Investigating smart home security : is blockchain the answer?

Smart Home automation is increasingly gaining popularity among current applications of Internet of Things (IoT) due to the convenience and facilities it provides to the home owners. Sensors are employed within the home appliances via wireless connectivity to be accessible remotely by home owners to operate these devices. With the exponential increase of smart home IoT devices in the marketplace such as door locks, light bulbs, power switches etc, numerous security concerns are arising due to limited storage and processing power of such devices, making these devices vulnerable to several attacks. Due to this reason, security implementations in the deployment of these devices has gained popularity among researchers as a critical research area. Moreover, the adoption of traditional security schemes has failed to address the unique security concerns associated with these devices. Blockchain, a decentralised database based on cryptographic techniques, is gaining enormous attention to assure security of IoT systems. The blockchain framework within an IoT system is a fascinating substitute to the traditional centralised models, which has some significant concerns in fulfilling the demand of smart homes security. In this article, we aim to examine the security of smart homes by instigating the adoption of blockchain and exploring some of the currently proposed smart home architectures using blockchain technology. To present our findings, we describe a simple secure smart home framework based on a refined version of blockchain called Consortium blockchain. We highlight the limitations and opportunities of adopting such an architecture. We further evaluate our model and conclude with the results by designing an experimental testbed using a few household IoT devices commonly available in the marketplace. © 2013 IEEE

Network slicing : a next generation 5G perspective

Fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks are projected to bring a major transformation to the current fourth-generation network to support the billions of devices that will be connected to the Internet. 5G networks will enable new and powerful capabilities to support high-speed data rates, better connectivity and system capacity that are critical in designing applications in virtual reality, augmented reality and mobile online gaming. The infrastructure of a network that can support stringent application requirements needs to be highly dynamic and flexible. Network slicing can provide these dynamic and flexible characteristics to a network architecture. Implementing network slicing in 5G requires domain modification of the preexisting network architecture. A network slicing architecture is proposed for an existing 5G network with the aim of enhancing network dynamics and flexibility to support modern network applications. To enable network slicing in a 5G network, we established the virtualisation of the underlying physical 5G infrastructure by utilising technological advancements, such as software-defined networking and network function virtualisation. These virtual networks can fulfil the requirement of multiple use cases as required by creating slices of these virtual networks. Thus, abstracting from the physical resources to create virtual networks and then applying network slicing on these virtual networks enable the 5G network to address the increased demands for high-speed communication