Energy and Information Management of Electric Vehicular Network: A Survey

The connected vehicle paradigm empowers vehicles with the capability to communicate with neighboring vehicles and infrastructure, shifting the role of vehicles from a transportation tool to an intelligent service platform. Meanwhile, the transportation electrification pushes forward the electric vehicle (EV) commercialization to reduce the greenhouse gas emission by petroleum combustion. The unstoppable trends of connected vehicle and EVs transform the traditional vehicular system to an electric vehicular network (EVN), a clean, mobile, and safe system. However, due to the mobility and heterogeneity of the EVN, improper management of the network could result in charging overload and data congestion. Thus, energy and information management of the EVN should be carefully studied. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on the deployment and management of EVN considering all three aspects of energy flow, data communication, and computation. We first introduce the management framework of EVN. Then, research works on the EV aggregator (AG) deployment are reviewed to provide energy and information infrastructure for the EVN. Based on the deployed AGs, we present the research work review on EV scheduling that includes both charging and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) scheduling. Moreover, related works on information communication and computing are surveyed under each scenario. Finally, we discuss open research issues in the EVN

Game Theoretic Approaches in Vehicular Networks: A Survey

In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), vehicles and other intelligent components in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) are connected, forming the Vehicular Networks (VNs) that provide efficient and secure traffic, ubiquitous access to information, and various applications. However, as the number of connected nodes keeps increasing, it is challenging to satisfy various and large amounts of service requests with different Quality of Service (QoS ) and security requirements in the highly dynamic VNs. Intelligent nodes in VNs can compete or cooperate for limited network resources so that either an individual or group objectives can be achieved. Game theory, a theoretical framework designed for strategic interactions among rational decision-makers who faced with scarce resources, can be used to model and analyze individual or group behaviors of communication entities in VNs. This paper primarily surveys the recent advantages of GT used in solving various challenges in VNs. As VNs and GT have been extensively investigate34d, this survey starts with a brief introduction of the basic concept and classification of GT used in VNs. Then, a comprehensive review of applications of GT in VNs is presented, which primarily covers the aspects of QoS and security. Moreover, with the development of fifth-generation (5G) wireless communication, recent contributions of GT to diverse emerging technologies of 5G integrated into VNs are surveyed in this paper. Finally, several key research challenges and possible solutions for applying GT in VNs are outlined

Applications of Game Theory in Vehicular Networks: A Survey

In the Internet of Things (IoT) era, vehicles and other intelligent components in an intelligent transportation system (ITS) are connected, forming Vehicular Networks (VNs) that provide efficient and secure traffic and ubiquitous access to various applications. However, as the number of nodes in ITS increases, it is challenging to satisfy a varied and large number of service requests with different Quality of Service and security requirements in highly dynamic VNs. Intelligent nodes in VNs can compete or cooperate for limited network resources to achieve either an individual or a group's objectives. Game Theory (GT), a theoretical framework designed for strategic interactions among rational decision-makers sharing scarce resources, can be used to model and analyze individual or group behaviors of communicating entities in VNs. This paper primarily surveys the recent developments of GT in solving various challenges of VNs. This survey starts with an introduction to the background of VNs. A review of GT models studied in the VNs is then introduced, including its basic concepts, classifications, and applicable vehicular issues. After discussing the requirements of VNs and the motivation of using GT, a comprehensive literature review on GT applications in dealing with the challenges of current VNs is provided. Furthermore, recent contributions of GT to VNs integrating with diverse emerging 5G technologies are surveyed. Finally, the lessons learned are given, and several key research challenges and possible solutions for applying GT in VNs are outlined.Comment: It has been submitted to "IEEE communication surveys and tutorials".This is the revised versio

Amorphous Placement and Informed Diffusion for Timely Monitoring by Autonomous, Resource-Constrained, Mobile Sensors

Personal communication devices are increasingly equipped with sensors for passive monitoring of encounters and surroundings. We envision the emergence of services that enable a community of mobile users carrying such resource-limited devices to query such information at remote locations in the field in which they collectively roam. One approach to implement such a service is directed placement and retrieval (DPR), whereby readings/queries about a specific location are routed to a node responsible for that location. In a mobile, potentially sparse setting, where end-to-end paths are unavailable, DPR is not an attractive solution as it would require the use of delay-tolerant (flooding-based store-carry-forward) routing of both readings and queries, which is inappropriate for applications with data freshness constraints, and which is incompatible with stringent device power/memory constraints. Alternatively, we propose the use of amorphous placement and retrieval (APR), in which routing and field monitoring are integrated through the use of a cache management scheme coupled with an informed exchange of cached samples to diffuse sensory data throughout the network, in such a way that a query answer is likely to be found close to the query origin. We argue that knowledge of the distribution of query targets could be used effectively by an informed cache management policy to maximize the utility of collective storage of all devices. Using a simple analytical model, we show that the use of informed cache management is particularly important when the mobility model results in a non-uniform distribution of users over the field. We present results from extensive simulations which show that in sparsely-connected networks, APR is more cost-effective than DPR, that it provides extra resilience to node failure and packet losses, and that its use of informed cache management yields superior performance

Unified Role Assignment Framework For Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are made possible by the continuing improvements in embedded sensor, VLSI, and wireless radio technologies. Currently, one of the important challenges in sensor networks is the design of a systematic network management framework that allows localized and collaborative resource control uniformly across all application services such as sensing, monitoring, tracking, data aggregation, and routing. The research in wireless sensor networks is currently oriented toward a cross-layer network abstraction that supports appropriate fine or course grained resource controls for energy efficiency. In that regard, we have designed a unified role-based service paradigm for wireless sensor networks. We pursue this by first developing a Role-based Hierarchical Self-Organization (RBSHO) protocol that organizes a connected dominating set (CDS) of nodes called dominators. This is done by hierarchically selecting nodes that possess cumulatively high energy, connectivity, and sensing capabilities in their local neighborhood. The RBHSO protocol then assigns specific tasks such as sensing, coordination, and routing to appropriate dominators that end up playing a certain role in the network. Roles, though abstract and implicit, expose role-specific resource controls by way of role assignment and scheduling. Based on this concept, we have designed a Unified Role-Assignment Framework (URAF) to model application services as roles played by local in-network sensor nodes with sensor capabilities used as rules for role identification. The URAF abstracts domain specific role attributes by three models: the role energy model, the role execution time model, and the role service utility model. The framework then generalizes resource management for services by providing abstractions for controlling the composition of a service in terms of roles, its assignment, reassignment, and scheduling. To the best of our knowledge, a generic role-based framework that provides a simple and unified network management solution for wireless sensor networks has not been proposed previously

A Survey on Security in Wireless Sensor Networks

Advances in electronics and wireless communication technologies have enabled the development of large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs). There is numerous applications for wireless sensor networks, and security is vital for many of them. However, WSNs suffer from many constraints, including low computation capability, small memory, limited energy resources, susceptibility to physical capture, the lack of infrastructure, which impose unique security challenges and make innovative approaches desirable. In this paper we present a survey of security issues in WSNs, address the state of the art in research on sensor network security, and discuss some future directions for research.

Survey on Congestion Detection and Control in Connected Vehicles

The dynamic nature of vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) induced by frequent topology changes and node mobility, imposes critical challenges for vehicular communications. Aggravated by the high volume of information dissemination among vehicles over limited bandwidth, the topological dynamics of VANET causes congestion in the communication channel, which is the primary cause of problems such as message drop, delay, and degraded quality of service. To mitigate these problems, congestion detection, and control techniques are needed to be incorporated in a vehicular network. Congestion control approaches can be either open-loop or closed loop based on pre-congestion or post congestion strategies. We present a general architecture of vehicular communication in urban and highway environment as well as a state-of-the-art survey of recent congestion detection and control techniques. We also identify the drawbacks of existing approaches and classify them according to different hierarchical schemes. Through an extensive literature review, we recommend solution approaches and future directions for handling congestion in vehicular communications

User-Centric Security and Privacy Mechanisms in Untrusted Networking and Computing Environments

Our modern society is increasingly relying on the collection, processing, and sharing of digital information. There are two fundamental trends: (1) Enabled by the rapid developments in sensor, wireless, and networking technologies, communication and networking are becoming more and more pervasive and ad hoc. (2) Driven by the explosive growth of hardware and software capabilities, computation power is becoming a public utility and information is often stored in centralized servers which facilitate ubiquitous access and sharing. Many emerging platforms and systems hinge on both dimensions, such as E-healthcare and Smart Grid. However, the majority information handled by these critical systems is usually sensitive and of high value, while various security breaches could compromise the social welfare of these systems. Thus there is an urgent need to develop security and privacy mechanisms to protect the authenticity, integrity and confidentiality of the collected data, and to control the disclosure of private information. In achieving that, two unique challenges arise: (1) There lacks centralized trusted parties in pervasive networking; (2) The remote data servers tend not to be trusted by system users in handling their data. They make existing security solutions developed for traditional networked information systems unsuitable. To this end, in this dissertation we propose a series of user-centric security and privacy mechanisms that resolve these challenging issues in untrusted network and computing environments, spanning wireless body area networks (WBAN), mobile social networks (MSN), and cloud computing. The main contributions of this dissertation are fourfold. First, we propose a secure ad hoc trust initialization protocol for WBAN, without relying on any pre-established security context among nodes, while defending against a powerful wireless attacker that may or may not compromise sensor nodes. The protocol is highly usable for a human user. Second, we present novel schemes for sharing sensitive information among distributed mobile hosts in MSN which preserves user privacy, where the users neither need to fully trust each other nor rely on any central trusted party. Third, to realize owner-controlled sharing of sensitive data stored on untrusted servers, we put forward a data access control framework using Multi-Authority Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE), that supports scalable fine-grained access and on-demand user revocation, and is free of key-escrow. Finally, we propose mechanisms for authorized keyword search over encrypted data on untrusted servers, with efficient multi-dimensional range, subset and equality query capabilities, and with enhanced search privacy. The common characteristic of our contributions is they minimize the extent of trust that users must place in the corresponding network or computing environments, in a way that is user-centric, i.e., favoring individual owners/users

Anonymity Protection and Access Control in Mobile Network Environment

abstract: Wireless communication technologies have been playing an important role in modern society. Due to its inherent mobility property, wireless networks are more vulnerable to passive attacks than traditional wired networks. Anonymity, as an important issue in mobile network environment, serves as the first topic that leads to all the research work presented in this manuscript. Specifically, anonymity issue in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) is discussed with details as the first section of research. To thoroughly study on this topic, the presented work approaches it from an attacker's perspective. Under a perfect scenario, all the traffic in a targeted MANET exhibits the communication relations to a passive attacker. However, localization errors pose a significant influence on the accuracy of the derived communication patterns. To handle such issue, a new scheme is proposed to generate super nodes, which represent the activities of user groups in the target MANET. This scheme also helps reduce the scale of monitoring work by grouping users based on their behaviors. The first part of work on anonymity in MANET leads to the thought on its major cause. The link-based communication pattern is a key contributor to the success of the traffic analysis attack. A natural way to circumvent such issue is to use link-less approaches. Information Centric Networking (ICN) is a typical instance of such kind. Its communication pattern is able to overcome the anonymity issue with MANET. However, it also comes with its own shortcomings. One of them is access control enforcement. To tackle this issue, a new naming scheme for contents transmitted in ICN networks is presented. This scheme is based on a new Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) algorithm. It enforces access control in ICN with minimum requirements on additional network components. Following the research work on ABE, an important function, delegation, exhibits a potential security issue. In traditional ABE schemes, Ciphertext-Policy ABE (CP-ABE), a user is able to generate a subset of authentic attribute key components for other users using delegation function. This capability is not monitored or controlled by the trusted third party (TTP) in the cryptosystem. A direct threat caused from this issue is that any user may intentionally or unintentionally lower the standards for attribute assignments. Unauthorized users/attackers may be able to obtain their desired attributes through a delegation party instead of directly from the TTP. As the third part of work presented in this manuscript, a three-level delegation restriction architecture is proposed. Furthermore, a delegation restriction scheme following this architecture is also presented. This scheme allows the TTP to have full control on the delegation function of all its direct users.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201