Master of Science

thesisCurrently, few methods exist to accurately model a human motion inside a monitored area. Most of the approaches that exist depend on some kind of boolean data from sensors that tell the presence or absence of person a at a given instant of time near a particular sensor. Using that information, some systems can then track a person across the area at di erent timestamps. Furthermore, for most existing approaches, the accuracy drops rapidly as the number of persons in the image increases. The sensors used in such settings are usually expensive. Not much work has been done to build a similar system based on inexpensive radio sensors. As there is no way for our radio sensors to provide information as to whether a person is present at a location, we need to extract it from the data using computer vision and machine learning techniques. However, it is not easy in such a system to model the noise component accurately. Therefore, we provide a probabilistic model to decide whether a detected blob is noise or an actual person. In our work, we exploit the fact that images do not change by much between successive timeframes and use this to detect and track multiple persons in a monitored area with a reasonably high accuracy. We use location and count of persons in historical images, and their similarity with the current image to calculate the new locations and count

Secure location-aware communications in energy-constrained wireless networks

Wireless ad hoc network has enabled a variety of exciting civilian, industrial and military applications over the past few years. Among the many types of wireless ad hoc networks, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has gained popularity because of the technology development for manufacturing low-cost, low-power, multi-functional motes. Compared with traditional wireless network, location-aware communication is a very common communication pattern and is required by many applications in WSNs. For instance, in the geographical routing protocol, a sensor needs to know its own and its neighbors\u27 locations to forward a packet properly to the next hop. The application-aware communications are vulnerable to many malicious attacks, ranging from passive eavesdropping to active spoofing, jamming, replaying, etc. Although research efforts have been devoted to secure communications in general, the properties of energy-constrained networks pose new technical challenges: First, the communicating nodes in the network are always unattended for long periods without physical maintenance, which makes their energy a premier resource. Second, the wireless devices usually have very limited hardware resources such as memory, computation capacity and communication range. Third, the number of nodes can be potentially of very high magnitude. Therefore, it is infeasible to utilize existing secure algorithms designed for conventional wireless networks, and innovative mechanisms should be designed in a way that can conserve power consumption, use inexpensive hardware and lightweight protocols, and accommodate with the scalability of the network. In this research, we aim at constructing a secure location-aware communication system for energy-constrained wireless network, and we take wireless sensor network as a concrete research scenario. Particularly, we identify three important problems as our research targets: (1) providing correct location estimations for sensors in presence of wormhole attacks and pollution attacks, (2) detecting location anomalies according to the application-specific requirements of the verification accuracy, and (3) preventing information leakage to eavesdroppers when using network coding for multicasting location information. Our contributions of the research are as follows: First, we propose two schemes to improve the availability and accuracy of location information of nodes. Then, we study monitoring and detection techniques and propose three lightweight schemes to detect location anomalies. Finally, we propose two network coding schemes which can effectively prevent information leakage to eavesdroppers. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our schemes in enhancing security of the system. Compared to previous works, our schemes are more lightweight in terms of hardware cost, computation overhead and communication consumptions, and thus are suitable for energy-constrained wireless networks

Distance-Based and Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) comprises small sensor nodes with limited energy capabilities. The power constraints of WSNs necessitate efficient energy utilization to extend the overall network lifetime of these networks. We propose a distance-based and low-energy adaptive clustering (DISCPLN) protocol to streamline the green issue of efficient energy utilization in WSNs. We also enhance our proposed protocol into the multi-hop-DISCPLN protocol to increase the lifetime of the network in terms of high throughput with minimum delay time and packet loss. We also propose the mobile-DISCPLN protocol to maintain the stability of the network. The modelling and comparison of these protocols with their corresponding benchmarks exhibit promising results

Threatening National Security or Bridging the Digital Divide? A Case Study of Huawei’s Expansion in Brazil

China’s digital footprint has been expanding rapidly in Latin America in the last two decades. Neither the U.S.-China tech war nor the U.S.-led global campaign aimed at Chinese tech firms seemed to be able to reverse the trend. Much of the policy discussion in the western media surrounding China’s digital expansion focuses on the supply side, emphasizing the potential risks of adopting Chinese technologies. Yet there remains scant research on the demand side— namely, how policymakers in developing countries perceive Chinese tech firms and how they maneuver amid the intensifying rivalry between the U.S. and China. Why did Chinese tech firms become key telecommunication equipment providers for Latin America despite geopolitical headwinds? To shed light on the issue, my research examines local stakeholders’ perceptions of Chinese tech firms and their choices between development and national security. Employing a case study of Huawei’s expansion in Brazil, I argue that the lack of political consensus on banning Huawei, the prohibitive costs of replacing Huawei, Brazil’s priority of development over security concerns, and China’s vaccine diplomacy enabled the Chinese tech giant to gain a firm foothold in Brazil. Instead of perceiving Chinese technologies as a security threat, major Brazilian regulators and internet service providers consider Huawei as an opportunity for them to bridge the digital divide.https://dc.suffolk.edu/rifellows/1004/thumbnail.jp

Strategic Posturing of China in IOR: Implications for Regional Peace and Stability

China has been working on a modernization plan for its military. Particularly, the People’s Liberation Army-Navy (PLAN) has been the focus of modernization due to China’s seaward economic growth and development for protecting its maritime economic interests. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is an example of strategic envisioning which has multiple facades besides dividends. Since China has a massive trade volume transiting Indian Ocean Region, PLAN has increased engagement in this region. Its modernization including its naval capabilities, surface and underwater vessels, unmanned maritime vehicles (UMVs), acoustic systems for information, and other technological advancements has made China’s strategic posture in IOR dynamic and is threatening India’s intrinsic naval supremacy in the region with certain implications over regional peace and stability. This is exploratory research conducted to determine the nature of naval competition and the resulting balance of power to identify implications for regional peace and stability