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

Survey of Spectrum Sharing for Inter-Technology Coexistence

Increasing capacity demands in emerging wireless technologies are expected to be met by network densification and spectrum bands open to multiple technologies. These will, in turn, increase the level of interference and also result in more complex inter-technology interactions, which will need to be managed through spectrum sharing mechanisms. Consequently, novel spectrum sharing mechanisms should be designed to allow spectrum access for multiple technologies, while efficiently utilizing the spectrum resources overall. Importantly, it is not trivial to design such efficient mechanisms, not only due to technical aspects, but also due to regulatory and business model constraints. In this survey we address spectrum sharing mechanisms for wireless inter-technology coexistence by means of a technology circle that incorporates in a unified, system-level view the technical and non-technical aspects. We thus systematically explore the spectrum sharing design space consisting of parameters at different layers. Using this framework, we present a literature review on inter-technology coexistence with a focus on wireless technologies with equal spectrum access rights, i.e. (i) primary/primary, (ii) secondary/secondary, and (iii) technologies operating in a spectrum commons. Moreover, we reflect on our literature review to identify possible spectrum sharing design solutions and performance evaluation approaches useful for future coexistence cases. Finally, we discuss spectrum sharing design challenges and suggest future research directions

JamLab: Augmenting Sensornet Testbeds with Realistic and Controlled Interference Generation

Radio interference drastically affects the performance of sensor-net communications, leading to packet loss and reduced energy-efficiency. As an increasing number of wireless devices operates on the same ISM frequencies, there is a strong need for understanding and debugging the performance of existing sensornet protocols under interference. Doing so requires a low-cost flexible testbed infrastructure that allows the repeatable generation of a wide range of interference patterns. Unfortunately, to date, existing sensornet testbeds lack such capabilities, and do not permit to study easily the coexistence problems between devices sharing the same frequencies. This paper addresses the current lack of such an infrastructure by using off-the-shelf sensor motes to record and playback interference patterns as well as to generate customizable and repeat-able interference in real-time. We propose and develop JamLab: a low-cost infrastructure to augment existing sensornet testbeds with accurate interference generation while limiting the overhead to a simple upload of the appropriate software. We explain how we tackle the hardware limitations and get an accurate measurement and regeneration of interference, and we experimentally evaluate the accuracy of JamLab with respect to time, space, and intensity. We further use JamLab to characterize the impact of interference on sensornet MAC protocols

Energy-Delay Tradeoff and Dynamic Sleep Switching for Bluetooth-Like Body-Area Sensor Networks

Wireless technology enables novel approaches to healthcare, in particular the remote monitoring of vital signs and other parameters indicative of people's health. This paper considers a system scenario relevant to such applications, where a smart-phone acts as a data-collecting hub, gathering data from a number of wireless-capable body sensors, and relaying them to a healthcare provider host through standard existing cellular networks. Delay of critical data and sensors' energy efficiency are both relevant and conflicting issues. Therefore, it is important to operate the wireless body-area sensor network at some desired point close to the optimal energy-delay tradeoff curve. This tradeoff curve is a function of the employed physical-layer protocol: in particular, it depends on the multiple-access scheme and on the coding and modulation schemes available. In this work, we consider a protocol closely inspired by the widely-used Bluetooth standard. First, we consider the calculation of the minimum energy function, i.e., the minimum sum energy per symbol that guarantees the stability of all transmission queues in the network. Then, we apply the general theory developed by Neely to develop a dynamic scheduling policy that approaches the optimal energy-delay tradeoff for the network at hand. Finally, we examine the queue dynamics and propose a novel policy that adaptively switches between connected and disconnected (sleeping) modes. We demonstrate that the proposed policy can achieve significant gains in the realistic case where the control "NULL" packets necessary to maintain the connection alive, have a non-zero energy cost, and the data arrival statistics corresponding to the sensed physical process are bursty.Comment: Extended version (with proofs details in the Appendix) of a paper accepted for publication on the IEEE Transactions on Communication

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

이기종 IoT 기기간 협력을 통한 네트워크 성능 향상

학위논문(박사) -- 서울대학교대학원 : 공과대학 전기·정보공학부, 2022. 8. 박세웅.The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a daily life by pioneering applications in various fields. In this dissertation, we consider increasing transmission data rate with energy efficiency, extending transmission coverage with low power, and improving reliability in congested frequency bands as three challenges to expanding IoT applications. We address two issues to overcome these challenges. First, we design a layered network system with a new structure that combines Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and Wi-Fi networks in a multi-hop network. Based on the system, we propose methods to increase data rate with energy efficiency and extend transmission coverage in a low-power situation. We implement the proposed system in the Linux kernel and evaluate the performance through an indoor testbed. As a result, we confirmed that the proposed system supports high data traffic and reduces average power consumption in the testbed compared to the existing single BLE/Wi-Fi ad-hoc network in a multi-hop situation. Second, we tackle the adaptive frequency hopping (AFH) problem of BLE through cross-technology communication (CTC) and channel weighting. We design the AFH scheme that weights the channels used by BLE devices with improving reliability in the congested bands of both Wi-Fi and BLE devices. We evaluate the proposed scheme through prototype experiments and simulations, confirming that the proposed scheme increases the packet reception rate of BLE in the congested ISM band compared to the existing AFH algorithm.사물인터넷은 현재 다양한 영역에서 application을 개척하여 생활화되어 왔다. 이 학위 논문에서는 사물인터넷의 응용 사례 확장을 위해 에너지 효율적인 전송 속도 향상, 저전력 상황에서의 전송 범위 확장, 혼잡한 대역에서의 신뢰성 향상을 새로운 도전 과제로 삼고, 이러한 도전 과제를 극복할 두 가지 주제를 다룬다. 첫째, 다중 홉 네트워크 상황에서의 블루투스 저전력과 Wi-Fi 네트워크를 결합 한 새로운 구조의 계층적 네트워크 시스템을 설계하고 이에 기반한 에너지 효율적인 전송 속도 향상 및 저전력 상황에서의 전송 범위확장을 제안한다. 제안된 시스템은 Linux 커널에 구현하여 실내 테스트베드를 통해 성능을 평가한다. 결과적으로 제안 한 기법이 다중 홉 상황에서 기존 블루투스 저전력/Wi-Fi 단일 ad-hoc 네트워크와 비교하여 높은 데이터 트래픽을 지원하며, 테스트베드에서의 평균 전력 소비를 줄 이는 것을 확인한다. 둘째, Cross-technology Communication (CTC)과 채널 가중치를 통한 블루투스 저전력의 Adaptive Frequency Hopping (AFH) 문제를 해결한다. 최종적으로 블루투스 저전력 기기가 사용하는 채널에 가중치를 두는 AFH 기법을 설계하여 Wi-Fi 와 블루투스 저전력 기기가 모두 혼잡한 대역에서의 신뢰성을 향상한다. 프로토타입 실험과 시뮬레이션을 통해 제안한 기법이 기존의 AFH 기법과 비교하여 혼잡한 ISM 대역에서 블루투스 저전력의 패킷 수신율을 증가시키는 것을 확인한다.1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation 1 1.2 Contributions and Outline 2 2 Wi-BLE: On Cooperative Operation of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy under IPv6 4 2.1 Introduction 4 2.2 Related Work 7 2.2.1 Multihop Connectivity for Wi-Fi or BLE 7 2.2.2 Multi-radio Operation 11 2.3 System Overview 13 2.3.1 Control Plane 13 2.3.2 Data Plane 16 2.3.3 Overall Procedure 16 2.4 MABLE: AODV Routing over BLE 17 2.4.1 BLE Channel Utilization 17 2.4.2 Joint Establishment of Route and Connection 20 2.4.3 Link Quality Metric for BLE Data Channels 22 2.4.4 Bi-directional Route Error Propagation 25 2.5 Wi-BLE: Wi-Fi Ad-hoc over BLE 27 2.5.1 Radio Selection 27 2.5.2 Routing and Radio Wake-up for Wi-Fi 30 2.6 Evaluation 32 2.6.1 BLE Routing 33 2.6.2 Wi-Fi Routing over BLE 35 2.6.3 Radio Selection 38 2.7 Summary 40 3 WBC-AFH: Direct Wi-Fi to BLE Communication based AFH 41 3.1 Introduction 41 3.2 Background 45 3.2.1 Frequency hopping in BLE 45 3.2.2 Cross Technology Communication 47 3.3 Proposed AFH 49 3.3.1 CTC based informing 50 3.3.2 Weighted channel select 51 3.3.3 Hopping set size optimization 52 3.3.4 WBC-AFH 54 3.4 Evaluation 57 3.4.1 Setup 57 3.4.2 Robustness 60 3.4.3 Reliability 61 3.5 Future Work 65 3.6 Summary 66 4 Conclusion 67박