A Survey and Future Directions on Clustering: From WSNs to IoT and Modern Networking Paradigms

Many Internet of Things (IoT) networks are created as an overlay over traditional ad-hoc networks such as Zigbee. Moreover, IoT networks can resemble ad-hoc networks over networks that support device-to-device (D2D) communication, e.g., D2D-enabled cellular networks and WiFi-Direct. In these ad-hoc types of IoT networks, efficient topology management is a crucial requirement, and in particular in massive scale deployments. Traditionally, clustering has been recognized as a common approach for topology management in ad-hoc networks, e.g., in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Topology management in WSNs and ad-hoc IoT networks has many design commonalities as both need to transfer data to the destination hop by hop. Thus, WSN clustering techniques can presumably be applied for topology management in ad-hoc IoT networks. This requires a comprehensive study on WSN clustering techniques and investigating their applicability to ad-hoc IoT networks. In this article, we conduct a survey of this field based on the objectives for clustering, such as reducing energy consumption and load balancing, as well as the network properties relevant for efficient clustering in IoT, such as network heterogeneity and mobility. Beyond that, we investigate the advantages and challenges of clustering when IoT is integrated with modern computing and communication technologies such as Blockchain, Fog/Edge computing, and 5G. This survey provides useful insights into research on IoT clustering, allows broader understanding of its design challenges for IoT networks, and sheds light on its future applications in modern technologies integrated with IoT.acceptedVersio

SAFE ROUTING MODEL AND BALANCED LOAD MODEL FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) play a very important role in providing realtime data access for Big Data and Internet. However, the open deployment, energy constraint, and lack of centralized administration make WSNs very vulnerable to various kinds of malicious attacks. In WSNs identifying malicious sensor devices and eliminating their sensed information plays a very important role for mission critical applications. Standard cryptography and authentication schemes cannot be directly used in WSNs because of the resource constraint nature of sensor devices. Thus, energy efficient and low latency methodology is required for minimizing the impact of malicious sensor devices. This paper presents a Secure and Load Balanced Routing (SLBR) scheme for heterogeneous clustered based WSNs. SLBR presents a better trust-based security metric that overcomes the problem when sensors keep oscillating from good to bad state and vice versa, and also SLBR balances load among CH. Thus, aids in achieving better security, packet transmission, and energy efficiency performance. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of proposed SLBR model over existing trust-based routing model namely Exponential Cat Swarm Optimization (ECSO). The result attained shows SLBR model attains better performance than ECSO in terms of energy efficiency (i.e., network lifetime considering first sensor device death and total sensor device death), communication overhead, throughput, packet processing latency, malicious sensor device misclassification rate and identification

Energy-aware and secure routing with trust levels for wireless ad hoc and sensor networks

This dissertation focuses on the development of routing algorithms for secure and trusted routing in wireless ad hoc and sensor network. The first paper presents the Trust Level Routing (TLR) protocol, an extension of the optimized energy-delay routing (OEDR) protocol, focusing on the integrity, reliability and survivability of the wireless network...The second paper analyzes both OLSR and TLR in terms of survivability and reliability to emphasize the improved performance of the network in terms of lifetime and proper delivery of data...The third paper proposes a statistical reputation model that uses the watchdog mechanism to observe the cooperation of the neighboring nodes...The last paper presents the results of the hardware implementation of Energy-Efficient Hybrid Key Management --Abstract, page iv

COMITMENT: A Fog Computing Trust Management Approach

none8siAs an extension of cloud computing, fog computing is considered to be relatively more secure than cloud computing due to data being transiently maintained and analyzed on local fog nodes closer to data sources. However, there exist several security and privacy concerns when fog nodes collaborate and share data to execute certain tasks. For example, offloading data to a malicious fog node can result into an unauthorized collection or manipulation of users’ private data. Cryptographic-based techniques can prevent external attacks, but are not useful when fog nodes are already authenticated and part of a networks using legitimate identities. We therefore resort to trust to identify and isolate malicious fog nodes and mitigate security, respectively. In this paper, we present a fog COMputIng Trust manageMENT (COMITMENT) approach that uses quality of service and quality of protection history measures from previous direct and indirect fog node interactions for assessing and managing the trust level of the nodes within the fog computing environment. Using COMITMENT approach, we were able to reduce/identify the malicious attacks/interactions among fog nodes by approximately 66%, while reducing the service response time by approximately 15 s.openAl-khafajiy M.; Baker T.; Asim M.; Guo Z.; Ranjan R.; Longo A.; Puthal D.; Taylor M.Al-khafajiy, M.; Baker, T.; Asim, M.; Guo, Z.; Ranjan, R.; Longo, A.; Puthal, D.; Taylor, M

3R: a reliable multi-agent reinforcement learning based routing protocol for wireless medical sensor networks.

Interest in the Wireless Medical Sensor Network (WMSN) is rapidly gaining attention thanks to recent advances in semiconductors and wireless communication. However, by virtue of the sensitive medical applications and the stringent resource constraints, there is a need to develop a routing protocol to fulfill WMSN requirements in terms of delivery reliability, attack resiliency, computational overhead and energy efficiency. This paper proposes 3R, a reliable multi-agent reinforcement learning routing protocol for WMSN. 3R uses a novel resource-conservative Reinforcement Learning (RL) model to reduce the computational overhead, along with two updating methods to speed up the algorithm convergence. The reward function is re-defined as a punishment, combining the proposed trust management system to defend against well-known dropping attacks. Furthermore, an energy model is integrated with the reward function to enhance the network lifetime and balance energy consumption across the network. The proposed energy model uses only local information to avoid the resource burdens and the security concerns of exchanging energy information. Experimental results prove the lightweightness, attacks resiliency and energy efficiency of 3R, making it a potential routing candidate for WMSN

Swarm Intelligence-Based Bio-Inspired Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are gaining immense popularity as a result of their wide potential applications in industry, military, and academia such as military surveillance, agricultural monitoring, industrial automation, and smart homes. Currently, WSN has garnered tremendous significance as it is has become the core component of the Internet of Things (IOT) area. Modern-day applications need a high level of security and quick response mechanism to deal with the emerging data trends where the response is measured in terms of latency, throughput, and scalability. Further, critical security issues need to be considered due to various types of threats and attacks WSNs are exposed to as they are deployed in harsh and hostile environments unattended in most of the mission critical applications. The fact that a complex sensor network consisting of simple computing units has similarities with specific animal communities, whose members are often very simple but produce together more sophisticated and capable entities. Thus, from an algorithmic viewpoint, bio-inspired framework such as swarm intelligence technology may provide valuable alternative to solve the large scale optimization problems that occur in wireless sensor networks. Self-organization, on the other hand, can be useful for distributed control and management tasks. In this chapter, swarm intelligence and social insects-based approaches developed to deal with a bio-inspired networking framework are presented. The proposed approaches are designed to tackle the challenges and issues in the WSN field such as large scale networking, dynamic nature, resource constraints, and the need for infrastructure-less and autonomous operation having the capabilities of self-organization and survivability. This chapter covers three phases of the research work carried out toward building a framework. First phase involves development of SIBER-XLP model, Swarm Intelligence Based Efficient Routing protocol for WSN with Improved Pheromone Update Model, and Optimal Forwarder Selection Function which chooses an optimal path from source to the sink to forward the packets with the sole objective to improve the network lifetime by balancing the energy among the nodes in the network and at the same time selecting good quality links along the path to guarantee that node energy is not wasted due to frequent retransmissions. The second phase of the work develops a SIBER-DELTA model, which represents Swarm Intelligence Based Efficient Routing protocol for WSN taking into account Distance, Energy, Link Quality, and Trust Awareness. WSNs are prone to behavior related attacks due to the misbehavior of nodes in forwarding the packets. Hence, trust aware routing is important not only to protect the information but also to protect network performance from degradation and protect network resources from undue consumption. Finally, third phase of the work involves the development of SIBER-DELTAKE hybrid model, an improved ACO-KM-ECC trust aware routing protocol based on ant colony optimization technique using K-Medoids (KM) algorithm for the formation of clusters with Elliptical Curve Cryptography (ECC). KM yields efficiency in setting up a cluster head and ECC mechanism enables secure routing with key generation and management. This model takes into account various critical parameters like distance, energy, link quality, and trust awareness to discover efficient routing

A reliable trust-aware reinforcement learning based routing protocol for wireless medical sensor networks.

Interest in the Wireless Medical Sensor Network (WMSN) is rapidly gaining attention thanks to recent advances in semiconductors and wireless communication. However, by virtue of the sensitive medical applications and the stringent resource constraints, there is a need to develop a routing protocol to fulfill WMSN requirements in terms of delivery reliability, attack resiliency, computational overhead and energy efficiency. This doctoral research therefore aims to advance the state of the art in routing by proposing a lightweight, reliable routing protocol for WMSN. Ensuring a reliable path between the source and the destination requires making trustaware routing decisions to avoid untrustworthy paths. A lightweight and effective Trust Management System (TMS) has been developed to evaluate the trust relationship between the sensor nodes with a view to differentiating between trustworthy nodes and untrustworthy ones. Moreover, a resource-conservative Reinforcement Learning (RL) model has been proposed to reduce the computational overhead, along with two updating methods to speed up the algorithm convergence. The reward function is re-defined as a punishment, combining the proposed trust management system to defend against well-known dropping attacks. Furthermore, with a view to addressing the inborn overestimation problem in Q-learning-based routing protocols, we adopted double Q-learning to overcome the positive bias of using a single estimator. An energy model is integrated with the reward function to enhance the network lifetime and balance energy consumption across the network. The proposed energy model uses only local information to avoid the resource burdens and the security concerns of exchanging energy information. Finally, a realistic trust management testbed has been developed to overcome the limitations of using numerical analysis to evaluate proposed trust management schemes, particularly in the context of WMSN. The proposed testbed has been developed as an additional module to the NS-3 simulator to fulfill usability, generalisability, flexibility, scalability and high-performance requirements

Optimising routing and trustworthiness of ad hoc networks using swarm intelligence

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philsophy and awarded by Brunel UniversityThis thesis proposes different approaches to address routing and security of MANETs using swarm technology. The mobility and infrastructure-less of MANET as well as nodes misbehavior compose great challenges to routing and security protocols of such a network. The first approach addresses the problem of channel assignment in multichannel ad hoc networks with limited number of interfaces, where stable route are more preferred to be selected. The channel selection is based on link quality between the nodes. Geographical information is used with mapping algorithm in order to estimate and predict the links’ quality and routes life time, which is combined with Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm to find most stable route with high data rate. As a result, a better utilization of the channels is performed where the throughput increased up to 74% over ASAR protocol. A new smart data packet routing protocol is developed based on the River Formation Dynamics (RFD) algorithm. The RFD algorithm is a subset of swarm intelligence which mimics how rivers are created in nature. The protocol is a distributed swarm learning approach where data packets are smart enough to guide themselves through best available route in the network. The learning information is distributed throughout the nodes of the network. This information can be used and updated by successive data packets in order to maintain and find better routes. Data packets act like swarm agents (drops) where they carry their path information and update routing information without the need for backward agents. These data packets modify the routing information based on different network metrics. As a result, data packet can guide themselves through better routes. In the second approach, a hybrid ACO and RFD smart data packet routing protocol is developed where the protocol tries to find shortest path that is less congested to the destination. Simulation results show throughput improvement by 30% over AODV protocol and 13% over AntHocNet. Both delay and jitter have been improved more than 96% over AODV protocol. In order to overcome the problem of source routing introduced due to the use of the ACO algorithm, a solely RFD based distance vector protocol has been developed as a third approach. Moreover, the protocol separates reactive learned information from proactive learned information to add more reliability to data routing. To minimize the power consumption introduced due to the hybrid nature of the RFD routing protocol, a forth approach has been developed. This protocol tackles the problem of power consumption and adds packets delivery power minimization to the protocol based on RFD algorithm. Finally, a security model based on reputation and trust is added to the smart data packet protocol in order to detect misbehaving nodes. A trust system has been built based on the privilege offered by the RFD algorithm, where drops are always moving from higher altitude to lower one. Moreover, the distributed and undefined nature of the ad hoc network forces the nodes to obligate to cooperative behaviour in order not to be exposed. This system can easily and quickly detect misbehaving nodes according to altitude difference between active intermediate nodes

A peer to peer approach to large scale information monitoring

Issued as final reportNational Science Foundation (U.S.