A Survey on Wireless Sensor Network Security

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest in the research community due their wide range of applications. Due to distributed nature of these networks and their deployment in remote areas, these networks are vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their proper functioning. This problem is more critical if the network is deployed for some mission-critical applications such as in a tactical battlefield. Random failure of nodes is also very likely in real-life deployment scenarios. Due to resource constraints in the sensor nodes, traditional security mechanisms with large overhead of computation and communication are infeasible in WSNs. Security in sensor networks is, therefore, a particularly challenging task. This paper discusses the current state of the art in security mechanisms for WSNs. Various types of attacks are discussed and their countermeasures presented. A brief discussion on the future direction of research in WSN security is also included.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 2 table

Research on Quality of Service Based Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Quality of service (QoS) based routing protocols play a significant role in MANETs to maintain proper flow of data with efficient power consumption and without data loss. However, several network resource based technical challenges or issues are encountered in the design and implementation of QoS routing protocols that perform their routing function by considering the shortest route or the lowest cost. Furthermore, a secondary route is not reserved and alternative routes are not searched unless the established route is broken. The current structures of the state-of-the-art protocols for MANETs are not appropriate for today's high bandwidth and mobility requirements. Therefore, research on new routing protocols is needed, considering energy level, coverage, location, speed, movement, and link stability instead of only shortest path and lowest cost. This paper summarizes the main characteristics of QoS-based routing protocols to facilitate researchers to design and select QoS-based routing protocols. In this study, a wide range of protocols with their characteristics were classified according to QoS routing strategy, routing information update mechanism, interaction between network and MAC layer, QoS constraints, QoS guarantee type and number of discovered routes. In addition, the protocols were compared in terms of properties, design features, challenges and QoS metrics

QoS multicast tree construction in IP/DWDM optical internet by bio-inspired algorithms

Copyright @ Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.In this paper, two bio-inspired Quality of Service (QoS) multicast algorithms are proposed in IP over dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) optical Internet. Given a QoS multicast request and the delay interval required by the application, both algorithms are able to find a flexible QoS-based cost suboptimal routing tree. They first construct the multicast trees based on ant colony optimization and artificial immune algorithm, respectively. Then a dedicated wavelength assignment algorithm is proposed to assign wavelengths to the trees aiming to minimize the delay of the wavelength conversion. In both algorithms, multicast routing and wavelength assignment are integrated into a single process. Therefore, they can find the multicast trees on which the least wavelength conversion delay is achieved. Load balance is also considered in both algorithms. Simulation results show that these two bio-inspired algorithms can construct high performance QoS routing trees for multicast applications in IP/DWDM optical Internet.This work was supported in part ny the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of UK under Grant EP/E060722/1, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant no. 60673159 and 70671020, the National High-Tech Reasearch and Development Plan of China under Grant no. 2007AA041201, and the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education under Grant no. 20070145017

QoS multicast routing protocol oriented to cognitive network using competitive coevolutionary algorithm

The human intervention in the network management and maintenance should be reduced to alleviate the ever-increasing spatial and temporal complexity. By mimicking the cognitive behaviors of human being, the cognitive network improves the scalability, self-adaptation, self-organization, and self-protection in the network. To implement the cognitive network, the cognitive behaviors for the network nodes need to be carefully designed. Quality of service (QoS) multicast is an important network problem. Therefore, it is appealing to develop an effective QoS multicast routing protocol oriented to cognitive network. In this paper, we design the cognitive behaviors summarized in the cognitive science for the network nodes. Based on the cognitive behaviors, we propose a QoS multicast routing protocol oriented to cognitive network, named as CogMRT. It is a distributed protocol where each node only maintains local information. The routing search is in a hop by hop way. Inspired by the small-world phenomenon, the cognitive behaviors help to accumulate the experiential route information. Since the QoS multicast routing is a typical combinatorial optimization problem and it is proved to be NP-Complete, we have applied the competitive coevolutionary algorithm (CCA) for the multicast tree construction. The CCA adopts novel encoding method and genetic operations which leverage the characteristics of the problem. We implement and evaluate CogMRT and other two promising alternative protocols in NS2 platform. The results show that CogMRT has remarkable advantages over the counterpart traditional protocols by exploiting the cognitive favors

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio