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Device-to-Device (D2D) communications will be used as an underlay technology in the Fifth Generation mobile network (5G), which will make network services of multiple Service Providers (SP) available anywhere. The end users will be allowed to access and share services using their User Equipments (UEs), and thus they will require seamless and secured connectivity. At the same time, Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) will use the UE to offload traffic and push contents closer to users relying on D2D communications network. This raises security concerns at different levels of the system architecture and highlights the need for robust authentication and authorization mechanisms to provide secure services access and sharing between D2D users. Therefore, this paper proposes a D2D level security solution that comprises two security protocols, namely, the D2D Service security (DDSec) and the D2D Attributes and Capability security (DDACap) protocols, to provide security for access, caching and sharing data in network-assisted and non-network-assisted D2D communications scenarios. The proposed solution applies Identity-based Encryption (IBE), Elliptic Curve Integrated Encryption Scheme (ECIES) and access control mechanisms for authentication and authorization procedures. We formally verified the proposed protocols using ProVerif and applied pi calculus. We also conducted a security analysis of the proposed protocols.

Fifth generation mobile network (5G) is intended to solve future constraints for accessing network services. The user and network operator depend on security assurances provided by the Authentication and Key Agreement protocols (AKA) used. For 5G network, the AKA has been standardized and 5GAKA protocol is one of the primary authentication methods that have been defined. This paper models the protocol and provides comprehensive formal analysis on 5G-AKA protocol as specified by The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standard. Using ProVerif a security protocol verification tool, we perform a full systematic evaluation of the 5G-AKA protocol based on the latest 5G specifications. We present security assumptions and properties that assists on the analysis based on two taxonomies, we find out that some important security properties are not achieved and related work ignored some crucial protocol flaws. Finally, we make some recommendations to address the issues found by our security analysis.

The increased demand of data rate by mobile users has led to the evolution of mobile network technologies from the fourth generation to fifth generation (5G). 5G mobile network will support various technologies that will be able to provide low latency, offload traffic and connect vertical industries. Device-to-device (D2D) communications will be used as the underlay technology for 5G network in the offloading of traffic from the cellular network and pushing content closer to the user. With D2D communication, various network services can be implemented to improve spectral efficiency and reduce energy consumption of mobile devices. This paper gives a brief overview of D2D communication and discusses different D2D applications. It proposes a network services abstraction and suggests the mapping of existing studies with the network service abstraction which can be used in the harnessing the development and implementation of D2D communication applications in 5G network. The paper also highlights possible future research for D2D communication in 5G network.

Mobile computing is fast becoming a vital part of everyday life in which User Equipment (UE) demand being reachable anywhere and at anytime, as they spend much time travelling from one place to another, often by trains or buses. The ultimate aim of passengers is the ability to be connected to the Internet while they are moving from one place to another with their mobile devices. Providing indoor coverage on trains and buses directly with outdoor Base Stations (BSs) may not be a good solution due to the high density of use and path losses in the LTE network. This limitation can result in poor signal quality inside the train, and offering broadband services is not always possible. Clearly improvement to broadband access on buses and trains could be achieved by installing more BSs close to railway and bus routes and terminals. However, this solution is not ideal for the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) due to the high investment needed to deploy many more BSs. In addition, such a solution will introduce additional complexity by increasing the number of Handovers (HOs). This issue has focused the research community effort on developing solutions that take advantage of the existing wireless infrastructure without increasing the number of BSs. One method being considered is the development of more efficient methods and technologies to manage the UE's mobility in seamless ways. In this paper we propose adoption of Mobile Femtocell (Mobile-Femto) technology as a solution to mitigate the Vehicular Penetration Loss (VPL) and Path Loss, with consequent improvement to the vehicular UE's performance in LTE networks. Our results, using a Matlab simulation model, showed a noticeable improvement in the achieved Ergodic capacity by 5% under a VPL of 40 dB while 90% of vehicular UEs spectral efficiency has improved by 1.3 b/cu under a VPL of 25 dB. In addition, 80% of vehicular UEs have improved their throughput and SINR by 300 kb/s and 4 dB respectively after implementing the Mobile-Femto into the Macrocell in LTE networks.

One main feature of Software Defined Networking (SDN) is the basic principle of decoupling a device’s control plane from its data plane. This simplifies network management and gives network administrators a remarkable control over the network elements. As the control plane for each device within the network is now implemented on a separate controller, this reliefs individual devices from the overhead caused by complex routing. Specifically, this feature has been shown to be extremely beneficial in the case of resource-constrained Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). By keeping the control logic away from the low-powered nodes, the WSNs can resolve their major issues of resource underutilisation and counter-productivity. This paper highlights the importance of adopting the SDN in the WSNs as a relatively new networking paradigm. This is introduced through a comprehensive survey on relevant networking paradigms and protocols supported by a critical evaluation of the advantages and disadvantages of these mechanisms. Furthermore, open research issues and challenges are pointed out shedding a light on future innovations in this field.

Vehicular User Equipment (UE) performance during mobility faces two issues relating to signaling and transmission, namely Handover (HO) and link adaptation. This paper shows that both processes are experiencing degradation during mobility and that vehicular UEs suffer from call drops and loss of connections. Therefore, this work presents an effective technique using Mobile-Femtos to improve vehicular UEs' HO process and link quality. Results show that vehicular UEs attached to a Mobile-Femto achieved better signalling and Link Ergodic capacity and as a consequence the outage probability was reduced. The achieved results indicated that deploying Mobile-Femtos under 25dB Vehicular Penetration Loss (VPL) has improved the vehicular UE Link Ergodic capacity by 1% and reduced the signal outage probability by 1.8% compared to the eNB direct transmission. Consequently, Drop Calls Probability (DCP) and Block Calls Probability (BCP) have been reduced by 7% and 14% respectively compared to the direct transmission from the eNB.

The dense deployment of Femtocells within the Macrocell's coverage is expected to dominate the future of Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. While Mobile Femtocells (Mobile-Femtos) could be the solution for vehicular networks when there is a need to improve the vehicular User Equipment (UE) performance by mitigating the impact of penetration loss and path-loss issues. The deployed Femtocells have operated in a co-channel deployment due to the scarcity of spectrums. This issue causes interference between Femtocells and Macrocells as well it causes extra overhead on the LTE networks because of the co-tire interference between adjacent Femtocells. In this paper two interference scenarios are considered, the interference between Mobile-Femto and Macrocell, and the interference between the Mobile Femtos themselves. Therefore, to avoid the generated interference between Femtocells, the controlled transmission powers as well as the coverage planning techniques have been discussed. While in the worst-case scenarios, a frequency reuse scheme has been proposed to avoid the generated interference effectively and dynamically between the Mobile-Femtos as well as their UEs and between the Macrocell UEs.

Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy network (RPL) topology attacks can downgrade the network performance significantly by disrupting the optimal protocol structure. To detect such threats, we propose a RPL-specification, obtained by a semi-auto profiling technique that constructs a high-level abstract of operations through network simulation traces, to use as reference for verifying the node behaviors. This specification, including all the legitimate protocol states and transitions with corresponding statistics, will be implemented as a set of rules in the intrusion detection agents, in the form of the cluster heads propagated to monitor the whole network. In order to save resources, we set the cluster members to report related information about itself and other neighbors to the cluster head instead of making the head overhearing all the communication. As a result, information about a cluster member will be reported by different neighbors, which allow the cluster head to do cross-check. We propose to record the sequence in RPL Information Object (DIO) and Information Solicitation (DIS) messages to eliminate the synchronized issue created by the delay in transmitting the report, in which the cluster head only does cross-check on information that come from sources with the same sequence. Simulation results show that the proposed Intrusion Detection System (IDS) has a high accuracy rate in detecting RPL topology attacks, while only creating insignificant overhead (about 6.3%) that enable its scalability in large-scale network.

Supporting decentralized peer-to-peer communication between users is crucial for maintaining privacy and control over personal data. State-of-the-art protocols mostly rely on distributed hash tables (DHTs) in order to enable user-to-user communication. They are thus unable to provide transport address privacy and guaranteed low path stretch while ensuring sub-linear routing state together with tolerance of insider adversaries. In this paper we present U-Sphere, a novel location-independent routing protocol that is tolerant to Sybil adversaries and achieves low O (1) path stretch while maintaining View the MathML source per-node state. Departing from DHT designs, we use a landmark-based construction with node color groupings to aid flat name resolution while maintaining the stretch and state bounds. We completely remove the need for landmark-based location directories and build a name-record dissemination overlay that is able to better tolerate adversarial attacks under the assumption of social trust links established between nodes. We use large-scale emulation on both synthetic and actual network topologies to show that the protocol successfully achieves the scalability goals in addition to mitigating the impact of adversarial attacks.

A large number of emerging Internet applications require information dissemination across different organizational boundaries, heterogeneous platforms, and a large, dynamic population of publishers and subscribers. A new information-centric network architecture called Network of Information (NetInf) has been developed in the context of the FP7 EU-funded 4WARD project. This architecture can significantly improve large scale information distribution. Furthermore, it supports future mobile networks in situations with intermittent and heterogeneous connectivity and connects the digital with the physical world to enable better user experience. However, NetInf is still in an early stage of implementation and its security is yet to be evaluated. The security concern of NetInf is a major factor for its wide-scale adoption. Therefore, this paper uses the X.805 security standard to analyse the security of the NetInf architecture. The analysis highlights the main source of threats and potential security services to tackle them. The paper also defines a threat model in the form of possible attacks against the NetInf architecture.

Supporting high quality multimedia streaming on wireless devices poses several challenges compared to wired networks due to the high variance in network performance encountered in the mobile environment. Although rate adaptation is commonly used in multimedia applications to compensate for fluctuations in network performance, it is a reactive mechanism which is not aware of the frequently changing connectivity that may occur on mobile devices. This paper proposed a performance evaluation model for multimedia streaming applications that is aware of user mobility and network performance. We presented an example of mathematical solution to the model and demonstrated the functionality using common mobility and connectivity examples that may be found in an urban environment. The proposed model is evaluated based on this functionality and how it may be used to enhance application performance. © 2015 Fragkiskos Sardis et al.

Communications in Information-Centric Networking place more attention on WHAT data are being exchanged rather than WHO are exchanging them. A well-established approach of information centric networks is the Network of Information (NetInf) architecture, developed as part of the EU FP7 project SAIL. The security of NetInf has been fairly analysed in the literature. In particular, research efforts have been focusing on achieving data integrity and confidentially, source or publisher authenticity and authorization. This paper analyses some work in the literature to enforce authorized access to data in NetInf, highlights a potential security threat and proposes an enhancement to address the discovered threat. The new enhancement has been formally verified using formal method approach based on the Casper/FDR tool.

In recent years, Cloud technology has revolutionized the way services are delivered to end-users. The advent of truly mobile computing in the form of smart phones and tablets has also driven the demand for Cloud resources in order to compensate for the inherent lack of local resources on these devices. Furthermore, modern mobile devices are equipped with multiple network interfaces and in combination with the rapid deployment of wireless networks, it is expected that they will always have Internet connectivity and access to Cloud resources. In this paper we will focus on traffic management for interactive multimedia services accessed by a mobile user by means of dynamic migration of a Virtual Machine. Network performance measurements are taken from a network of virtualization-enabled hosts that perform live migrations of a Virtual Machine which hosts multimedia content. The data is used as input to an equation that determines whether a migration would be beneficial in terms of traffic localization based on a user's mobility characteristics and network usage patterns. The contribution of this paper lies in the proposed mechanism of managing traffic for interactive services in the context of mobile cloud computing. This helps alleviate the increased network costs introduced by dynamic migrations driven by Quality of Service parameters and may result in increased network traffic for the benefit of improved QoS.

An increasingly wireless world will mean that devices with multiple network interfaces will soon become commonplace. Users will expect to be always connected from anywhere and at any time as connections will be switched to available networks using handover techniques. However, different networks have different Qualities-of-Service so a Quality-of-Service Framework is needed to help applications and services deal with this new environment. In addition, since these networks must work together, future mobile systems will have an open, instead of the currently closed, architecture. Therefore new mechanisms will be needed to protect users, servers and network infrastructure. This means that future mobile networks will have to integrate communications, mobility, quality-of service and security. This paper provides an overview of potential architectures for communication in future networks. Our study shows that only a number of these architectures support this integration.

For communication in Next Generation Networks, highly-developed mobile devices will enable users to store and manage a lot of credentials on their terminals. Furthermore, these terminals will represent and act on behalf of users when accessing different networks and connecting to a wide variety of services. In this situation, it is essential for users to trust their terminals and for all transactions using them to be secure. This paper analyses a number of the Authentication and Key Agreement protocols between the users and mobile terminals, then proposes a novel device authentication protocol. The proposed protocol is analysed and verified using a formal methods approach based on Casper/FDR compiler.

Cooperative intrusion detection use several intrusion detection systems (IDS) and analyzers in order to build a reliable overview of the monitored system trough a central security information and event management system (SIEM). In such environment, the definition of a shared vocabulary describing the exchanged information between tools is prominent. Since these pieces of information are structured, we propose in this paper to use an ontological representation based on Description Logics (DLs) which is a powerful tool for knowledge representation. Moreover, DLs are able to ensure a decidable reasoning. An alert correlation prototype is presented using this ontology, and an illustrative attack scenario is carried out to show the usefulness of the proposed ontology.

Next generation networks will comprise different wireless networks including cellular technologies, WLAN and indoor technologies. To support these heterogeneous environments, there is a need to consider a new design of the network infrastructure. Furthermore, this heterogeneous environment implies that future devices will need to roam between different networks using vertical handover techniques. When a mobile user moves into a new foreign network, data confidentiality and mutual authentication between the user and the network are vital issues in this heterogeneous environment. This article deals with these issues by first examining the implication of moving towards an open architecture, and then looking at how current approaches such as the 3GPP, HOKEY and mobile ethernet respond to the new environment while trying to address the security issue. The results indicate that a new authentication and key agreement protocol is required to secure handover in this environment. Casper/FDR, is used in the analysis and development of the protocol. The proposed protocol has been proven to be successful in this heterogeneous environment.