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Summary: IoT‐assisted WSN contains various nodes, which are placed on a huge scale that increases complications. Thus, the challenges and issues of these networks fluctuate as compared to WSNs. Hence, sensor nodes are imperative unit that runs on less energy resources. Hence, devising a robust and energy‐effective protocol for increasing network lifetime is a complex task. This paper devises a novel hybrid optimization‐driven approach for selecting cluster head (CH) in IoT‐assisted WSNs. Initially, the simulation of IoT nodes is done by configuration. Thereafter, the Cluster Head selection is done using a newly devised optimization technique, namely the Taylor‐Political optimizer (Taylor‐PO). Thus, fitness is newly developed by adapting certain attributes like energy, delay, inter and intra‐cluster distance, Link Lifetime (LLT), predicted energy, and delay. Here, the multipath routing is accomplished using Tunicate Swarm gray wolf optimization (TSGWO). Thus, the proposed Taylor‐PO is offered for effective Cluster Head selection along with multipath routing using TSGWO. The proposed Taylor‐PO offered improved performance with smallest delay of 0.006 sec, highest energy of 2.368 J, highest throughput of 494.043 kbps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Human‐centered Internet of things (IoT) systems enable human beings to enjoy the ubiquitous services and play more and more important roles in our life. A common application scenario in human‐centered IoT systems is that two distributed wireless devices from heterogeneous networks want to communicate with each other. However, key generation centers (KGCs) from different networks usually use independent security parameters. It is difficult for two users with different security parameters to establish a common session key. We propose a certificateless key exchange protocol for two different devices managed by different KGCs to address the issue. The security of the proposed protocol is conducted in the random oracle model with the hardness assumption of elliptic curve computational Diffie‐Hellman (ECDH) problem. The main merits of our protocol include the following: (a) it enables users from heterogeneous networks to establish upon a shared session key, (b) it can solve the key escrow problem, (c) it does not use bilinear pairings and obtains computational efficiency, and (d) it achieves stronger security compared with other related protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The Internet of Things (IoT) continues to expand the current Internet, opening the door to a wide range of novel applications. The increasing volume of the IoT requires effective strategies to overcome its challenges. Machine Learning (ML) has led to a growing technology that enables computers to solve problems without the need for knowledge of their intricate details. Over the past years, various ML techniques have been used to efficiently manage IoT networks. Clustering is a technique that has proven its performance in the networking domain. Many works in the literature have studied ML‐based clustering methods for IoT networks, including their main properties, characteristics, underlying technologies, and open issues. In this paper, we focus on topology‐centered ML‐based clustering protocols for IoT networks. Specifically, we investigate the potential benefits of adopting the clustering approach to address several IoT challenges. Moreover, we provide a comprehensive taxonomy of ML‐based clustering algorithms for IoT networks. Finally, we statistically analyze the incorporation of ML techniques for clustering in various IoT systems and highlight the related open issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Recently, much of the wireless personal area network (WPAN) research concerns network protocols, scheduling, and security challenges but the major issue of resource utilization has been very rarely investigated. The design of resource sharing in a network gets more attention when the number of users increases. While optimizing performance, resource utilization plays a critical role. In this paper, the numerical performance of a wireless resource utilization algorithm for a bi‐partite scatternet is presented. This algorithm is focused to enhance the bandwidth allocation and power utilization of wireless scatternets. Every node can communicate with a single neighbor at a time with minimum resources. Finally, the performances of the RUBI algorithm are shown. This algorithm is compared with the existing algorithms such as the load adaptive scheduling algorithm and pseudorandom coordinated scheduling scheme in terms of various parametric metrics like reliability, throughput, collision probability, transmission probability, and signal‐to‐noise ratio (SINR). The proposed L‐RUBI achieves 93.4% of reliability, 93.6% of transmission probability, 91.4% of throughput, 76.8% of collision performance, and 72.2% SINR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: A well‐optimized and well‐performed communication network protocol is necessary to build successful underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWASNs). But for wired and wireless communication, medium access control (MAC) has a great effect on network performance and optimization. But unlike land‐based MAC protocols, underwater MAC protocols come with various challenges and issues like high propagation delay, limited bandwidth for communication signals, large attenuation in network signals, and the high noise level in signals. It is very challenging to build a well‐optimized underwater MAC protocol. Also, in UWASN, sensor nodes are generally divided into sub‐network parts to reduce the propagation delay of data signals. But this creates the problem of non‐uniform traffic load in sensor nodes. So, considering these issues, dynamic hold time MAC (DHT‐MAC) protocol is proposed here. In this protocol, depending on the distance from the central node, sensor nodes are divided into two sub‐network zones (parent node and child node). Depending on the traffic load and propagation delay, the child nodes can change their respective parent nodes dynamically. Advantage of the proposed method is that, if any of the parent nodes stops working, the child node will connect to the nearest parent node. When collecting the data signals, it has been observed that child nodes have a light traffic load compared to parent nodes. So dynamic cooperative transmission MAC (DCT‐MAC) protocol which is a contention‐based MAC protocol has been used in child nodes and as parent nodes have high traffic load, reservation‐based MAC protocol has been used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are receiving increased attention, and several routing protocols have been proposed already by the research community. In such a framework, social aspects and human mobility are important performance enablers, which however are mostly overlooked. In this work, we propose the socially aware CLWPR (SCALE) protocol, significantly enhancing cross‐layer weighted position‐based routing (CLWPR), a routing protocol for urban VANET environments, combining social properties such as trust, influence, and users' individual mobility patterns to its core design in order to support an efficient content dissemination scheme. The design principles of SCALE that rely on both online and offline social metrics quantifying relationships on social networking platforms and opportunistic contacts of nodes due to physical proximity, respectively, are presented, while nodes with close online and offline social relationship are favored as next forwarder nodes. Subsequently we provide the performance evaluation of SCALE against other routing protocols in distributed vehicular networks, employing representative urban scenarios with synthetic and real traffic. It is shown that the proposed approach presents improved performance in terms of Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and throughput when compared with other similar protocols by an average of 37% in scenarios with synthetic dataset and 58% with real dataset for PDR and by an average of 45% in scenarios with synthetic dataset and 61% with real dataset for throughput. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Wireless sensor network (WSN) is frequently being used for increasing the data collection and monitoring critical parameters. Major challenge in WSN design is achieving the better energy efficiency and latency considering the dynamic sink location. Lots of research has been done for improving the performance of WSN systems in wide range of applications. Prime goal of this paper is to evaluate the performance of WSN routing under the grid‐based dynamic sink locations. Later the performance of various existing critical protocols is compared to route data over centralized server. Various applications of WSNs are tabulated along with the sensor utilization. The paper contributed in three passes. Initial contribution of this research is to identify the issues and limitations of present WSN communication technologies. The paper contributed to present a case study to discover the implications of dynamic sink routing for building protocol to extend network's lifetime. The effectiveness of several clustering‐based WSN routing algorithms is first compared in this paper. After that, the protocol with the longest network life is put to the test under a grid‐based dynamic sink routing scenario. The significance of clustering‐based protocols for improving lifetime of the network is evaluated as case study. The clustering‐based energy efficient protocol like low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) and its different variants, PEGASIS, SEP, DEC, their variants, and so on, are compared in this paper. Various performance metrics like network delays, throughput, latency, energy consumption and network lifetime are defined for studying routing protocols. Significance of dynamic sink locations performance is evaluated for Enhanced Distributed Energy Efficient Clustering (EDEEC) protocol. Overall paper covers and reviewed many critical design aspects for WSN networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The vast number of smart cloud applications that communicate with the "things" over a variety of physical networks and communication protocols contribute to the rise of complexity in Internet of Things (IoT) systems. The diversity of end‐user requirements related to the volume of generated data, its variety, and the velocity of its transmission makes quality of service (QoS) provisioning even more crucial and challenging in IoT. This paper provides a comprehensive and up‐to‐date survey of QoS support in IoT networks and communication protocols. An analysis of the QoS‐aware IoT architectures, layer‐dependent QoS metrics, and network resource optimization methods utilized in IoT systems are given. The limitations of the current state‐of‐the‐art studies for efficient delivery of QoS metrics are discussed. The paper concludes with future research directions on end‐to‐end QoS provisioning in IoT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The development of tiny sensor nodes (SNs) has incarnated numerous applications in the field of wireless sensor networks (WSN). These devices became much popular in multidisciplinary research area such as the internet of things (IoT). However, the use of these devices has been restricted due to some constraints like SN energy, data aggregation, quality of service (QoS), reliability, SN deployment, scalability, energy consumption, and many more. Among all these constraints, we focus on SN energy, SN deployment, and energy consumption of the network. Because if the consumption of SN energy is less, network lifetime automatically increases. So, we propose active–passive node topology on deployed SNs which enhance the network lifetime. With the help of the proposed mechanism, the lifetime and stability have increased by 60% and 3%, respectively, as compared with directed diffusion protocol in Experiment 1. In another experiment, the lifetime has increased by 67%, 64%, and 62% as compared with LEACH, NEAP, and DREEP, respectively, in homogeneous environment. The proposed scheme also performed significant improvement in heterogeneous environment. The simulation performance shows that the proposed protocol increases the network lifetime and stability of the network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: With the improvement of industrial informatization, various industrial control system network protocols have also been widely used. The reliability of these protocols will directly affect the safety of industrial control systems. As an effective method that can automatically analyze system reliability, model checking has been widely used in the verification of various safety‐critical systems. In this paper, we propose a modeling design method for industrial control network protocol based on time semantic reconstruction of time state transition matrix (TSTM). In addition, we provide a TSTM model checking method based on linear temporal logic (LTL). In order to effectively alleviate the state space explosion, the method adopts bounded model checking (BMC) technology. Furthermore, we implement a TSTM model verification tool called ICPV. Finally, we apply the above method to the modeling and verification of the industrial control network protocol Powerlink and through a comparison experiment with UPPAAL to illustrate the effectiveness of the method proposed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The handoff process in WiFi networks has a very important role to provide continuity of the service to wireless users where the access points (APs) are in numerous numbers. In traditional WiFi networks, the handoff process takes a few seconds and is initiated by the wireless devices, but these few seconds could be a reason for information loss when dealing with delay sensitive applications. In this paper, we propose a reduced detection and discovery time approach (DeRy), which generates a solution based on software defined WiFi networks (SD‐WiFi). A simple network management protocol (SNMP) manager and received signal strength indicator (RSSI) manager are employed to report the AP traffic conditions and RSSI values to the SDN controller and instead of the wireless devices, the handoff decisions are taken at the controller end. When to initiate the handoff (detection phase) and which destination AP to associate to (discovery phase) are handled by the centralized SDN controller. To implement DeRy, extensive simulation runs are carried out on Mininet‐NS3‐WiFi network simulator. The simulation results show that the DeRy significantly reduces the handoff times by 60–70% and reduces the average number of retransmission by 4–49%, hence maintaining the throughput for delay sensitive applications such as VoIP, when compared to the standard RSSI‐based handoff scheme, channel measurement based access selection scheme (CMAS) and (DL‐SINR) downlink‐signal to interference plus noise ratio AP selection scheme (DASA). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: To design a reliable and energy efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) is an active research area due to its variety of applications. There are many issues associated with underwater acoustic channels including long and variable propagation delay, attenuation, and limited bandwidth which pose significant challenges in the design of MAC protocol. The available sender‐initiated asynchronous preamble‐based MAC protocols for UWSNs are not reliable and energy‐efficient. This is due to the problems caused by transmission of preambles for longer duration and collision of preambles from hidden nodes in sender‐initiated preamble‐based MAC protocols. To resolve these issues, the paper proposed an asynchronous receiver‐initiated preamble‐based MAC protocol named Receiver Preambling with Channel Polling MAC (RPCP‐MAC) protocol for shallow underwater monitoring applications with high data rates. The protocol is proposed to resolve data packet collision and support reliability in an energy‐efficient way without using any transmission schedule. The proposed protocol is based on the following mechanisms. Firstly, receiver preambling mechanism is adopted to reduce idle listening. Secondly, channel polling mechanism is used to determine missing data frame during its sleeping period and to minimize the active time of node and reduces energy wastage. Finally, a back‐off mechanism is applied to resolve collision when preambles are received simultaneously. In addition, performance analysis through Markov chain together with its validation with simulation‐based studies is reported in the paper. Both the analytical and simulation results have demonstrated the reliability achievable with RPCP‐MAC while providing good energy efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Covert channels have been recently the subject of the study in both creation and countermeasure aspects. There are many different ways to embed the covert data in network standards and protocols, especially in wireless networks. MORE (MAC‐independent opportunistic routing) is an opportunistic routing protocol which uses networks coding to enhance routing performance by reducing the repetitions. This protocol can be a suitable medium for covert channel establishment. A middleman covert channel establishment method is proposed in this paper over MORE routing protocol and with the use of network coding. Hidden data are transferred through packet's payload bytes. Covert sender manipulates coding mechanism by calculating packets' coefficients instead of random selection. The proposed covert channel provides the average throughput of 218 and 231 bps, using two different data length approaches which is relatively a good comparing to the previous network layer covert channels. The proposed covert channel is also a covert storage channel and cannot be removed or restricted. Effect of different network characteristics on the proposed method's capacity and security is investigated by a simulation study, and the results are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, Chaudhry et al and Kumari et al proposed an advanced mutual authentication protocol for Session Initiation Protocol on the basis of the protocol of Lu et al. The authors claimed that their schemes can be resistant to various attacks. Unfortunately, we observe some important flaws in their respective schemes. We point out that their schemes are prone to off-line password guessing and privileged insider attacks. To remedy their protocols's drawbacks, in this paper, we present a new improved authentication scheme keeping apart the threats encountered in the design of the schemes of Chaudhry et al and Kumari et al. Furthermore, the security analysis illustrates that our proposed scheme not only removes these drawbacks in their schemes but also can resist all known attacks and provide session key security. We give a heuristic security analysis and also provide the security analysis of the proposed scheme with the help of widespread Burrows-Abadi-Needham Logic. Finally, our scheme is compared with the previously proposed schemes on security and performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the modeling and analysis of a proposed label-quality of service (QoS) switching protocol for heterogeneous robot in a swarm. Establishing the data communication and network in multirobot task allocation is an important aspect in robot collaboration. Instead of passing the data through the cloud network, each robot can be configured as a node in its swarm for intercommunication. This research was conducted to model and propose aggregation and classification methods in a swarm robot network inspired from multiprotocol label switching, namely, label-QoS switching protocol. Each packet of data is forwarded with a proposed 2-side label values that are concerned with addressing and QoS. This proposed protocol was applied in each of the node's routing, and it was set up with forwarding information table. The simulation and analysis were conducted in 2 situations: (1) with a constant n-label switch mobile robot and a number of packet data increasing with time and (2) with a constant number of packet and varying n-label switch mobile robot by time. With reference to the network parameter performances, it shows that the anomaly treatment by the proposed protocol is able to prioritize the data forwarding between the robots at the edge of the swarm with class of service although the robot community at the center is increasing or getting crowded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overlapping is one of the topics in wireless sensor networks that is considered by researchers in the last decades. An appropriate overlapping management system can prolong network lifetime and decrease network recovery time. This paper proposes an intelligent and knowledge-based overlapping clustering protocol for wireless sensor networks, called IKOCP. This protocol uses some of the intelligent and knowledge-based systems to construct a robust overlapping strategy for sensor networks. The overall network is partitioned to several regions by a proposed multicriteria decision-making controller to monitor both small-scale and large-scale areas. Each region is managed by a sink, where the whole network is managed by a base station. The sensor nodes are categorized by various clusters using the low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH)-improved protocol in a way that the value of p is defined by a proposed support vector machine--based mechanism. A proposed fuzzy system determines that noncluster heads associate with several clusters in order to manage overlapping conditions over the network. Cluster heads are changed into clusters in a period by a suggested utility function. Since network lifetime should be prolonged and network traffic should be alleviated, a data aggregation mechanism is proposed to transmit only crucial data packets from cluster heads to sinks. Cluster heads apply a weighted criteria matrix to perform an inner-cluster routing for transmitting data packets to sinks. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol surpasses the existing methods in terms of the number of alive nodes, network lifetime, average time to recover, dead time of first node, and dead time of last node. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: To provide privacy protection in mobile health care system, medical users typically encrypt their personal health information before publishing it to the health care center. And other medical users download, decrypt, and process it using an access control protocol. However, current access control protocols are mainly focusing the privacy of personal health information and lacking the protection for medical users' real identities, leading to a variety of security issues. At the same time, current access control protocols for mobile health care systems are usually based on bilinear map, resulting in high computation costs. Observing the above issues, we introduce a novel access control protocol with privacy‐preserving called Access Control for Mobile Healthcare System (ACMHS). Similar to protocols of this field, ACMHS can provide privacy protection for mobile health care systems. However, different from other well‐known approaches, ACMHS uses pseudonyms instead of real identities, which can provide privacy protection for medical users' real identities. Moreover, to reduce the computation cost of bilinear map, we introduce the algebraic signature to ACMHS and design a novel access control protocol, which is much more efficient than current bilinear‐map‐based protocols. By doing so, ACMHS can achieve high efficiency while still enjoying required security requirements. Experimental results show that ACMHS is feasible for real‐world applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Communication protocols in vehicular sensor networks (VSNs) in urban areas play an important role in intelligent transport systems applications. Many cross‐layer communication protocol studies are originated from topology‐based algorithms, which is not suitable for the frequently changing computational scenario. In addition, the influence factors that have been considered for VSNs routing are not enough. With these aspects in mind, this paper proposes a multifactor cross‐layer position‐based routing protocol for VSNs to improve reliability and efficiency in message delivery. Considering the complex intersection environment, the algorithm for vehicles selection at intersections (called AVSI) is further proposed, in which comprehensive factors are taken into account including the position and direction of vehicle, the vehicle density, the signal‐to‐noise‐plus‐interference ratio, and the frame error rate in MAC layer. Meanwhile, the dynamic HELLO_STREAM broadcasting system with the various vehicle speeds is proposed to increase the decisions accuracy. Experimental results in network simulator 3 show the advantage of multifactor cross‐layer position‐based routing protocol over traditional state‐of‐the‐art algorithms in terms of packet delivery ratio, overhead, and the mean end‐to‐end delay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Opportunistic networks (OppNets) are networks that can be used in situations of sparse network connectivity. Strategies for implementing secure transmission of messages in OppNets offer complex and distinctive problems that are wholly different from traditional networks using TCP/IP protocols for data transmission. In this paper, a security protocol named FuzzyPT is proposed which combats black hole attacks in OppNets. The defense mechanism is based on the information extracted from messages in the buffer, potential threat (PT) messages, and fuzzy logic. Fuzziness aids the system in being adaptive by modeling the character of nodes as either benign or malicious. It provides the network with the ability to judge the character of nodes based on relationships between different parameters instead of basing this decision on fixed conditions. FuzzyPT is observed to reduce erroneous decision‐making and decrease the number of false positives and false negatives in the system. An evolutionary game theoretic model is applied, which analyzes the decision‐making ability of relays in choosing varied strategies while forwarding messages. The evolutionary stable state is computed for the protocol, which verifies the proposition that a majority of the relays will cooperate by forwarding messages. The efficiency of the protocol is judged on various grounds such as delivery probability, network overhead ratio, packets dropped, and transmission latency. It is observed that the proposed game theoretic protocol outperforms an existing acknowledge and evolutionary game theory–based security protocol in terms of all the aforementioned performance characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key exchange protocols play an important role in securing the network communication over an insecure channel. In literature, a large number of key exchange schemes exist. The security of most of them is based on the Diffie-Hellman (DH) problems over a group. But these types of DH problems are solvable in the presence of quantum computers. Thus, we require a non-DH type key exchange scheme that resists to the quantum computers and new modern technologies. In this paper, 2 novel lattice-based authenticated key exchange (LB-AKE) protocols, (1) using a signature-based authenticator and (2) using a signcryption-based authenticator, are devised in Canetti-Krawczyk proof model. The security of proposed protocols depends on the hardness of small integer solutions on the lattice. An extensive proof of security to our claim is given. The proposed AKEs characterize faster computation speed and resistance to the modern complex computers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authenticated key exchange protocols represent an important cryptographic mechanism that enables several parties to communicate securely over an open network. Elashry, Mu, and Susilo proposed an identity-based authenticated key exchange (IBAKE) protocol where different parties establish secure communication by means of their public identities.The authors also introduced a new security notion for IBAKE protocols called resiliency, that is, if the secret shared key is compromised, the entities can generate another shared secret key without establishing a new session between them. They then claimed that their IBAKE protocol satisfies this security notion. We analyze the security of their protocol and prove that it has a major security flaw, which renders it insecure against an impersonation attack. We also disprove the resiliency property of their scheme by proposing an attack where an adversary can compute any shared secret key if just one secret bit is leaked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the random access procedure of Universal Mobile Telecommunications System network is investigated. We have proposed a model based on communicating timed automata that represents the main functions related to the random access procedure including the user equipment, the base station (node B or BTS), and the channel. Then, we have used computational tree logic formula to specify the proprieties to be verified. The model and the formulas serve as inputs to the model checker, which is used as a verification engine, ie, UPPAAL and SPIN. The formal verification approach shows that the protocol has several drawbacks that may not be detected by simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid demand for various increasing applications, the internet users require a common secret key to communicate among a group. The traditional key exchange protocols involve a trusted key generation center for generation and distribution of the group key among the various group members. Therefore, the establishment of a trusted key generation center server and the generation (and distribution) of common session key require an extra overhead. To avoid this difficulty, a number of group key exchange protocols have been proposed in the literature. However, these protocols are vulnerable to many attacks and have a high computational and communication cost. In this paper, we present an elliptic curve cryptography-based authenticated group key exchange (ECC-AGKE) protocol, which provides better security and has lower computational cost compared to related proposed schemes. Further, a complexity reduction method is deployed to reduce the overall complexity of the proposed elliptic curve cryptography-based authenticated group key exchange protocol. The security of proposed work is ensured by the properties of elliptic curves. A security adversarial model is given and an extensive formal security analysis against our claim is done in the random oracle model. We also made a comparison of our proposed protocol with similar works and found that ours have better complexity, security and efficiency over others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UW-ASN) are provisioned with limited bandwidth, long variable propagation delay, limited available energy, highly unreliable acoustic channels, and random node mobility. Consequently, efficient data routing between source destination pair requires UW-ASN to apply a technology different than terrestrial networks. For the past few years researchers have proposed many robust and efficient routing protocols for UW-ASN, thus reviewing the challenges posed by stringent underwater environment. These protocols can be broadly categorized into localization based and localization-free protocols. This paper presents a critical review of beacon-based localization-free routing protocols and suggest possible solution to improve the working of studied beacon based protocols. This work categorizes beacon based protocols into hop-by-hop, end-to-end, single, and multiple parameters based forwarding protocols. This categorization will help to differentiate and identify the requirements for the development of new beacon-based protocols. Finally, this paper presents performance comparison based on simulation results and outlines the research gap and future directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the problem of secure communication for a scenario, which consists of one pair of source-destination nodes and one untrusted relay. The source communicates with the destination via the help of energy harvesting-aware untrusted relay, which acts as the helper to forward the source information to the destination; however, the relay also acts as the unintended user to eavesdrop the source information. To keep the source information confidential from untrusted relay, the destination-assisted jamming technique is deployed. We evaluate the impact of energy harvesting protocols on such a secure communication scenario through the proposed energy transfer protocols, namely, source-based energy harvesting protocol and maximum energy harvesting protocol. To evaluate the secrecy performance of these proposed schemes, we derive analytical expressions for two important performance metrics including intercept probability and strictly positive secrecy capacity. The numerical analysis reveals the different trade-off between secure performance and relevant system parameters (i.e., power splitting ratio, time switching ratio, energy conversion efficiency, transmit signal-to-noise ratio, and relay location). Simulation results are also provided to demonstrate the accuracy of the developed analytical expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wireless regional area networks (WRANs) operates in the very high frequency and ultra high frequency television white space bands regulated by the IEEE 802.22 standard. The IEEE 802.22 standard supports Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP)-based authentication scheme. Due to the participation of a server and the information exchanged between a customer primes equipment and the secondary user base station, it takes around 50 ms to complete a complete EAP authentication that cannot be accepted in a handover procedure in WRANs. In this paper, we propose an EAP-based proxy signature (EPS) handover authentication scheme for WRANs. The customer primes equipment and secondary user base station accomplish a handover authentication without entailing the server by using the proxy signature. Approved by the logic derivation by Burrows, Abadi, and Needham logic and formal verification by Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications, we can conclude that the proposed EPS scheme can obtain mutual authentication and hold the key secrecy with a strong antiattack ability. Additionally, the performance of the EPS scheme in terms of the authentication delay has been investigated by simulation experiments with the results showing that the EPS scheme is much more efficient in terms of low computation delay and less communication resources required than the security scheme regulated in IEEE 802.22 standard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authentication is the first step toward establishing a service provider and customer association. In a mobile network environment, a lightweight and secure authentication protocol is one of the most significant factors to enhance the degree of service persistence. This work presents a secure and lightweight keying and authentication protocol suite termed time-assisted authentication protocol (TAP). The TAP improves the security of protocols with the assistance of time-based encryption keys and scales down the authentication complexity by issuing a reauthentication ticket. While moving across the network, a mobile customer node sends a reauthentication ticket to establish new sessions with service-providing nodes. Consequently, this reduces the communication and computational complexity of the authentication process. In the keying protocol suite, a key distributor controls the key generation arguments and time factors, while other participants independently generate a keychain based on key generation arguments. We undertake a rigorous security analysis and prove the security strength of TAP using communicating sequential processes and rank function analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart card-based client-server authentication protocol is well popular for secure data exchange over insecure and hostile networks. Recently, Lee et al. put forward an authentication protocol by utilizing ElGamal cryptosystem and proved that it can withstand known security threats. This article evinces that the protocol of Lee et al. is unwilling to protect various important security vulnerabilities such as forgery attack and off-line password-guessing attack. To vanquish these loopholes, this article presents a robust authentication protocol for client-server communication over any insecure networks. The security explanation of our protocol has done through the formal and informal mechanism and its outcome makes sure that the designed protocol is strong enough to resist the known vulnerabilities. In addition, we have simulated our protocol using ProVerif online software and its results certify that our protocol is safe against private information of the client and server. This paper also has made performance estimation of the presented protocol and others, and the outcome favors the presented protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing popularity of multimedia applications and services needs to support several quality of service metrics such as high throughput, low energy, and jitter, which is a challenging task in mobile ad hoc networks. Because of limited bandwidth, energy constraints, dynamic topology, transmission errors, and fluctuating link stability, the links between adjacent nodes are often not reliable and may break because of node mobility. Link breakage initiates the process of rerouting either at the sender node (the node at which the link breaks) or at the source node. In either case, it leads to packet loss, delivery delays, and increased control overheads. Hence, to attain a minimum quality of service, routing protocols must address the dynamic network topology. Uncertain and varying movement of nodes necessitates stability of the links between such nodes. The objective of this paper is to propose 2 protocols, the first based on link stability and the other based on route stability. Link stability identifies a stable link from the available links to the next hop and determines a stable end-to-end route. The probability of successful transmission of periodic packets is used as a link stability metric to assess the stable path. Acknowledgment -free packets are used to check connectivity in the network. Increased probability of successful transmission implies that the selected link is sustained for longer duration and can deliver packets more reliably or, as a consequence, results in a stable link to deliver a better data rate. With a stable link, there is a reduced possibility of retransmissions, reduced end-to-end delay, reduced control overheads, and enhanced data delivery ratio. Selection of the most stable route for data transmission improves the performance. Experimental results from simulations performed on EXata/Cyber v2.0 simulator reveal that our proposed protocols are an improvement over the existing protocols in terms of packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay, and average route lifetime, even without route optimization with the minor increase in control packets. A case study of the application of proposed protocols is also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent progresses made in microelectronics and sensor networks led to the emergence of a new family of networks called Internet of things (IoT). Several factors may degrade seriously IoT applications performance and prevent the connected objects to accomplish out their services. One factor is the inability of medium access control (MAC) protocol, namely, DCF 802.11 function, to distinguish between different sources of frame losses. To address this problem, we propose in this article an improvement called MAC protocol with distinction between data losses (MAC-DL), which consists mainly to consider the different sources of frame losses in the functioning of the backoff algorithm. After the evaluation of MAC-DL performance, the results showed a better performance compared with MAC protocol with the original DCF 802.11 function and to 2 other protocols proposed in the literature. Our solution improved significantly the quality of service and the energy efficient for typical IoT scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been an escalation in deployment and research of wireless mesh networks by both the business community and academia in the last few years. Their attractive characteristics include low deployment cost, a low-cost option to extend network coverage and ease of maintenance due to their self-healing properties. Multiple routes exist between the sender and receiver nodes because of the mesh layout that ensures network connectivity even when node or link failures occur. Recent advances among others include routing metrics, optimum routing, security, scheduling, cross-layer designs and physical layer techniques. However, there are still challenges in wireless mesh networks as discussed in this paper that need to be addressed. Cross-layer design allows information from adjacent and non-adjacent layers to be used at a particular layer for performance improvement. This paper presents a survey of cross-layer protocol design approaches applied to the IEEE 802.11 standards for wireless multi-hop mesh networks that have been proposed over the last few years for improved performance. We summarize the current research efforts in cross-layer protocol design using the IEEE 802.11 standard in identifying unsolved issues that are a promising avenue to further research. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authentication schemes have been widely deployed access control and mobility management in various communication networks. Especially, the schemes that are based on multifactor authentication such as on password and smart card come to be more practical. One of the standard authentication schemes that have been widely used for secure communication over the Internet is session initiation protocol (SIP). The original authentication scheme proposed for SIP was vulnerable to some crucial security weaknesses. To overcome the security problems, various improved authentication schemes have been developed, especially based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). Very recently, Zhang et al. proposed an improved authentication scheme for SIP based on ECC using smart cards to overcome the security flaws of the related protocols. Zhang et al. claimed that their protocol is secure against all known security attacks. However, this paper indicates that Zhang et al. protocol is still insecure against impersonation attack. We show that an active attacker can easily masquerade as a legal server to fool users. As a remedy, we also improve Zhang et al. protocol by imposing a little extra computation cost. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three-party password-authenticated key exchange (3PAKE) protocols allow two clients to agree on a secret session key through a server via a public channel. 3PAKE protocols have been designed using different arithmetic aspects including chaotic maps. Recently, Lee et al. proposed a 3PAKE protocol using Chebyshev chaotic maps and claimed that their protocol has low computation and communication cost and can also resist against numerous attacks. However, this paper shows that in spite of the computation and communication efficiency of the Lee et al. protocol, it is not secure against the modification attack. To conquer this security weakness, we propose a simple countermeasure, which maintains the computation and communication efficiency of the Lee et al. protocol. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, based on attribute and password, we introduce a new kind of two-factor authentication protocol that has various applications such as anonymous authentication and privacy protection. Specifically, our proposal is constructed by introducing password authentication into the generic framework of attribute-based authentication. Consequently, it not only achieves two-factor authentication, but also enjoys the advantages of attribute authentication and password authentication simultaneously. Furthermore, to formally evaluate the security of the proposed protocol, we present the corresponding security model, within which the detailed security proof of the proposal is given. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presented an efficient design of identity-based handover authentication protocol for wireless mobile networks under the prime-order elliptic curve cryptosystem. The present work does not include the time-consuming and expensive bilinear pairing and map-to-point hash functions. The proposed protocol is analyzed in the random oracle model and also demonstrated to have other security properties, including protection against replay attack and denial-of-service attack, user anonymity and unlinkability, subscription validation, conditional privacy preservation, and mutual authentication. Our handover authentication protocol is examined to be more efficient from the size of the security parameter and computation costs than the previous protocols. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In next generation wireless communication, cognitive radio technology facilitates to utilize underutilized licensed frequency bands that help to enhance the spectrum utilization. Cognitive radio wireless mesh network (CRWMN) is a promising and reliable technology to experience high throughput with low cost. Existing IEEE 802.11 based medium access control (MAC) protocols offer high data rates with decreasing efficiency at the MAC layer. Hence, most of the researchers applied aggregation mechanisms to provide the solution to bandwidth craving applications. In CRWMN, MAC design is significant because stability, efficient resource utilization, and scalability are predominating problems; however, the specified MAC issues are not yet resolved. The proposed MAC is novel, which aims to ensure reliability and scalability for CRWMN. The common control channel is used to exchange handshaking frames between the transmitter and receiver. It helps us to schedule the data transmission as well as reserve the channel in a discrete time interval. It introduces a token-based channel accessing mechanism with resource-aware channel assignment, which resolves the problems of efficiency and stability. The proposed MAC simulated using the network simulator (ns-2), and the simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol improved the performance compared with the existing protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the fifth generation mobile networks (in short, 5G), radio frequency identification (RFID) tags are embedded in a growing number of personal items, especially in smartphones. The RFID authentication protocols in 5G should be anti-scanning and privacy-enhancing, because RFID tags in smartphones often suffer from leaking private trace of mobile users. However, majorities of existing RFID protocols are vulnerable to location-tracking threats, and to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on back-end servers. To eliminate these threats, we propose a hash-based mutual authentication protocol for smartphones in 5G. This protocol protects individuals' location privacy against malicious hidden scanning in public places. By the authentication of RFID readers via hash values, the proposed protocol is robust against the aforementioned threats. Additionally, our authentication efficiency on the tag side is 2H (two hash calculations), which outperforms most of previously reported solutions based on hash, and the tag stores only two vectors (one is k-bit and the other j-bit). Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: In this paper, a novel blind carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation is proposed on the basis of the linearly constrained optimization for the uplink transmission of space–time block‐coded multicarrier code division multiple access systems. First, the full‐dimensional spatial‐and‐temporal data are formed to avoid violation of the second‐order statistics in the conventional receiver design. A set of weight vectors is then provided for acquiring each multipath signal from the desired user while the others get rejected. Finally, the estimated CFO is obtained in accordance with maximizing the well‐defined measurement function, which is formulated by collecting all the output powers of the receiver. A space–time averaging technique is also proposed to enhance the robustness to the finite sample effect. Simulation study confirms that with the proposed CFO estimator used in the preceding, the receiver can successfully achieve the same performance of the optimal receiver working in the absence of CFO. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most interesting radio-frequency identification applications is the detection of missing tags along with the objects they are attached to. This process must be executed in a fast and efficient way. A monitoring function may need to be periodically executed in order to implement a reliable detection system, therefore raising the need to optimize its performance, in terms of both time and reliability. The contribution of this paper is twofold; on one hand, we provide a protocol taxonomy for the missing-tag detection problem, which up to our best knowledge is the first of its class, and on the other hand, we propose two novel protocols for a fast detection of the missing tags in a passive radio-frequency identification system. By increasing the length of the packets exchanged among the reader and the tags, our protocols are able to reduce the time needed to detect the missing tags, by decreasing the number of broadcast messages in the network. Our results show that our proposals outperform the most recent protocols in the literature, obtaining improvements on the execution time going from 25% to 75%. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we discuss an interference aware multichannel MAC (IAMMAC) protocol assign channels for communication in wireless sensor-actor networks. An actor acts as a cluster head for k-hop sensors and computes the shortest path for all the sensors. Then, the actor partitions the cluster into multiple subtrees and assigns a noninterference channel to each subtree. The actor 1-hop sensors are represented as relay nodes. The actor selects a relay node as a backup cluster head (BCH) based on the residual energy and node degree. After selecting a BCH from the relay nodes, the actor broadcast this information to the remaining relay nodes using the common control channel. The relay sensors use the same channel of BCH to communicate with it. However, the other cluster members do not change their data channel. Further, interference-aware and throughput-aware multichannel MAC protocol is also proposed for actor-actor coordination. The performance of the proposed IAMMAC protocol is analyzed using standard network parameters such as packet delivery ratio, goodput, end-to-end delay, and energy dissipation in the network. The obtained simulation results indicate that the IAMMAC protocol has superior performance as compared with the existing MAC protocols. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discovery and management of desired network services present significant challenges for mobile networks. Based on the Service Location Protocol, this paper proposes an integrated service discovery architecture for vehicular ad hoc networks. The proposed approach divides the network into several logical zones. The zone structure is formed virtually based on position information. Each logical zone may have a zone directory agent to manage registered services from service providers. The proposed architecture considers both vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-vehicle communication modes and introduces roadside directory agents and vehicle directory agents to reduce deployment costs. We also introduce a substitute query technique, cache mechanism, and backup mechanism to improve the request hit ratio and reduce the message overhead of the substitute query. Finally, we implement the proposed mechanisms in Network Simulator version 2, with simulation results showing that the proposed architecture can provide a high average data hit ratio and low message overhead. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The SMEN protocol, proposed by Wu and Ustaoglu in 2009, has been considered to be secure as the authors claimed, and numerous theories are proposed based on this protocol. This paper analyzes the SMEN protocol and finds that this protocol is not resistant to the session corruption attack and the key compromise impersonation attack. Then, we propose an improved protocol with tight security reduction. Our improved protocol not only avoids the above attacks but also embraces the same efficiency as the SMEN protocol in terms of exponentiation. Besides, formal analysis of the improved protocol is presented by using the formal automatic security analysis tool Scyther. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY The efficiency of medium access control strongly influences the performance of distributed wireless networks. Collisions in the channel and unused timeslots result in poor performance. On the other hand, quantum superdense coding proved that entanglement-assisted quantum communications can improve the data transmission rates compared with classical systems. It allows sending two classical bits from one party to another in exchange of one quantum bit and a pre-shared entangled Bell pair. This paper introduces a new protocol, which involves a modified version of superdense coding to medium access control of distributed communication systems. Using a pre-shared entangled Bell pair and one classical bit, 2.5 classical bits can be transmitted in average between the parties in each timeslot. This means not only valuable increase in capacity, but the two-way distributed operation opens new fields of investigation. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of the uncertainty of transmission opportunity in delay tolerant networks (DTN), routing algorithms in DTN often need nodes to serve as relays for others to carry and forward messages. One classic policy is the Epidemic routing (ER) algorithm. To reduce the overhead, the hop-limited ER protocol is proposed. This method can get better performance through controlling the message hop count. However, because of the energy constraint or other factors, each node may forward only limited times, that is, both the message hop count and the forwarding times may be limited. This paper proposes a unifying framework to evaluate the performance of ER with the aforementioned constraints. Simulations based on both synthetic and real motion traces show the accuracy of the framework. In addition, we explore the impact of many parameters (e.g., message hop count) through extensive numerical results. For example, numerical results show that both the message hop count and the forwarding times can have certain impact on the routing performance, but their impact is related with many other factors (e.g., the number of nodes). Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security service level agreements (SSLAs) provide a systematic way for end users at home or in the office to guarantee sufficient security level when doing business or exchanging sensitive personal or organizational data with an online service. In this paper, we propose an SSLA negotiation protocol that implements non-repudiation with cryptographic identities and digital signatures and includes features that make it resistant to denial of service attacks. The basic version of the protocol does not rely on the use of a trusted third party, and it can be used for all kinds of simple negotiations. For the negotiation about SSLAs, the protocol provides an option to use an external knowledge base that may help the user in the selection of suitable security measures. We have implemented a prototype of the system, which uses JSON Web Signature for the message exchange and made some performance tests with it. The results show that the computational effort required by the cryptographic operations of the negotiation protocol remains at a reasonable level. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicular networking applications often use multi-hop wireless broadcasting as a primary data dissemination mechanism. Therefore, protocols that efficiently and thoroughly propagate application data while adapting to a wide range of network density, vehicle distribution pattern, channel quality, and other conditions are critical for vehicular communications. Here, we design the Statistical Vehicular Broadcast (SVB) protocol to efficiently distribute data via multi-hop broadcast in vehicular networks. First, we present an automated optimization technique for the design of threshold functions in statistical broadcasting methods. Next, we compare and analyze known statistical techniques, including different fundamental methods, assessment delay algorithms, and failsafe mechanisms. All combinations of these techniques are given threshold functions optimized using the proposed automated procedure then are evaluated in a wide range of simulations. High-level statistical design principles and recommendations are established based on analysis of these results. Finally, we apply those principles to design SVB. It is evaluated in JiST/SWANS and is shown to achieve a high target reachability level while consuming less bandwidth than similar protocols across urban and highway vehicular networking scenarios.Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hot-potato routing is a border gateway protocol policy that selects the 'closest' egress router in terms of interior gateway protocol cost. This policy imposes inherent interactions between intra-AS (Autonomous System) and inter-AS traffic engineering. In light of this observation, we present a hybrid intra-AS and inter-AS traffic engineering scheme named egress selection based upon hot potato routing. This scheme involves link weight optimization, which can not only minimize the time that IP (Internet Protocol) packets travel across the network by assigning specified egress router but also balance the load among the internal links of the transit network. Egress selection based upon hot potato routing also incorporates multi-topology routing technique to address the problem that one set of link weights might not guarantee specified egress routers. Accordingly, we formulate the link weights optimization problem using multi-topology routing as a mixed integer linear programming model. And we present a new heuristic algorithm to make the problem tractable. Numerical results show that only a few topologies are needed to guarantee specified egress router, and maximum link utilization is also reduced. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new opportunistic cross-layer MAC protocol involving channel allocation and packet scheduling for cognitive radio networks is proposed. Cognitive radio allows secondary users (SUs) to exploit the available portions of the licensed spectrum bands without interfering with primary users. In particular, we consider a cognitive radio system, where SUs are equipped with two transceivers: a control transceiver and a software-defined radio transceiver. Data traffic characteristics of SUs are considered to ameliorate system performance. So, we propose a mechanism of resource reservation to improve QoS requirements that favors successful SUs to transmit data during x time slots without interfering with primary users. The key novelty of this paper is giving priority for SUs with important data traffic and which frequently solicits data channels to transmit for the remaining time of the ongoing time slot and for the next time slots directly after checking the channel availability. We develop a new analytical model to evaluate delay parameter for two scenarios with and without resource reservation and we then investigate the impact of those scenarios on the energy consumption. We show through simulations that cognitive radio performances increase noticeably with the proposed scheme. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the issue of real-time data transmission in vehicles to roadside environment by the hybrid coordination function controlled channel access (HCCA) scheme with Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 802.11p protocol. The HCCA is one of the medium access protocols specified in 802.11p standard, which uses a polling scheme similar to the point coordination function to provide a reliable QoS. In this paper, we improve the HCCA polling scheme and design a new data transmission scheduling method. We also prepared a mathematical model to systematically evaluate the performance of the HCCA in terms of average delay. Moreover, we analyze the factors that could impact the average delay, throughput, and packet loss rate as well. The simulation results are compared with the original scheme specified in the standard. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed delay model could estimate the average delay of the HCCA with a high precision, whereas the proposal of the enhancement of the HCCA has lower delay, lower loss rate, and higher throughput than the one specified in the standard. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many anti-collision protocols have been proposed at present. Almost all known protocols exhibit an overall identification efficiency smaller than 50%. And all of them are proposed for general purpose applications and do not consider the distribution characteristic of tag IDs in different radio frequency identification (RFID) systems. In real world, there are many RFID systems, in which the tag IDs are mostly distributed continuously, such as in container terminals, warehouse management, supply chain management, and so on. This paper presents an efficient anti-collision protocol, named improved collision tree protocol (ICT), to identify RFID tags simultaneously. The main novelties of this paper include that the duality and certainty principle is introduced and used in ICT to improve the tag identification efficiency, and the continuous and partially continuous distributions of tag IDs are taken into account in this paper. Both the theoretical and experimental results indicate that ICT improves the tag identification efficiency up to 100% when the tag IDs are distributed continuously, and always above 50% even when the tag IDs are distributed uniformly. For straightforward and efficient, ICT can be used in various RFID tag identification conditions, especially when the tag IDs are distributed continuously or partially continuously. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]