate that the absolute energy savings will differ from scenario to scenario, the potential energy savings made possible by the proposed algorithm significantly reduce the battery requirements of the devices in the emerging landscape of the Internet of Things; potentially even opening the door for new devices to connect