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

Time Segmentation Approach Allowing QoS and Energy Saving for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are conceived to monitor a certain application or physical phenomena and are supposed to function for several years without any human intervention for maintenance. Thus, the main issue in sensor networks is often to extend the lifetime of the network by reducing energy consumption. On the other hand, some applications have high priority traffic that needs to be transferred within a bounded end-to-end delay while maintaining an energy efficient behavior. We propose MaCARI, a time segmentation protocol that saves energy, improves the overall performance of the network and enables quality of service in terms of guaranteed access to the medium and end-to-end delays. This time segmentation is achieved by synchronizing the activity of nodes using a tree-based beacon propagation and allocating activity periods for each cluster of nodes. The tree-based topology is inspired from the cluster-tree proposed by the ZigBee standard. The efficiency of our protocol is proven analytically, by simulation and through real testbed measurements

An Energy Driven Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks

Most wireless sensor networks operate with very limited energy sources-their batteries, and hence their usefulness in real life applications is severely constrained. The challenging issues are how to optimize the use of their energy or to harvest their own energy in order to lengthen their lives for wider classes of application. Tackling these important issues requires a robust architecture that takes into account the energy consumption level of functional constituents and their interdependency. Without such architecture, it would be difficult to formulate and optimize the overall energy consumption of a wireless sensor network. Unlike most current researches that focus on a single energy constituent of WSNs independent from and regardless of other constituents, this paper presents an Energy Driven Architecture (EDA) as a new architecture and indicates a novel approach for minimising the total energy consumption of a WS

Improving sensor network robustness with multi-channel convergecast

Intenerg

Event-Driven Data Gathering in Pure Asynchronous Multi-Hop Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

[EN] In underwater acoustic modem design, pure asynchrony can contribute to improved wake-up coordination, thus avoiding energy-inefficient synchronization mechanisms. Nodes are designed with a pre-receptor and an acoustically adapted Radio Frequency Identification system, which wakes up the node when it receives an external tone. The facts that no synchronism protocol is necessary and that the time between waking up and packet reception is narrow make pure asynchronism highly efficient for energy saving. However, handshaking in the Medium Control Access layer must be adapted to maintain the premise of pure asynchronism. This paper explores different models to carry out this type of adaptation, comparing them via simulation in ns-3. Moreover, because energy saving is highly important to data gathering driven by underwater vehicles, where nodes can spend long periods without connection, this paper is focused on multi-hop topologies. When a vehicle appears in a 3D scenario, it is expected to gather as much information as possible in the minimum amount of time. Vehicle appearance is the event that triggers the gathering process, not only from the nearest nodes but from every node in the 3D volume. Therefore, this paper assumes, as a requirement, a topology of at least three hops. The results show that classic handshaking will perform better than tone reservation because hidden nodes annulate the positive effect of channel reservation. However, in highly dense networks, a combination model with polling will shorten the gathering time.Blanc Clavero, S. (2020). Event-Driven Data Gathering in Pure Asynchronous Multi-Hop Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks. Sensors. 20(5):1-16. https://doi.org/10.3390/s20051407S116205Roy, A., & Sarma, N. (2018). Effects of Various Factors on Performance of MAC Protocols for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks. Materials Today: Proceedings, 5(1), 2263-2274. doi:10.1016/j.matpr.2017.09.228Awan, K. M., Shah, P. A., Iqbal, K., Gillani, S., Ahmad, W., & Nam, Y. (2019). Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks: A Review of Recent Issues and Challenges. Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, 2019, 1-20. doi:10.1155/2019/6470359Rudnick, D. L., Davis, R. E., Eriksen, C. C., Fratantoni, D. M., & Perry, M. J. (2004). Underwater Gliders for Ocean Research. Marine Technology Society Journal, 38(2), 73-84. doi:10.4031/002533204787522703Petritoli, E., & Leccese, F. (2018). High Accuracy Attitude and Navigation System for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). ACTA IMEKO, 7(2), 3. doi:10.21014/acta_imeko.v7i2.535Nam, H. (2018). Data-Gathering Protocol-Based AUV Path-Planning for Long-Duration Cooperation in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks. IEEE Sensors Journal, 18(21), 8902-8912. doi:10.1109/jsen.2018.2866837Sun, J., Hu, F., Jin, W., Wang, J., Wang, X., Luo, Y., … Zhang, A. (2020). Model-Aided Localization and Navigation for Underwater Gliders Using Single-Beacon Travel-Time Differences. Sensors, 20(3), 893. doi:10.3390/s20030893Wahid, A., Lee, S., Kim, D., & Lim, K.-S. (2014). MRP: A Localization-Free Multi-Layered Routing Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks. Wireless Personal Communications, 77(4), 2997-3012. doi:10.1007/s11277-014-1690-6Sánchez, A., Blanc, S., Yuste, P., Perles, A., & Serrano, J. J. (2012). An Ultra-Low Power and Flexible Acoustic Modem Design to Develop Energy-Efficient Underwater Sensor Networks. Sensors, 12(6), 6837-6856. doi:10.3390/s120606837Li, S., Qu, W., Liu, C., Qiu, T., & Zhao, Z. (2019). Survey on high reliability wireless communication for underwater sensor networks. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 148, 102446. doi:10.1016/j.jnca.2019.102446Jiang, S. (2018). State-of-the-Art Medium Access Control (MAC) Protocols for Underwater Acoustic Networks: A Survey Based on a MAC Reference Model. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 20(1), 96-131. doi:10.1109/comst.2017.2768802Chirdchoo, N., Soh, W., & Chua, K. C. (2008). RIPT: A Receiver-Initiated Reservation-Based Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Networks. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 26(9), 1744-1753. doi:10.1109/jsac.2008.081213Zenia, N. Z., Aseeri, M., Ahmed, M. R., Chowdhury, Z. I., & Shamim Kaiser, M. (2016). Energy-efficiency and reliability in MAC and routing protocols for underwater wireless sensor network: A survey. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 71, 72-85. doi:10.1016/j.jnca.2016.06.005Khasawneh, A., Latiff, M. S. B. A., Kaiwartya, O., & Chizari, H. (2017). A reliable energy-efficient pressure-based routing protocol for underwater wireless sensor network. Wireless Networks, 24(6), 2061-2075. doi:10.1007/s11276-017-1461-xSánchez, A., Blanc, S., Yuste, P., Perles, A., & Serrano, J. J. (2015). An Acoustic Modem Featuring a Multi-Receiver and Ultra-Low Power. Circuits and Systems, 06(01), 1-12. doi:10.4236/cs.2015.6100

Let the Tree Bloom: Scalable Opportunistic Routing with ORPL

Routing in battery-operated wireless networks is challenging, posing a tradeoff between energy and latency. Previous work has shown that opportunistic routing can achieve low-latency data collection in duty-cycled networks. However, applications are now considered where nodes are not only periodic data sources, but rather addressable end points generating traffic with arbitrary patterns. We present ORPL, an opportunistic routing protocol that supports any-to-any, on-demand traffic. ORPL builds upon RPL, the standard protocol for low-power IPv6 networks. By combining RPL's tree-like topology with opportunistic routing, ORPL forwards data to any destination based on the mere knowledge of the nodes' sub-tree. We use bitmaps and Bloom filters to represent and propagate this information in a space-efficient way, making ORPL scale to large networks of addressable nodes. Our results in a 135-node testbed show that ORPL outperforms a number of state-of-the-art solutions including RPL and CTP, conciliating a sub-second latency and a sub-percent duty cycle. ORPL also increases robustness and scalability, addressing the whole network reliably through a 64-byte Bloom filter, where RPL needs kilobytes of routing tables for the same task