LoRaWAN device security and energy optimization

Resource-constrained devices are commonly connected to a network and become things that make up the Internet of Things (IoT). Many industries are interested in cost-effective, reliable, and cyber secure sensor networks due to the ever-increasing connectivity and benefits of IoT devices. The full advantages of IoT devices are seen in a long-range and remote context. However, current IoT platforms show many obstacles to achieve a balance between power efficiency and cybersecurity. Battery-powered sensor nodes can reliably send data over long distances with minimal power draw by adopting Long-Range (LoRa) wireless radio frequency technology. With LoRa, these devices can stay active for many years due to a low data bit rate and low power draw during device sleep states. An improvement built on top of LoRa wireless technology, Long-Range Wide Area Networks (LoRaWAN), introduces integrity and confidentiality of the data sent within the IoT network. Although data sent from a LoRaWAN device is encrypted, protocol and implementation vulnerabilities still exist within the network, resulting in security risks to the whole system. In this research, solutions to these vulnerabilities are proposed and implemented on a LoRaWAN testbed environment that contains devices, gateways, and servers. Configurations that involve the transmission of data using AES Round Reduction, Join Scheduling, and Metadata Hiding are proposed in this work. A power consumption analysis is performed on the implemented configurations, resulting in a LoRaWAN system that balances cybersecurity and battery life. The resulting configurations may be harnessed for usage in the safe, secure, and efficient provisioning of LoRaWAN devices in technologies such as Smart-Industry, Smart-Environment, Smart-Agriculture, Smart-Universities, Smart-Cities, et

Selective Vulnerability of Neurons in Layer II of the Entorhinal Cortex during Aging and Alzheimer's Disease

All neurons are not created equal. Certain cell populations in specific brain regions are more susceptible to age-related changes that initiate regional and system-level dysfunction. In this respect, neurons in layer II of the entorhinal cortex are selectively vulnerable in aging and Alzheimer's disease (AD). This paper will cover several hypotheses that attempt to account for age-related alterations among this cell population. We consider whether specific developmental, anatomical, or biochemical features of neurons in layer II of the entorhinal cortex contribute to their particular sensitivity to aging and AD. The entorhinal cortex is a functionally heterogeneous environment, and we will also review data suggesting that, within the entorhinal cortex, there is subregional specificity for molecular alterations that may initiate cognitive decline. Taken together, the existing data point to a regional cascade in which entorhinal cortical alterations directly contribute to downstream changes in its primary afferent region, the hippocampus

Transferring the Cost of Higher Education To Students and Families: Who Bears the Greatest Burden?

The statistical results of this study confirm what many in the popular media have been saying. The greatest burden of the increasing level of student debt is falling on middle class families. In addition to income differences, we also find that that there are gender, race and ethnic differences in the burden of student debt. Specifically, these results suggest that the rising burden of student debt will disproportionately fall on females and African Americans. We also find that non-traditional students (older, independent/not living with family of origin, and having their own children) had higher propensity to have debt after college than more traditional college students, although being married tends to neutralize this effect

Development of the young people's conference

This item was digitized by the Internet Archive. Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universityhttps://archive.org/details/developmentofyou00str

A Re-Examination Of The Property Tax Burden

The property tax is the major source of own revenues for most city and county governments, yet economists have had very little definitive information to share with policymakers about the burden that it imposes on local citizens.  This is because most previous studies of property taxes have used a Suits index analysis which does not allow for any independent variables other than income.  We estimate a regression model using current income and various socio-demographic variables in order to take a more fine grained approach.  We use data obtained from the Florida Department of Revenue from 326,976 single family homeowners in four northeast Florida counties geo-coded with the 2010 block group census data.  We find that the property tax is regressive with respect to current income. With respect to demographic variables, we find that homeowners over the age of 65 pay a higher average tax rate based on their current incomes.  African Americans pay a lower tax rate than other races based on their current income. When we combine income and demographic variables to predict the tax rate paid by a hypothetical low socio-economic status household versus a high socio-economic status household, we find that the high SES household pays a higher average tax rate.  Thus, the demographic variables temper the regressivity of the property tax based on current income alone

Testing contrastive inferences from suprasegmental features using offline measures

Speakers add modifiers to the extent that they are informative (Grice 1975); studies using the visual world eye-tracking paradigm find that the use of pre-nominal modifiers (short, big) leads listeners to infer the existence of similar objects differing along that same scale (Grodner & Sedivy 2011; Sedivy et al. 1999). In this study, we probe these contrastive inferences using an offline questionnaire, paired with audio/video stimuli to ask whether similar inferences extend to two types of suprasegmental features: prosodic focus and depictive co-speech gestures. Our results suggest that the presence of a scalar adjective robustly leads to contrastive inferences in this offline forced choice paradigm, and that the robustness of the lexical pattern persists even when prosodic focus would indicate otherwise. Prosodic focus does, however, appear to modulate the contrastive effect of a given pre-nominal modifier. We find that the same pragmatic process fails to extend to depictive co-speech gestures, supporting a semantic analysis of these gestures as generally not-at-issue contributions