A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201

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

Capacity of Cellular Wireless Network

Earlier definitions of capacity for wireless networks, e.g., transport or transmission capacity, for which exact theoretical results are known, are well suited for ad hoc networks but are not directly applicable for cellular wireless networks, where large-scale basestation (BS) coordination is not possible, and retransmissions/ARQ under the SINR model is a universal feature. In this paper, cellular wireless networks, where both BS locations and mobile user (MU) locations are distributed as independent Poisson point processes are considered, and each MU connects to its nearest BS. With ARQ, under the SINR model, the effective downlink rate of packet transmission is the reciprocal of the expected delay (number of retransmissions needed till success), which we use as our network capacity definition after scaling it with the BS density. Exact characterization of this natural capacity metric for cellular wireless networks is derived. The capacity is shown to first increase polynomially with the BS density in the low BS density regime and then scale inverse exponentially with the increasing BS density. Two distinct upper bounds are derived that are relevant for the low and the high BS density regimes. A single power control strategy is shown to achieve the upper bounds in both the regimes. This result is fundamentally different from the well known capacity results for ad hoc networks, such as transport and transmission capacity that scale as the square root of the (high) BS density. Our results show that the strong temporal correlations of SINRs with PPP distributed BS locations is limiting, and the realizable capacity in cellular wireless networks in high-BS density regime is much smaller than previously thought. A byproduct of our analysis shows that the capacity of the ALOHA strategy with retransmissions is zero.Comment: A shorter version to appear in WiOpt 201

The Outage Probability of a Finite Ad Hoc Network in Nakagami Fading

An ad hoc network with a finite spatial extent and number of nodes or mobiles is analyzed. The mobile locations may be drawn from any spatial distribution, and interference-avoidance protocols or protection against physical collisions among the mobiles may be modeled by placing an exclusion zone around each radio. The channel model accounts for the path loss, Nakagami fading, and shadowing of each received signal. The Nakagami m-parameter can vary among the mobiles, taking any positive value for each of the interference signals and any positive integer value for the desired signal. The analysis is governed by a new exact expression for the outage probability, defined to be the probability that the signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) drops below a threshold, and is conditioned on the network geometry and shadowing factors, which have dynamics over much slower timescales than the fading. By averaging over many network and shadowing realizations, the average outage probability and transmission capacity are computed. Using the analysis, many aspects of the network performance are illuminated. For example, one can determine the influence of the choice of spreading factors, the effect of the receiver location within the finite network region, and the impact of both the fading parameters and the attenuation power laws.Comment: to appear in IEEE Transactions on Communication

MoMo: a group mobility model for future generation mobile wireless networks

Existing group mobility models were not designed to meet the requirements for accurate simulation of current and future short distance wireless networks scenarios, that need, in particular, accurate, up-to-date informa- tion on the position of each node in the network, combined with a simple and flexible approach to group mobility modeling. A new model for group mobility in wireless networks, named MoMo, is proposed in this paper, based on the combination of a memory-based individual mobility model with a flexible group behavior model. MoMo is capable of accurately describing all mobility scenarios, from individual mobility, in which nodes move inde- pendently one from the other, to tight group mobility, where mobility patterns of different nodes are strictly correlated. A new set of intrinsic properties for a mobility model is proposed and adopted in the analysis and comparison of MoMo with existing models. Next, MoMo is compared with existing group mobility models in a typical 5G network scenario, in which a set of mobile nodes cooperate in the realization of a distributed MIMO link. Results show that MoMo leads to accurate, robust and flexible modeling of mobility of groups of nodes in discrete event simulators, making it suitable for the performance evaluation of networking protocols and resource allocation algorithms in the wide range of network scenarios expected to characterize 5G networks.Comment: 25 pages, 17 figure

Remote Control and Monitoring of Smart Home Facilities via Smartphone with Wi-Fly

Due to the widespread ownership of smartphone devices, the application of mobile technologies to enhance the monitoring and control of smart home facilities has attracted much academic attention. This study indicates that tools already in the possession of the end user can be a significant part of the specific context-aware system in the smart home. The behaviour of the system in the context of existing systems will reflect the intention of the client. This model system offers a diverse architectural concept for Wireless Sensor Actuator Mobile Computing in a Smart Home (WiSAMCinSH) and consists of sensors and actuators in various communication channels, with different capacities, paradigms, costs and degree of communication reliability. This paper focuses on the utilization of end users’ smartphone applications to control home devices, and to enable monitoring of the context-aware environment in the smart home to fulfil the needs of the ageing population. It investigates the application of an iPhone to supervise smart home monitoring and control electrical devices, and through this approach, after initial setup of the mobile application, a user can control devices in the smart home from different locations and over various distances

Goodbye, ALOHA!

©2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) to interconnect and Internet-connect everyday people, objects, and machines poses new challenges in the design of wireless communication networks. The design of medium access control (MAC) protocols has been traditionally an intense area of research due to their high impact on the overall performance of wireless communications. The majority of research activities in this field deal with different variations of protocols somehow based on ALOHA, either with or without listen before talk, i.e., carrier sensing multiple access. These protocols operate well under low traffic loads and low number of simultaneous devices. However, they suffer from congestion as the traffic load and the number of devices increase. For this reason, unless revisited, the MAC layer can become a bottleneck for the success of the IoT. In this paper, we provide an overview of the existing MAC solutions for the IoT, describing current limitations and envisioned challenges for the near future. Motivated by those, we identify a family of simple algorithms based on distributed queueing (DQ), which can operate for an infinite number of devices generating any traffic load and pattern. A description of the DQ mechanism is provided and most relevant existing studies of DQ applied in different scenarios are described in this paper. In addition, we provide a novel performance evaluation of DQ when applied for the IoT. Finally, a description of the very first demo of DQ for its use in the IoT is also included in this paper.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft