AMISEC: Leveraging Redundancy and Adaptability to Secure AmI Applications

Security in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) poses too many challenges due to the inherently insecure nature of wireless sensor nodes. However, there are two characteristics of these environments that can be used effectively to prevent, detect, and confine attacks: redundancy and continuous adaptation. In this article we propose a global strategy and a system architecture to cope with security issues in AmI applications at different levels. Unlike in previous approaches, we assume an individual wireless node is vulnerable. We present an agent-based architecture with supporting services that is proven to be adequate to detect and confine common attacks. Decisions at different levels are supported by a trust-based framework with good and bad reputation feedback while maintaining resistance to bad-mouthing attacks. We also propose a set of services that can be used to handle identification, authentication, and authorization in intelligent ambients. The resulting approach takes into account practical issues, such as resource limitation, bandwidth optimization, and scalability

An evaluation of two distributed deployment algorithms for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

Deployment is important in large wireless sensor networks (WSN), specially because nodes may fall due to failure or battery issues. Mobile WSN cope with deployment and reconfiguration at the same time: nodes may move autonomously: i) to achieve a good area coverage; and ii) to distribute as homogeneously as possible. Optimal distribution is computationally expensive and implies high tra c load, so local, distributed approaches may be preferable. This paper presents an experimental evaluation of role-based and behavior based ones. Results show that the later are better, specially for a large number of nodes in areas with obstacles.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

A network-aware framework for energy-efficient data acquisition in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks enable users to monitor the physical world at an extremely high fidelity. In order to collect the data generated by these tiny-scale devices, the data management community has proposed the utilization of declarative data-acquisition frameworks. While these frameworks have facilitated the energy-efficient retrieval of data from the physical environment, they were agnostic of the underlying network topology and also did not support advanced query processing semantics. In this paper we present KSpot+, a distributed network-aware framework that optimizes network efficiency by combining three components: (i) the tree balancing module, which balances the workload of each sensor node by constructing efficient network topologies; (ii) the workload balancing module, which minimizes data reception inefficiencies by synchronizing the sensor network activity intervals; and (iii) the query processing module, which supports advanced query processing semantics. In order to validate the efficiency of our approach, we have developed a prototype implementation of KSpot+ in nesC and JAVA. In our experimental evaluation, we thoroughly assess the performance of KSpot+ using real datasets and show that KSpot+ provides significant energy reductions under a variety of conditions, thus significantly prolonging the longevity of a WSN

Remotely piloted aircraft systems and a wireless sensors network for radiological accidents

In critical radiological situations, the real time information that we could get from the disaster area becomes of great importance. However, communication systems could be affected after a radiological accident. The proposed network in this research consists of distributed sensors in charge of collecting radiological data and ground vehicles that are sent to the nuclear plant at the moment of the accident to sense environmental and radiological information. Afterwards, data would be analyzed in the control center. Collected data by sensors and ground vehicles would be delivered to a control center using Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) as a message carrier. We analyze the pairwise contacts, as well as visiting times, data collection, capacity of the links, size of the transmission window of the sensors, and so forth. All this calculus was made analytically and compared via network simulations.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version