Understanding the Performance of Software Defined Wireless Sensor Networks under Denial of Service Attack

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are formed from restricted devices and are known to be vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) security attacks. In parallel, software-defined networking has been identified as a solution for many WSN challenges with respect to flexibility and reuse. Conversely, the SDN control plane centralization may bring about new security threats and vulnerabilities. In this work, we perform a traffic analysis of software-defined WSN (SDWSN) in order to gain understanding of the network's performance when it is under certain types of DoS attacks. In particular, we consider three different DoS scenarios of increasing aggressiveness: (i) false flow requests DoS, (ii) false data flow forwarding DoS, and, (iii) false neighbor information passing DoS. Our simulation results for the latter two types of attack showed significant changes both in the average value and the variance of the delivery rate and the overall overhead. These results demonstrate that it is possible to identify when a SDWSN is under a particular type of DoS, by monitoring the respective quantities

Can You Hear Me? A Metric for Link Asymmetry

The Internet of Things is a networking paradigm aiming to provide computing pervasiveness to our everyday lives. A key component to the Internet of Things is low power networks that gather information from the environment. Low power networks are prone to asymmetric and unidirectional links. Measuring the level of asymmetry and understanding its sources are key steps to successfully deploying sensor networks and the Internet of Things. Our first contribution is a new metric to assess link asymmetry, one which takes into account the instantaneous delivery success probability. Next, we study the influence of four factors on link asymmetry in light of our asymmetry metric, namely, relative distance, output power, relative position, and hardware heterogeneity. With our unique method, we show that all four factors impact link asymmetry

Network Metrics Detection to Support Internet of Things Application Orchestration

Software DefinedWireless Sensor Networks (SDWSN) play an important role to serve as an infrastructure to Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In order to improve coverage, reduce costs, and make better use of the available resources, sharing the infrastructure among multiple applications is necessary. Works in the literature aim to enable resource sharing by allocating applications dynamically according to the resources available on the node. However, these works do not monitor if a node stops complying with application requirements once the application is allocated. Thus, network metrics detection is essential to identify nodes that are not able to comply with the application requirements. In this paper, we present the IT-SDN Manager architecture which is composed of a monitoring module and a resource orchestrator. The monitoring module monitors the network metrics, enabling the orchestrator to identify nodes that reach a certain threshold for energy available and packet loss. This threshold configuration depends on the metric characteristics. For packet loss, we present a study showing how it should be defined according to the network size and applications executed in the network. In order to evaluate the orchestrator detection rate, we set two application requirements to identify nodes that reach 90% of available energy and packet loss greater than the obtained threshold for each scenario studied. Results from the simulations executed show that the resource orchestrator detects all the nodes that reach the available energy threshold, and at least 85%, with an average of 97%, of the nodes that reach the packet loss threshold

Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Networks Approach: Southbound Protocol and Its Performance Evaluation

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has been identified as a promising network paradigm for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and the Internet of Things. It is a key tool for enabling Sensing as a Service, which provides infrastructure sharing thus reducing operational costs. While a few proposals on SDN southbound protocols designed for WSN are found in the literature, they lack adequate performance analysis. In this paper, we review ITSDN main features and present a performance evaluation with all the sensing nodes transmitting data periodically. We conducted a number of experiments varying the number of nodes and assessing the impact of flow table maximum capacity. We assessed the metrics of data delivery, data delay, control overhead and energy consumption in order to show the tradeoffs of using IT-SDN in comparison to the IETF RPL routing protocol. We discuss the main challenges still faced by IT-SDN in larger WSN, and how they could be addressed to make IT-SDN use worthwhile

Sensing as a Service: Secure Wireless Sensor Network Infrastructure Sharing for the Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) andWireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are composed of devices capable of sensing/actuation, communication and processing. They are valuable technology for the development of applications in several areas, such as environmental, industrial and urban monitoring and processes controlling. Given the challenges of different protocols and technologies used for communication, resource constrained devices nature, high connectivity and security requirements for the applications, the main challenges that need to be addressed include: secure communication between IoT devices, network resource management and the protected implementation of the security mechanisms. In this paper, we present a secure Software-Defined Networking (SDN) based framework that includes: communication protocols, node task programming middleware, communication and computation resource management features and security services. The communication layer for the constrained devices considers IT-SDN as its basis. Concerning security, we address the main services, the type of algorithms to achieve them, and why their secure implementation is needed. Lastly, we showcase how the Sensing as a Service paradigm could enable WSN usage in more environments

Characterizing energy consumption in a visual sensor network testbed

Abstract — In this work we characterize the energy consumption of a visual sensor network testbed. Each node in the testbed consists of a ”single-board computer”, namely Crossbow’s Stargate, equipped with a wireless network card and a webcam. We assess energy consumption of activities representative of the target application (e.g., perimeter surveillance) using a benchmark that runs (individual and combinations of) “basic” tasks such as processing, flash memory access, image acquisition, and communication over the network. In our characterization, we consider the various hardware states the system switches through as it executes these benchmarks, e.g., different radio modes (sleep, idle, transmission, reception), and webcam modes (off, on, and acquiring image). We report both steady-state and transient energy consumption behavior obtained by direct measurements of current with a digital multimeter. We validate our measurements against results obtained using the Stargate’s on-board energy consumption measuring capabilities. I

Modeling Energy Consumption in Single-Hop IEEE 802.11 Ad Hoc Networks

This paper presents an analytical model to predict energy consumption in saturated IEEE 802.11 single-hop ad hoc networks under ideal channel conditions. The model we introduce takes into account the different operational modes of the IEEE 802.11 DCF MAC, and is validated against packetlevel simulations. In contrast to previous works that attempted to characterize the energy consumption of IEEE 802.11 cards in isolated, contention-free channels (i.e., single sender/receiver pair), this paper investigates the extreme opposite case, i.e., when nodes need to contend for channel access under saturation conditions. In such scenarios, our main findings include: (1) contrary to what most previous results indicate, the radio's transmit mode has marginal impact on overall energy consumption, while other modes (receive, idle, etc.) are responsible for most of the energy consumed; (2) the energy cost to transmit useful data increases almost linearly with the network size; and (3) transmitting large payloads is more energy efficient under saturation conditions

A survey on key management mechanisms for distributed Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have a vast field of applications, including deployment in hostile environments. Thus, the adoption of security mechanisms is fundamental. However, the extremely constrained nature of sensors and the potentially dynamic behavior of WSNs hinder the use of key management mechanisms commonly applied in modern networks. For this reason, many lightweight key management solutions have been proposed to overcome these constraints. In this paper, we review the state of the art of these solutions and evaluate them based on metrics adequate for WSNs. We focus on pre-distribution schemes well-adapted for homogeneous networks (since this is a more general network organization), thus identifying generic features that can improve some of these metrics. We also discuss some challenges in the area and future research directions. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Brazilian National Council for Scientific & Technological Development (CNPq)[312005/2006-7]Research and Development Centre, Ericsson Telecomunicacoes S.A., Brazi