Utilizing ZigBee Technology for More Resource-efficient Wireless Networking

Wireless networks have been an essential part of communication in our daily life. Targeted at different applications, a variety of wireless networks have emerged. Due to constrained resources for wireless communications, challenges arise but are not fully addressed. Featured by low cost and low power, ZigBee technology has been developed for years. As the ZigBee technology becomes more and more mature, low-cost embedded ZigBee interfaces have been available off the shelf and their sizes are becoming smaller and smaller. It will not be surprising to see the ZigBee interface commonly embedded in mobile devices in the near future. Motivated by this trend, we propose to leverage the ZigBee technology to improve existing wireless networks. In this dissertation, we classify wireless networks into three categories (i.e., infrastructure-based, infrastructure-less and hybrid networks), and investigate each with a representative network. Practical schemes are designed with the major objective of improving resource efficiency for wireless networking through utilizing ZigBee technology. Extensive simulation and experiment results have demonstrated that network performance can be improved significantly in terms of energy efficiency, throughput, packet delivery delay, etc., by adopting our proposed schemes

A Secure Peer-to-Peer Application Framework

The nature of the Internet has changed dramatically. From a modest research network, it has evolved into one of the most important fabrics of our modern society, affecting the lives of billions each day. We rely on it for everything from performing our daily chores to accessing rich media and keeping in touch with our friends. Despite this change, service provisioning has largely remained intact. Services are provided in a centralized manner, resulting in bottlenecks and vulnerable collections of, often unwittingly, submitted sensitive information. Peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies have the potential to provide a better alternative for future networking. P2P services distribute the load from a single node to a network of peers, relying on the resources of the end-users themselves. Not only does it remove the bottlenecks, it has the potential to provide a more personal and safe networking environment. In this dissertation, we inspect the feasibility and implications of a generic, cross-application, P2P framework. We present the design and implementation of a framework that uses existing infrastructure and advanced networking protocols to create a secure environment. Using this framework, applications are able to benefit from P2P networking without having to deploy new infrastructure or implement complex connection- and identity management. Users benefit from using a single, strong, cross-application identity management and having better control over their data. This improves the trust within the system and enables new ways of dealing with security threats. We demonstrate the feasibility of the framework by evaluating the performance and usability of the prototype implementation. This provides a model for future networking applications and insight into the security and usability issues these will face

End-to-End Resilience Mechanisms for Network Transport Protocols

The universal reliance on and hence the need for resilience in network communications has been well established. Current transport protocols are designed to provide fixed mechanisms for error remediation (if any), using techniques such as ARQ, and offer little or no adaptability to underlying network conditions, or to different sets of application requirements. The ubiquitous TCP transport protocol makes too many assumptions about underlying layers to provide resilient end-to-end service in all network scenarios, especially those which include significant heterogeneity. Additionally the properties of reliability, performability, availability, dependability, and survivability are not explicitly addressed in the design, so there is no support for resilience. This dissertation presents considerations which must be taken in designing new resilience mechanisms for future transport protocols to meet service requirements in the face of various attacks and challenges. The primary mechanisms addressed include diverse end-to-end paths, and multi-mode operation for changing network conditions

Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are penetrating our daily lives, and they are starting to be deployed even in an industrial environment. The research on such industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) considers more stringent requirements of robustness, reliability, and timeliness in each network layer. This Special Issue presents the recent research result on industrial wireless sensor networks. Each paper in this Special Issue has unique contributions in the advancements of industrial wireless sensor network research and we expect each paper to promote the relevant research and the deployment of IWSNs

Secure Data Collection and Analysis in Smart Health Monitoring

Smart health monitoring uses real-time monitored data to support diagnosis, treatment, and health decision-making in modern smart healthcare systems and benefit our daily life. The accurate health monitoring and prompt transmission of health data are facilitated by the ever-evolving on-body sensors, wireless communication technologies, and wireless sensing techniques. Although the users have witnessed the convenience of smart health monitoring, severe privacy and security concerns on the valuable and sensitive collected data come along with the merit. The data collection, transmission, and analysis are vulnerable to various attacks, e.g., eavesdropping, due to the open nature of wireless media, the resource constraints of sensing devices, and the lack of security protocols. These deficiencies not only make conventional cryptographic methods not applicable in smart health monitoring but also put many obstacles in the path of designing privacy protection mechanisms. In this dissertation, we design dedicated schemes to achieve secure data collection and analysis in smart health monitoring. The first two works propose two robust and secure authentication schemes based on Electrocardiogram (ECG), which outperform traditional user identity authentication schemes in health monitoring, to restrict the access to collected data to legitimate users. To improve the practicality of ECG-based authentication, we address the nonuniformity and sensitivity of ECG signals, as well as the noise contamination issue. The next work investigates an extended authentication goal, denoted as wearable-user pair authentication. It simultaneously authenticates the user identity and device identity to provide further protection. We exploit the uniqueness of the interference between different wireless protocols, which is common in health monitoring due to devices\u27 varying sensing and transmission demands, and design a wearable-user pair authentication scheme based on the interference. However, the harm of this interference is also outstanding. Thus, in the fourth work, we use wireless human activity recognition in health monitoring as an example and analyze how this interference may jeopardize it. We identify a new attack that can produce false recognition result and discuss potential countermeasures against this attack. In the end, we move to a broader scenario and protect the statistics of distributed data reported in mobile crowd sensing, a common practice used in public health monitoring for data collection. We deploy differential privacy to enable the indistinguishability of workers\u27 locations and sensing data without the help of a trusted entity while meeting the accuracy demands of crowd sensing tasks

Modeling, Design And Evaluation Of Networking Systems And Protocols Through Simulation

Computer modeling and simulation is a practical way to design and test a system without actually having to build it. Simulation has many benefits which apply to many different domains: it reduces costs creating different prototypes for mechanical engineers, increases the safety of chemical engineers exposed to dangerous chemicals, speeds up the time to model physical reactions, and trains soldiers to prepare for battle. The motivation behind this work is to build a common software framework that can be used to create new networking simulators on top of an HLA-based federation for distributed simulation. The goals are to model and simulate networking architectures and protocols by developing a common underlying simulation infrastructure and to reduce the time a developer has to learn the semantics of message passing and time management to free more time for experimentation and data collection and reporting. This is accomplished by evolving the simulation engine through three different applications that model three different types of network protocols. Computer networking is a good candidate for simulation because of the Internet\u27s rapid growth that has spawned off the need for new protocols and algorithms and the desire for a common infrastructure to model these protocols and algorithms. One simulation, the 3DInterconnect simulator, simulates data transmitting through a hardware k-array n-cube network interconnect. Performance results show that k-array n-cube topologies can sustain higher traffic load than the currently used interconnects. The second simulator, Cluster Leader Logic Algorithm Simulator, simulates an ad-hoc wireless routing protocol that uses a data distribution methodology based on the GPS-QHRA routing protocol. CLL algorithm can realize a maximum of 45% power savings and maximum 25% reduced queuing delay compared to GPS-QHRA. The third simulator simulates a grid resource discovery protocol for helping Virtual Organizations to find resource on a grid network to compute or store data on. Results show that worst-case 99.43% of the discovery messages are able to find a resource provider to use for computation. The simulation engine was then built to perform basic HLA operations. Results show successful HLA functions including creating, joining, and resigning from a federation, time management, and event publication and subscription

Recent Advances in Wireless Communications and Networks

This book focuses on the current hottest issues from the lowest layers to the upper layers of wireless communication networks and provides "real-time" research progress on these issues. The authors have made every effort to systematically organize the information on these topics to make it easily accessible to readers of any level. This book also maintains the balance between current research results and their theoretical support. In this book, a variety of novel techniques in wireless communications and networks are investigated. The authors attempt to present these topics in detail. Insightful and reader-friendly descriptions are presented to nourish readers of any level, from practicing and knowledgeable communication engineers to beginning or professional researchers. All interested readers can easily find noteworthy materials in much greater detail than in previous publications and in the references cited in these chapters