Risk and threat mitigation techniques in internet of things (IoT) environments: a survey

Security in the Internet of Things (IoT) remains a predominant area of concern. Although several other surveys have been published on this topic in recent years, the broad spectrum that this area aims to cover, the rapid developments and the variety of concerns make it impossible to cover the topic adequately. This survey updates the state of the art covered in previous surveys and focuses on defences and mitigations against threats rather than on the threats alone, an area that is less extensively covered by other surveys. This survey has collated current research considering the dynamicity of the IoT environment, a topic missed in other surveys and warrants particular attention. To consider the IoT mobility, a life-cycle approach is adopted to the study of dynamic and mobile IoT environments and means of deploying defences against malicious actors aiming to compromise an IoT network and to evolve their attack laterally within it and from it. This survey takes a more comprehensive and detailed step by analysing a broad variety of methods for accomplishing each of the mitigation steps, presenting these uniquely by introducing a “defence-in-depth” approach that could significantly slow down the progress of an attack in the dynamic IoT environment. This survey sheds a light on leveraging redundancy as an inherent nature of multi-sensor IoT applications, to improve integrity and recovery. This study highlights the challenges of each mitigation step, emphasises novel perspectives, and reconnects the discussed mitigation steps to the ground principles they seek to implement

Reliable and energy efficient scheduling protocols for wireless body area networks (WBAN)

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) facilitates efficient and cost-effective e-health care and well-being applications. The WBAN has unique challenges and features compared to other Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). In addition to battery power consumption, the vulnerability and the unpredicted channel behavior of the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer make channel access a serious problem.MAC protocols based on Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) can improve the reliability and efficiency of WBAN. However, conventional static TDMA techniques adopted by IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.6 do not sufficiently consider the channel status or the buffer requirements of the nodes within heterogeneous contexts. Although there are some solutions that have been proposed to alleviate the effect of the deep fade in WBAN channel by adopting dynamic slot allocation, these solutions still suffer from some reliability and energy efficiency issues and they do not avoid channel deep fading.This thesis presents novel and generic TDMA based techniques to improve WBAN reliability and energy efficiency. The proposed techniques synchronise nodes adaptively whilst tackling their channel and buffer status in normal and emergency contexts. Extensive simulation experiments using various traffic rates and time slot lengths demonstrate that the proposed techniques improve the reliability and the energy efficiency compared to the de-facto standards of WBAN, i.e. the IEEE 802.15.4 and the IEEE 802.15.6. In normal situations, the proposed techniques reduce packet loss up to 61% and 68% compared to the IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.6 respectively. They also reduce energy consumption up to 7.3%. In emergencies, however, the proposed techniques reduce packets loss up to 63.4% and 90% with respect to their counterparts in IEEE 802.15.4 and 802.15.6. The achieved results confirm the significant enhancements made by the developed scheduling techniques to promote the reliability and energy efficiency of WBAN, opening up promising doors towards new horizons and applications

Reliability and Energy Efficiency Enhancement for Emergency-Aware Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN)

Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols based on Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) can improve the reliability and efficiency of WBAN. However, traditional static TDMA techniques adopted by IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.6 do not sufficiently consider the channel status or the buffer requirements of the nodes within heterogeneous contexts. Although there are some solutions that have been proposed to alleviate the effect of the deep fade in WBAN channel by adopting dynamic slot allocation, these solutions still suffer from some reliability and energy efficiency issues and they do not avoid channel deep fading. This paper presents two novel and generic TDMA based techniques to improve WBAN reliability and energy efficiency. Both techniques synchronize nodes adaptively whilst tackling their channel and buffer status in normal and emergency contexts. Extensive simulation experiments using various traffic rates and time slot lengths demonstrate that the proposed techniques improve the reliability and the energy efficiency compared to IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.15.6 in both situations, the normal and emergency contexts. This improvement has been achieved in terms of packet loss, up to 90% and energy consumption, up to 13%, confirming the significant enhancements made by the developed scheduling techniques

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN): A Survey on Reliability, Fault Tolerance, and Technologies Coexistence

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has been a key element in e-health to monitor bodies. This technology enables new applications under the umbrella of different domains, including the medical field, the entertainment and ambient intelligence areas. This survey paper places substantial emphasis on the concept and key features of the WBAN technology. First, the WBAN concept is introduced and a review of key applications facilitated by this networking technology is provided. The study then explores a wide variety of communication standards and methods deployed in this technology. Due to the sensitivity and criticality of the data carried and handled by WBAN, fault tolerance is a critical issue and widely discussed in this paper. Hence, this survey investigates thoroughly the reliability and fault tolerance paradigms suggested for WBANs. Open research and challenging issues pertaining to fault tolerance, coexistence and interference management and power consumption are also discussed along with some suggested trends in these aspect

Reliability and energy efficiency enhancement in wireless body area networks for e-health

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has been a potential avenue for future digitized healthcare systems. WBAN has unique challenges and features compared to other wireless sensor networks. In addition to battery power consumption, the vulnerability and the unpredicted channel behaviour make channel access a serious problem. Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols can help in achieving a reliable and energy efficient WBAN. IEEE 802.15.4 provides TDMA based mechanisms to save energy consumption. However, both contention-free and inactive periods are static and do not consider channel status or nodes reliability requirements. Hence, this paper presents two IEEE 802.15.4 TDMA based techniques to improve WBAN reliability and energy efficiency. The first technique allows nodes to avoid channel deep fade by distributing adaptively their sleep period during their active period according to their channel status. Thereafter, in the second technique, nodes are dynamically allocated time slots according to their requirements, which depend on their link's status. The proposed techniques are evaluated within various traffic rates and their performances are compared with the legacy IEEE 802.15.4 MAC. Results reveal that the proposed techniques are able to promote the WBAN reliability and energy efficiency