Reliable machine-to-machine multicast services with multi-radio cooperative retransmissions

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11036-015-0575-6The 3GPP is working towards the definition of service requirements and technical solutions to provide support for energy-efficient Machine Type Communications (MTC) in the forthcoming generations of cellular networks. One of the envisioned solutions consists in applying group management policies to clusters of devices in order to reduce control signaling and improve upon energy efficiency, e.g., multicast Over-The-Air (OTA) firmware updates. In this paper, a Multi-Radio Cooperative Retransmission Scheme is proposed to efficiently carry out multicast transmissions in MTC networks, reducing both control signaling and improving energy-efficiency. The proposal can be executed in networks composed by devices equipped with multiple radio interfaces which enable them to connect to both a cellular access network, e.g., LTE, and a short-range MTC area network, e.g., Low-Power Wi-Fi or ZigBee, as foreseen by the MTC architecture defined by ETSI. The main idea is to carry out retransmissions over the M2M area network upon error in the main cellular link. This yields a reduction in both the traffic load over the cellular link and the energy consumption of the devices. Computer-based simulations with ns-3 have been conducted to analyze the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of energy consumption and assess its superior performance compared to non-cooperative retransmission schemes, thus validating its suitability for energy-constrained MTC applications.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Synoptic analysis techniques for intrusion detection in wireless networks

Current system administrators are missing intrusion alerts hidden by large numbers of false positives. Rather than accumulation more data to identify true alerts, we propose an intrusion detection tool that e?ectively uses select data to provide a picture of ?network health?. Our hypothesis is that by utilizing the data available at both the node and cooperative network levels we can create a synoptic picture of the network providing indications of many intrusions or other network issues. Our major contribution is to provide a revolutionary way to analyze node and network data for patterns, dependence, and e?ects that indicate network issues. We collect node and network data, combine and manipulate it, and tease out information about the state of the network. We present a method based on utilizing the number of packets sent, number of packets received, node reliability, route reliability, and entropy to develop a synoptic picture of the network health in the presence of a sinkhole and a HELLO Flood attacker. This method conserves network throughput and node energy by requiring no additional control messages to be sent between the nodes unless an attacker is suspected. We intend to show that, although the concept of an intrusion detection system is not revolutionary, the method in which we analyze the data for clues about network intrusion and performance is highly innovative

An analysis on decentralized adaptive MAC protocols for Cognitive Radio networks

The scarcity of bandwidth in the radio spectrum has become more vital since the demand for more and more wireless applications has increased. Most of the spectrum bands have been allocated although many studies have shown that these bands are significantly underutilized most of the time. The problem of unavailability of spectrum and inefficiency in its utilization has been smartly addressed by the Cognitive Radio (CR) Technology which is an opportunistic network that senses the environment, observes the network changes, and then using knowledge gained from the prior interaction with the network, makes intelligent decisions by dynamically adapting their transmission characteristics. In this paper some of the decentralized adaptive MAC protocols for CR networks have been critically analyzed and a novel adaptive MAC protocol for CR networks, DNG-MAC which is decentralized and non-global in nature, has been proposed. The results show the DNG-MAC out performs other CR MAC protocols in terms of time and energy efficiency