A critical analysis of mobility management related issues of wireless sensor networks in cyber physical systems

Mobility management has been a long-standing issue in mobile wireless sensor networks and especially in the context of cyber physical systems; its implications are immense. This paper presents a critical analysis of the current approaches to mobility management by evaluating them against a set of criteria which are essentially inherent characteristics of such systems on which these approaches are expected to provide acceptable performance. We summarize these characteristics by using a quadruple set of metrics. Additionally, using this set we classify the various approaches to mobility management that are discussed in this paper. Finally, the paper concludes by reviewing the main findings and providing suggestions that will be helpful to guide future research efforts in the area

A critical analysis of mobility management related issues of wireless sensor networks in cyber physical systems

Mobility management has been a long-standing issue in mobile wireless sensor networks and especially in the context of cyber physical systems its implications are immense. This paper presents a critical analysis of the current approaches to mobility management by evaluating them against a set of criteria which are essentially inherent characteristics of such systems on which these approaches are expected to provide acceptable performance. We summarize these characteristics by using a quadruple set of metrics. Additionally, using this set we classify the various approaches to mobility management that are discussed in this paper. Finally, the paper concludes by reviewing the main findings and providing suggestions that will be helpful to guide future research efforts in the area. **Please note that there are multiple authors for this article therefore only the name of the first 5 including Federation University Australia affiliate “Muhammad Imran” is provided in this record*

Surveying Position Based Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor and Ad-hoc Networks

A focus of the scientific community is to design network oriented position-based routing protocols and this has resulted in a very high number of algorithms, different in approach and performance and each suited only to particular applications. However, though numerous, very few position-based algorithms have actually been adopted for commercial purposes. This article is a survey of almost 50 position-based routing protocols and it comes as an aid in the implementation of this type of routing in various applications which may need to consider the advantages and pitfalls of position-based routing. An emphasis is made on geographic routing, whose notion is clarified as a more restrictive and more efficient type of position-based routing. The protocols are therefore divided into geographic and non-geographic routing protocols and each is characterized according to a number of network design issues and presented in a comparative manner from multiple points of view. The main requirements of current general applications are also studied and, depending on these, the survey proposes a number of protocols for use in particular application areas. This aims to help both researchers and potential users assess and choose the protocol best suited to their interest

TRUST-BASED DEFENSE AGAINST INSIDER PACKET DROP ATTACKS IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

In most wireless sensor networks (WSNs), sensor nodes generate data packets and send them to the base station (BS) by multi-hop routing paths because of their limited energy and transmission range. The insider packet drop attacks refer to a set of attacks where compromised nodes intentionally drop packets. It is challenging to accurately detect such attacks because packets may also be dropped due to collision, congestion, or other network problems. Trust mechanism is a promising approach to identify inside packet drop attackers. In such an approach, each node will monitor its neighbor's packet forwarding behavior and use this observation to measure the trustworthiness of its neighbors. Once a neighbor's trust value falls below a threshold, it will be considered as an attacker by the monitoring node and excluded from the routing paths so further damage to the network will not be made. In this dissertation, we analyze the limitation of the state-of-the-art trust mechanisms and propose several enhancement techniques to better defend against insider packet drop attacks in WSNs. First, we observe that inside attackers can easily defeat the current trust mechanisms and even if they are caught, normally a lot of damage has already been made to the network. We believe this is caused by current trust models' inefficiency in distinguishing attacking behaviors and normal network transmission failures. We demonstrate that the phenomenon of consecutive packet drops is one fundamental difference between attackers and good sensor nodes and build a hybrid trust model based on it to improve the detection speed and accuracy of current trust models. Second, trust mechanisms give false alarms when they mis-categorize good nodes as attackers. Aggressive mechanisms like our hybrid approach designed to catch attackers as early as possible normally have high false alarm rate. Removing these nodes from routing paths may significantly reduce the performance of the network. We propose a novel false alarm detection and recovery mechanism that can recover the falsely detected good nodes. Next, we show that more intelligent packet drop attackers can launch advanced attacks without being detected by introducing a selective forwarding-based denial-of-service attack that drops only packets from specific victim nodes. We develop effective detection and prevention methods against such attack. We have implemented all the methods we have proposed and conducted extensive simulations with the OPNET network simulator to validate their effectiveness

Fault-tolerant wireless sensor networks using evolutionary games

This dissertation proposes an approach to creating robust communication systems in wireless sensor networks, inspired by biological and ecological systems, particularly by evolutionary game theory. In this approach, a virtual community of agents live inside the network nodes and carry out network functions. The agents use different strategies to execute their functions, and these strategies are tested and selected by playing evolutionary games. Over time, agents with the best strategies survive, while others die. The strategies and the game rules provide the network with an adaptive behavior that allows it to react to changes in environmental conditions by adapting and improving network behavior. To evaluate the viability of this approach, this dissertation also describes a micro-component framework for implementing agent-based wireless sensor network services, an evolutionary data collection protocol built using this framework, ECP, and experiments evaluating the performance of this protocol in a faulty environment. The framework addresses many of the programming challenges in writing network software for wireless sensor networks, while the protocol built using the framework provides a means of evaluating the general viability of the agent-based approach. The results of this evaluation show that an evolutionary approach to designing wireless sensor networks can improve the performance of wireless sensor network protocols in the presence of node failures. In particular, we compared the performance of ECP with a non-evolutionary rule-based variant of ECP. While the purely-evolutionary version of ECP has more routing timeouts than the rule-based approach in failure-free networks, it sends significantly fewer beacon packets and incurs statistically fewer routing timeouts in both simple fault and periodic fault scenarios

Distributed reactive routing for selective forwarding attack resilience in wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are an emerging technology that may one day supply real-time information to many services and Internet-based applications. The utility of WSNs relies on the ability to provide valid information, even in the presence of failures or attackers. Current research in the field has identified a large variety of attacks and countermeasures, however, few works address how WSN routing protocols can autonomously react to detected attacks. The works that do provide attack-reactive schemes generally require nodes to coordinate or exchange trust/detection reports. This work aims to maximize data delivery in the presence of selective forwarding attacks with nodes performing detection and reaction operations independently. Via modifications to the Collection Tree Protocol\u27s forwarding path and route update procedure, nodes autonomously evaluate their parent\u27s forwarding reliability and duplicate data to alternative parent nodes when deemed necessary. As shown though a number of simulations, this distributed scheme yields significant data recovery with only modest overheads for attackers dropping data at medium to high rates

Intrusion detection in IPv6-enabled sensor networks.

In this research, we study efficient and lightweight Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) for ad-hoc networks through the lens of IPv6-enabled Wireless Sensor Actuator Networks. These networks consist of highly constrained devices able to communicate wirelessly in an ad-hoc fashion, thus following the architecture of ad-hoc networks. Current state of the art IDS in IoT and WSNs have been developed considering the architecture of conventional computer networks, and as such they do not efficiently address the paradigm of ad-hoc networks, which is highly relevant in emerging network paradigms, such as the Internet of Things (IoT). In this context, the network properties of resilience and redundancy have not been extensively studied. In this thesis, we first identify a trade-off between the communication and energy overheads of an IDS (as captured by the number of active IDS agents in the network) and the performance of the system in terms of successfully identifying attacks. In order to fine-tune this trade-off, we model networks as Random Geometric Graphs; these are a rigorous approach that allows us to capture underlying structural properties of the network. We then introduce a novel IDS architectural approach that consists of a central IDS agent and set of distributed IDS agents deployed uniformly at random over the network area. These nodes are able to efficiently detect attacks at the networking layer in a collaborative manner by monitoring locally available network information provided by IoT routing protocols, such as RPL. The detailed experimental evaluation conducted in this research demonstrates significant performance gains in terms of communication overhead and energy dissipation while maintaining high detection rates. We also show that the performance of our IDS in ad-hoc networks does not rely on the size of the network but on fundamental underling network properties, such as the network topology and the average degree of the nodes. The experiments show that our proposed IDS architecture is resilient against frequent topology changes due to node failures

A critical analysis of research potential, challenges and future directives in industrial wireless sensor networks

In recent years, Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs) have emerged as an important research theme with applications spanning a wide range of industries including automation, monitoring, process control, feedback systems and automotive. Wide scope of IWSNs applications ranging from small production units, large oil and gas industries to nuclear fission control, enables a fast-paced research in this field. Though IWSNs offer advantages of low cost, flexibility, scalability, self-healing, easy deployment and reformation, yet they pose certain limitations on available potential and introduce challenges on multiple fronts due to their susceptibility to highly complex and uncertain industrial environments. In this paper a detailed discussion on design objectives, challenges and solutions, for IWSNs, are presented. A careful evaluation of industrial systems, deadlines and possible hazards in industrial atmosphere are discussed. The paper also presents a thorough review of the existing standards and industrial protocols and gives a critical evaluation of potential of these standards and protocols along with a detailed discussion on available hardware platforms, specific industrial energy harvesting techniques and their capabilities. The paper lists main service providers for IWSNs solutions and gives insight of future trends and research gaps in the field of IWSNs

Challenges and Solutions for Location-based Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks with Complex Network Topology

Complex Network Topologies (CNTs)–network holes and cuts–often occur in practical WSN deployments. Many researchers have acknowledged that CNTs adversely affect the performance of location-based routing and proposed various CNT- aware location-based routing protocols. However, although they aim to address practical issues caused by CNTs, many proposed protocols are either based on idealistic assumptions, require too much resources, or have poor performance. Additionally, proposed protocols are designed only for a single routing primitive–either unicast, multicast, or convergecast. However, as recent WSN applications require diverse traffic patterns, the need for an unified routing framework has ever increased. In this dissertation, we address these main weaknesses in the research on location- based routing. We first propose efficient algorithms for detecting and abstracting CNTs in the network. Using these algorithms, we present our CNT-aware location- based unicast routing protocol that achieves the guaranteed small path stretch with significantly reduced communication overhead. We then present our location-based multicast routing protocol that finds near optimal routing paths from a source node to multicast member nodes, with efficient mechanisms for controllable packet header size and energy-efficient recovery from packet losses. Our CNT-aware convergecast routing protocol improves the network lifetime by identifying network regions with concentrated network traffic and distributing the traffic by using the novel concept of virtual boundaries. Finally, we present the design and implementation details of our unified routing framework that seamlessly integrates proposed unicast, multicast, and convergecast routing protocols. Specifically, we discuss the issues regarding the implementation of our routing protocols on real hardware, and the design of the framework that significantly reduces the code and memory size to fit in a resource constrained sensor mote. We conclude with a proactive solution designed to cope with CNTs, where mobile nodes are used for “patching” CNTs to restore the network connectivity and to optimize the network performance

A comprehensive review of energy efficient routing protocols for query driven wireless sensor networks [version 3; peer review: 2 approved]

In this current era of communications and networking, The Internet of things plays the main role in the making of smart communication and networking. In this article, we have focused on the literature survey on wireless sensor networks which are energy efficient. Various standard protocols are reviewed along with some enhanced protocols which makes the network energy efficient. The comparison of the standard and enhanced protocols with respect to various applications in wireless sensor networks is thoroughly done in this article. The outcomes of the enhanced protocols are also briefly discussed. For easier analysis to future researchers, a comparative table which lists the enhanced protocols which are compared with standard counterparts along with the factors for energy efficiency of the protocols. This article also comments on the issues and challenges of the protocols which can be further analyzed for making the wireless sensor network more energy efficient