An Authentication Protocol for Future Sensor Networks

Authentication is one of the essential security services in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for ensuring secure data sessions. Sensor node authentication ensures the confidentiality and validity of data collected by the sensor node, whereas user authentication guarantees that only legitimate users can access the sensor data. In a mobile WSN, sensor and user nodes move across the network and exchange data with multiple nodes, thus experiencing the authentication process multiple times. The integration of WSNs with Internet of Things (IoT) brings forth a new kind of WSN architecture along with stricter security requirements; for instance, a sensor node or a user node may need to establish multiple concurrent secure data sessions. With concurrent data sessions, the frequency of the re-authentication process increases in proportion to the number of concurrent connections, which makes the security issue even more challenging. The currently available authentication protocols were designed for the autonomous WSN and do not account for the above requirements. In this paper, we present a novel, lightweight and efficient key exchange and authentication protocol suite called the Secure Mobile Sensor Network (SMSN) Authentication Protocol. In the SMSN a mobile node goes through an initial authentication procedure and receives a re-authentication ticket from the base station. Later a mobile node can use this re-authentication ticket when establishing multiple data exchange sessions and/or when moving across the network. This scheme reduces the communication and computational complexity of the authentication process. We proved the strength of our protocol with rigorous security analysis and simulated the SMSN and previously proposed schemes in an automated protocol verifier tool. Finally, we compared the computational complexity and communication cost against well-known authentication protocols.Comment: This article is accepted for the publication in "Sensors" journal. 29 pages, 15 figure

BER Performance of IM/DD FSO System with OOK using APD Receiver

In this paper, the performance of intensity-modulated with direct detection (IM/DD) free space optical (FSO) system using the on-off keying (OOK) and avalanche photodiode (APD) receiver is observed. The gamma-gamma model is used to describe the effect of atmospheric turbulence since it provides good agreement in the wide range of atmospheric conditions. In addition, the same FSO system with equal gain combining applied at the reception is analyzed. After theoretical derivation of the expression for the bit error rate (BER), the numerical integration with previously specified relative calculation error is performed. Numerical results are presented and confirmed by Monte Carlo simulations. The effects of the FSO link and receiver parameters on the BER performance are discussed. The results illustrate that the optimal APD gain in the minimum BER sense depends considerably on the link distance, atmospheric turbulence strength and receiver temperature. In addition, the value of this optimal gain is slightly different in the case of spatial diversity application compared with single channel reception