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

Ubiquitous robust communications for emergency response using multi-operator heterogeneous networks

A number of disasters in various places of the planet have caused an extensive loss of lives, severe damages to properties and the environment, as well as a tremendous shock to the survivors. For relief and mitigation operations, emergency responders are immediately dispatched to the disaster areas. Ubiquitous and robust communications during the emergency response operations are of paramount importance. Nevertheless, various reports have highlighted that after many devastating events, the current technologies used, failed to support the mission critical communications, resulting in further loss of lives. Inefficiencies of the current communications used for emergency response include lack of technology inter-operability between different jurisdictions, and high vulnerability due to their centralized infrastructure. In this article, we propose a flexible network architecture that provides a common networking platform for heterogeneous multi-operator networks, for interoperation in case of emergencies. A wireless mesh network is the main part of the proposed architecture and this provides a back-up network in case of emergencies. We first describe the shortcomings and limitations of the current technologies, and then we address issues related to the applications and functionalities a future emergency response network should support. Furthermore, we describe the necessary requirements for a flexible, secure, robust, and QoS-aware emergency response multi-operator architecture, and then we suggest several schemes that can be adopted by our proposed architecture to meet those requirements. In addition, we suggest several methods for the re-tasking of communication means owned by independent individuals to provide support during emergencies. In order to investigate the feasibility of multimedia transmission over a wireless mesh network, we measured the performance of a video streaming application in a real wireless metropolitan multi-radio mesh network, showing that the mesh network can meet the requirements for high quality video transmissions

Survey of Spectrum Sharing for Inter-Technology Coexistence

Increasing capacity demands in emerging wireless technologies are expected to be met by network densification and spectrum bands open to multiple technologies. These will, in turn, increase the level of interference and also result in more complex inter-technology interactions, which will need to be managed through spectrum sharing mechanisms. Consequently, novel spectrum sharing mechanisms should be designed to allow spectrum access for multiple technologies, while efficiently utilizing the spectrum resources overall. Importantly, it is not trivial to design such efficient mechanisms, not only due to technical aspects, but also due to regulatory and business model constraints. In this survey we address spectrum sharing mechanisms for wireless inter-technology coexistence by means of a technology circle that incorporates in a unified, system-level view the technical and non-technical aspects. We thus systematically explore the spectrum sharing design space consisting of parameters at different layers. Using this framework, we present a literature review on inter-technology coexistence with a focus on wireless technologies with equal spectrum access rights, i.e. (i) primary/primary, (ii) secondary/secondary, and (iii) technologies operating in a spectrum commons. Moreover, we reflect on our literature review to identify possible spectrum sharing design solutions and performance evaluation approaches useful for future coexistence cases. Finally, we discuss spectrum sharing design challenges and suggest future research directions

Scalability study of backhaul capacity sensitive network selection scheme in LTE-wifi HetNet

Wireless Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) with small cells presents a new backhauling challenge which differs from those of experienced by conventional macro-cells. In practice, the choice of backhaul technology for these small cells whether fiber, xDSL, point–to-point and point-to-multipoint wireless, or multi-hop/mesh networks, is often governed by availability and cost, and not by required capacity. Therefore, the resulting backhaul capacity of the small cells in HetNet is likely to be non-uniform due to the mixture of backhaul technologies adopted. In such an environment, a question then arises whether a network selection strategy that considers the small cells’ backhaul capacity will improve the end users’ usage experience. In this paper, a novel Dynamic Backhaul Capacity Sensitive (DyBaCS) network selection schemes (NSS) is proposed and compared with two commonly used network NSSs, namely WiFi First (WF) and Physical Data Rate (PDR) in an LTE-WiFi HetNet environment. The proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of average connection or user throughput1and fairness among users. The effects of varying WiFi backhaul capacity (uniform and non-uniform distribution), WiFi-LTE coverage ratio, user density and WiFi access points (APs) density within the HetNet form the focus of this paper. Results show that the DyBaCS scheme generally provides superior fairness and user throughput performance across the range of backhaul capacity considered. Besides, DyBaCS is able to scale much better than WF and PDR across different user and WiFi densities