A lightweight framework for secure life-logging in smart environments

As the world becomes an interconnected network where objects and humans interact with each other, new challenges and threats appear in the ecosystem. In this interconnected world, smart objects have an important role in giving users the chance for life-logging in smart environments. However, smart devices have several limitations with regards to memory, resources and computation power, hindering the opportunity to apply well-established security algorithms and techniques for secure life-logging on the Internet of Things (IoT) domain. The need for secure and trustworthy life-logging in smart environments is vital, thus, a lightweight approach has to be considered to overcome the constraints of smart objects. The purpose of this paper is to present in details the current topics of life-logging in smart environments, while describing interconnection issues, security threats and suggesting a lightweight framework for ensuring security, privacy and trustworthy life-logging. In order to investigate the efficiency of the lightweight framework and the impact of the security attacks on energy consumption, an experimental test-bed was developed including two interconnected users and one smart attacker, who attempts to intercept transmitted messages or interfere with the communication link. Several mitigation factors, such as power control, channel assignment and AES-128 encryption were pplied for secure life-logging. Finally, research into the degradation of the consumed energy regarding the described intrusions is presented

Addressing Mobility in Wireless Sensor Media Access Protocol

Handling mobility in wireless sensor networks presents several new new challenges. Techniques developed for other mobile networks, such as mobile phone or mobile adhoc networks can not be applicable, as in these networks energy is not a very critical resource. This paper presents a new adaptive Mobility-aware Sensor MAC protocol (MS-MAC) for mobile sensor applications. In MS-MAC protocol, a node detects its neighbor’s mobility based on a change in its received signal level from the neighbor, or a loss of connection with this neighbor after a timeout period. By propagating mobility pres-ence information, and distance from nearest border node, each node learns its relative distance from the nearest mobile node and from nearest border node. Depending on the mobile node movement direction, the distances from mobile and border nodes, a node may trigger its neighbor search mechanism to quicken the connection setup time. The simulation results show that, the new mobility-aware MAC protocol can work very energy-efficiently when the network is stationary, whereas it performs much better in terms of throughput than the existing sensor MAC (SMAC) protocol in scenarios involving mobile sensors. 1

Chain-Type Wireless Sensor Network for Monitoring Long Range Infrastructures: Architecture and Protocols

We present in this paper an investigation of a special class of wireless sensor networks for monitoring critical infrastructures that may extend for hundreds of miles in distances. Such networks are fundamentally different from traditional sensor networks in that the sensor nodes in this class of networks are deployed along narrowly elongated geographical areas and form a chain-type topology. Based on careful analysis of existing sensor network architectures, we first demonstrate the need to develop new architecture and networking protocols to match the unique topology of chain-type sensor networks. We then propose hierarchical network architecture that consists of clusters of sensor nodes to enable the chain-type sensor networks to be scalable to cover typically long range infrastructures with tolerable delay in network-wide data collection. To maintain energy efficient operations and maximize the lifetime for such a chain-type sensor network, we devise a smart strategy for the deployment of cluster heads. Protocols for network initialization and seamless operations of the chain-type sensor networks are also developed to match the proposed hierarchical architecture and cluster head deployment strategy. Simulations have been carried out to verify the performance of the hierarchical architecture, the smart node deployment strategy, and the corresponding network initialization and operation protocols