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Fifth-generation (5G) and beyond networks are expected to serve large numbers of user equipments (UEs). Grant-based random access (RA) protocols are efficient when serving human users, typically with large data volumes to transmit. The strongest user collision resolution (SUCRe) is the first protocol that effectively uses the many antennas at the 5G base station (BS) to improve connectivity performance. In this paper, our proposal involves substituting the retransmission rule of the SUCRe protocol with a neural network (NN) to enhance the identification of the strongest user and resolve collisions in a decentralized manner on the UEs' side. The proposed NN-based procedure is trained offline, admitting different congestion levels of the system, aiming to obtain a single setup able to operate with different numbers of UEs. The numerical results indicate that our method attains substantial connectivity performance improvements compared to other protocols without requiring additional complexity or overhead. In addition, the proposed approach is robust regarding variations in the number of BS antennas and transmission power while improving energy efficiency by requiring fewer attempts on the RA stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of Things (IoT) is being deployed to provide smart solutions for buildings, logistics, hospitals, and many more. It is growing with billions of connected devices. However, with such tremendous growth, maintenance and support are the hidden burdens. The devices deployed for IoT generally have a light microcontroller, low-power, low memory, and lightweight software. The software, which includes firmware and applications, can be managed remotely via a wireless connection. This improves flexibility, installation time, accessibility, effectiveness, and cost. The firmware can be updated constantly to remove known bugs and improve the functionality of the device. This work presents an approach to update firmware over-the-air (OTA) for constrained IoT devices. We used Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) as the wireless communication standard to communicate between the managing server and devices. NB-IoT is one of the most promising low power wide area (LPWA) network protocols that supports more than 50k devices within a cell using a licensed spectrum. This work is a proof of concept demonstrating the usage of NB-IoT to update firmware for constrained devices. We also calculated the overall power consumption and latency for different sizes of the firmware. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Automated mechanism for configuring node radio parameters at run-time. • Distributed mechanism, primarily on nodes, reduces communication overhead. • Responds dynamically to both internal and external changes in network environment. • Supports multiple application requirements simultaneously. Advanced wireless communication technologies are leading towards large-scale, geographically distributed systems, which consist of thousands of co-existing devices with potentially conflicting application requirements, such as high data delivery ratio and low power consumption. At the same time, devices are challenged by varying environmental conditions, which can also lead to degradation in network performance. To ensure the overall network performance and service stability offered by individual devices, the devices must co-exist and adapt to changes in their surrounding environment. In this paper, an application-aware adaptive method is proposed to allow individual devices to dynamically and automatically decide and configure its communication parameters according to its application requirements and environmental conditions. The algorithm aims to enhance and maintain the network performance over time, while allowing every device to satisfy its application requirements. The algorithm is realised on the modern LoRaWAN network protocol. Simulated experiments confirm the proposed algorithm's ability to adapt to changing application requirements at runtime while maintaining network performance. They demonstrate an improvement in packet delivery ratio, energy consumption, and the novel ability to respond to an application's individual performance requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the era of expansion of smart sensing interconnected devices and their growing application in complex systems, the application of wireless communication technology becomes evident. Many wireless technologies are developed to facilitate the growth of systems such as the Internet of Things and Smart Cities. The application of a particular wireless technology in a particular system depends on many factors, such as purpose, requirements, complexity, range, and node deployment. IEEE 802.15.4 is a technical standard that defines the operation of low-rate wireless personal area networks. It is used as the basis for a group of network standards and protocols designed for wireless sensor networks. In this article, the basic features of the emerging IEEE 802.15.4g SUN low-powered wireless network standard, its application scenarios, and performance analyses are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most existing network communication systems, such as the Internet, are built around the TCP/IP protocol stack. However, TCP/IP cannot effectively support the upcoming network communication systems with more wireless communication links and higher requirements in terms of throughput, latency, and reliability. In this article, we introduce a general network communication protocol design based on batched network coding (BNC), which includes the existing framework as a special case and whose design can be guided by channel coding theory. BNC-based protocols can have significant throughput gain for single-hop or multihop wireless communications and provide better trade-off among throughput, latency and reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low-power wireless communication is a central building block of cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things. Conventional low-power wireless protocols make avoiding packet collisions a cornerstone design choice. The concept of synchronous transmissions challenges this view. As collisions are not necessarily destructive, under specific circumstances, commodity low-power wireless radios are often able to receive useful information even in the presence of superimposed signals from different transmitters. We survey the growing number of protocols that exploit synchronous transmissions for higher robustness and deficiency as well as unprecedented functionality and versatility compared to conventional designs. The illustration of protocols based on synchronous transmissions is cast in a conceptional framework we establish, with the goal of highlighting differences and similarities among the proposed solutions. We conclude this article with a discussion on open questions and challenges in this research field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a full duplex (FD) cooperative non‐orthogonal multiple access system that employs power splitting relaying (PSR)‐based simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) technique, that is, FD‐PSR‐NOMA system. A single cell network is considered consisting of a base station (BS) and two pre‐paired users, where the near user is configured to act as FD relay to assist the BS for information delivery to the far user. It is assumed that the far user implements maximal ratio combining to combine the direct link signal arriving from the BS and the relayed signal from the near user, to exploit the diversity advantage. Analytical expressions are derived for the outage probabilities of the downlink users, system outage probability, and the throughput of the considered network under imperfect successive interference cancellation (i‐SIC). Analytical expressions are also derived for the outage probabilities and throughput of half duplex (HD) cooperative NOMA system under PSR‐based SWIPT, that is, HD‐PSR‐NOMA system. Further, the asymptotic outage probabilities and diversity orders are derived as well. The optimal power allocation factors at the BS that minimize the system outage probabilities of FD/HD‐PSR‐NOMA networks are determined. Extensive simulation results are provided to corroborate the analytical findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) will pave the way for a new era of underwater monitoring and actuation applications. The envisioned landscape of UWSN applications will help us learn more about our oceans, as well as about what lies beneath them. They are expected to change the current reality where no more than 5% of the volume of the oceans has been observed by humans. However, to enable large deployments of UWSNs, networking solutions toward efficient and reliable underwater data collection need to be investigated and proposed. In this context, the use of topology control algorithms for a suit-able, autonomous, and on-the-fly organization of the UWSN topology might mitigate the undesired effects of underwater wireless communications and consequently improve the performance of networking services and protocols designed for UWSNs. This article presents and discusses the intrinsic properties, potentials, and current research challenges of topology control in underwater sensor networks. We propose to classify topology control algorithms based on the principal methodology used to change the network topology. They can be categorized in three major groups: power control, wireless interface mode management, and mobility assisted-based techniques. Using the proposed classification, we survey the current state of the art and present an in-depth discussion of topology control solutions designed for UWSNs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The portfolio of models offered by car manufacturing groups often includes many variants (i.e., different car models and their versions). With such diversity in car models, variant management becomes a formidable task. Thus, there is an effort to keep the variants as close as possible. This simple requirement forms a big challenge in the area of communication protocols. When several vehicle variants use the same signal, it is often required to simultaneously schedule such a signal in all vehicle variants. Furthermore, new vehicle variants are designed incrementally in such a way as to maintain backward compatibility with the older vehicles. Backward compatibility of time-triggered schedules reduces expenses relating to testing and fine-tuning of the components that interact with physical environment (e.g., electromagnetic compatibility issues). As this requirement provides for using the same platform, it simplifies signal traceability and diagnostics, across different vehicle variants, besides simplifying the reuse of components and tools. This paper proposes an efficient and robust heuristic algorithm, which creates the schedules for internal communication of new vehicle variants. The algorithm provides for variant management by ensuring compatibility among the new variants, besides preserving backward compatibility with the preceding vehicle variants. The proposed method can save about 20% of the bandwidth with respect to the schedule common to all variants. Based on the results of the proposed algorithm, the impact of maintaining compatibility among new variants and of preserving backward compatibility with the preceding variants on the scheduling procedure is examined and discussed. Thanks to the execution time of the algorithm, which is less than one second, the network parameters like the frame length and cycle duration are explored to find their best choice concerning the schedule feasibility. Finally, the algorithm is tested on benchmark sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fuel utilization efficiency and cost reduction are two major goals in designing in-vehicle networks. Aiming to address these two issues, we investigate in-vehicle networking protocols from both wired and wireless perspectives by first presenting representative solutions in each area, then identifying the challenges to current solutions, and finally advocating the use of the automotive Ethernet. Also, we propose a priority-based scheduler for the automotive Ethernet. Our preliminary experiments show that the proposed scheduler is effective and flexible, and thus is applicable to next-generation in-vehicle networks. We hope that further studies in this area can be inspired by our work and will be forthcoming in years to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent physical-layer designs capable of decoding multi-packet collisions demonstrate great potential for improving the network performance. Current network protocols, however, tailor the traditional physical layer to avoid collisions and thus cannot fully exploit the benefits of concurrent transmission techniques. In this paper, we propose an innovative generic concurrent transmission aware routing design called mShare. The mShare design exploits the benefits of these techniques by scheduling concurrent senders to utilize co-owned receiver(s) in parallel. This design significantly increases the available number of routing choices and thus improves the network performance. To illustrate the versatility of our design, we test mShare in three settings: unicast, opportunistic routing, and data collection (convergecast). The performance of mShare is evaluated with physical testbed experiments running on USRP and simulations. The experimental results show that compared to conventional designs, mShare: 1) improves 277% of the throughput in unicast; 2) saves 78% of transmissions in opportunistic routing; and 3) reduces 70% of the delivery delay in data collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network latency and reliability are becoming critical performance indicators for future mission critical services based on wireless connectivity. In this article we present a portable and low-cost measurement framework for quantifying the endto- end (E2E) latency and reliability of communication systems based on single or multiple links. The proposed framework is tailored for characterization of access diversity mechanisms, for example, multi-connectivity or hybrid access methods, which are expected to be essential for ultra-reliable wireless communications in 4G and 5G networks. An active-probe measurement approach is adopted, consisting of a client that transmits timestamped packets to a server, and vice versa, via one or multiple communication links under test. The setup allows us to measure the one-way latency performance in uplink and downlink separately, and allows fully synchronized measurements of multiple links in parallel to understand the benefits of multi-connectivity mechanisms. Traffic generation is flexible in terms of packet size, transport protocol (TCP or UDP), and inter-arrival time interval of the generated packets, hence being a powerful tool for benchmarking the performance for different application-specific message flows. Special emphasis is put on the tail of the latency distribution, that is, the latency that can be achieved with a certain probability constraint, for example, 99.9 percent or beyond. Given the challenge of measuring such rare events, we measure and validate the stability of the measurement equipment to ensure that the observed performance is not compromised by undesired behavior or malfunction of the equipment. The system has a measurement error below 400 μs with 99.9 percent confidence and below 3.1 ms with 99.999 percent confidence. The capability and applicability of the measurement framework is illustrated by a measurement test of two simultaneous LTE connections that provide robust communications to an aerial drone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a Context-aware Smallworld routing protocol for wireless ad-hoc networks which finds efficient routes to the destination nodes often through a very short chain of intermediate nodes, without using any routing table. This protocol exploits the “small-world” phenomenon of social networks where source-destination pairs typically get connected through few intermediate friends and the individuals can collectively discover such short paths. The key idea behind our routing protocol is that for forwarding an incoming packet to the destination, a node picks the next hop from among the one-hop neighbor from its one-hop neighborhood that is closest to the destination, and multiple randomly selected long-distance neighbor(s), i.e., from outside of its one-hop neighborhood, based on which of these neighbors is closest to the destination. The long-distance neighbors are selected by using their contextual information through a probabilistic mapping. We provide the theoretical foundations behind our protocol. This simple but effective algorithm can meet performance objectives for most scenarios by reducing loss and latency. Simulation results, using synthetic network topologies, have demonstrated that the routing performance of context-aware Smallworld is better than geographical (distance-based) Smallworld and other standard proactive routing protocols (e.g., OLSRv2) when metrics, such as packet losses, end-to-end delays, hop-counts, connectivity drops, and control traffic generated, are used as the key performance indicators. We also show that the proposed protocol is resilient to dynamic topology changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world of connected devices has led to the rise of the Internet of Things paradigm, where applications rely on multiple devices, gathering and sharing data across highly heterogeneous networks. The variety of possible mechanisms, protocols, and hardware has become a hindrance in the development of architectures capable of addressing the most common IoT use cases, while abstracting services from the underlying communication subsystem. Moreover, the world is moving toward new strict requirements in terms of timeliness and low latency in combination with ultra-high availability and reliability. Thus, future IoT architectures will also have to support the requirements of these cyber-physical applications. In this regard, edge computing has been presented as one of the most promising solutions, relying on the cooperation of nodes by moving services directly to end devices and caching information locally. Therefore, in this article, we propose a modular and scalable architecture based on lightweight virtualization. The provided modularity, combined with the orchestration supplied by Docker, simplifies management and enables distributed deployments, creating a highly dynamic system. Moreover, characteristics such as fault tolerance and system availability are achieved by distributing the application logic across different layers, where failures of devices and micro-services can be masked by this natively redundant architecture, with minimal impact on the overall system performance. Experimental results have validated the implementation of the proposed architecture for on-demand services deployment across different architecture layers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid urbanisation has transformed cities to the preferential human settlement and allowed cities to quietly witness all range of human activities. As the key enabler in the information and communications technology industry, cellular networks play a decisive role in delivering communication messages and entertainment content. In particular, cellular network operators respond to human initiated service requests by gradually deploying necessary infrastructure and calibrating transmission protocols. Hence, cellular network records encompass the interesting interaction between human-initiated messages and network-triggered responses. In this study, the authors collect the 'big data' in urban cellular networks and try to dig out the human and urban planning properties. Specifically, they focus on the statistical modelling of three representative scenarios like spatial deployment density of base stations, packet length or traffic volume of mobile services, as well as inter-arrival time and dwell time of human mobility. Through extensive data mining, they validate the heavy-tailed feature universally existing in these scenarios. Afterwards, they discuss the implications of this heavy-tailed feature and talk about its fundamental contribution to intelligent resource adjustment, proactive content caching, and enhanced connection management in cellular networks. Finally, they highlight the applications of this feature towards smarter cellular networks and cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a wireless powered communication network, where a multiantenna power beacon (PB) is employed to assist an energy constrained source to establish secure communications with a destination in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers. We propose a two-phase communication protocol termed as accumulate then transmit to enhance network secrecy. In the energy harvesting phase, the PB transfers radio frequency energy to charge the source; then in the information transmission phase, the PB acts as a friendly jammer to protect the source transmission against eavesdropping. We study the dynamic energy state transitions at the source using an energy discretization method and a finite-state Markov chain. Closed-form expressions are derived for connection outage probability, secrecy outage probability, and effective secrecy throughput, with the aim to evaluate both reliability and security of the proposed protocol. Furthermore, numerical results reveal the impacts of various system parameters on the secrecy performance and demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed protocol over an existing scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An opportunistic network is a wireless ad hoc network that has frequently intermittent connectivity due to nodes’ mobility. These spare, unpredictable networks aim to solve the prolonged delay paths by a store-carry-forward scheme. It is difficult to determine the appropriate nodes to forward the messages since there are few opportunistic contacts. The nodes might decide based on the obtained data of the network as a guide to reach a destination. The aforementioned technique is not helpful in case the rate of change in the network topology is higher than the rate of data gathering due to usage restrictions and uncertain available information/knowledge of the future contacts. In this paper, to cope with the challenges imposed by the un-deterministic environment, a risk assessment strategy is considered to evaluate the short and long-term impact of each decision to find the optimal node/paths. This routing scheme can take advantage of the unanticipated connection to make the routing more flexible in short time and with less buffer usage. Our proposed risk assessment algorithms that are based on MALP are mixed with the knowledge about buffer management and network capacity. The prioritized messages to be disseminated as well as better decision to take a risk are the main contributions of this paper. Moreover, the self-adaptive threshold, distributed PID controller, is considered to tackle different threshold levels for each node individually. Numerical results prove that the proposed method drastically increases the delivery ratio and also minimizes the risk of exceeding resource consumption and packet loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, achieving reliable physical layer performance is a challenging task due to the highly dynamic nature of V2V propagation channels. Frame timing estimation, as one of the most critical signal processing procedures that rely on channel statistics, has to be appropriately enhanced to tackle this challenge. This study presents a novel frame timing estimation scheme based on both the available periodical preambles in IEEE 802.11p standard. By designing the fourth-order statistics-based correlation and differential normalisation functions, the proposed timing metric not only is capable of possessing an extensible correlation length, but also achieves the robustness to multipath effect and large carrier frequency offset. From the standpoints of hypothesis testing and classification, the proposed approach can effectively increase the distinction between correct and wrong timing indexes in terms of the class-separability criteria, and consequently has a significantly improved timing estimation performance compared with the existing methods. Simulation results consist with theoretical analysis under the typical V2V channel model, and demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly reduce both the probabilities of false alarm and missed detection, and make the selection of a suitable threshold for frame detection much easier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global Mobility Networks(GLOMONETs) in wireless communication permits the global roaming services that enable a user to leverage the mobile services in any foreign country. Technological growth in wireless communication is also accompanied by new security threats and challenges. A threat-proof authentication protocol in wireless communication may overcome the security flaws by allowing only legitimate users to access a particular service. Recently, Lee et al. found Mun et al. scheme vulnerable to different attacks and proposed an advanced secure scheme to overcome the security flaws. However, this article points out that Lee et al. scheme lacks user anonymity, inefficient user authentication, vulnerable to replay and DoS attacks and Lack of local password verification. Furthermore, this article presents a more robust anonymous authentication scheme to handle the threats and challenges found in Lee et al.’s protocol. The proposed protocol is formally verified with an automated tool(ProVerif). The proposed protocol has superior efficiency in comparison to the existing protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in relay interference channels (ICs), where energy-constrained relays harvest energy from sources’ radio-frequency signals and use the harvested energy to forward the information to destinations. We adopt the power splitting (PS) relay protocol and the interference alignment (IA) technique to jointly realize energy transfer and interference management. We propose two novel transmission schemes for the SWIPT in relay IC networks, namely, one-stage PS IA scheme and two-stage PS IA scheme. For both schemes, we investigate the optimal PS ratios that maximize the network sum rate. We obtain the closed-form optimal PS ratios for the two-stage PS IA scheme and develop a distributed and iterative algorithm to derive the optimal PS ratios for the one-stage PS IA scheme. We further study the optimal design of the IA precoding and decoding matrices. Based on the Grassmann manifold approach, we present an algorithm to obtain the optimal IA matrices for both schemes. The optimality of the designs of both the PS ratios and the IA matrices is then verified by simulations. Our results show that the proposed schemes effectively improve the performance of the network and significantly outperform benchmark schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A cooperative wireless-powered communication network protocol is proposed, in which user far away from a hybrid access point (H-AP) is capable of harvesting wireless powers by overhearing the uplink signals of users that are relatively nearer to the H-AP, in addition to downlink signal broadcast by the H-AP. In this setting, time allocations for the downlink transmission of the H-AP and the uplink transmission for the users are jointly optimized for two different purposes. First, the weighted sum-rate maximization problem is solved for a given total transmission time. Then, the total transmission time is minimized under a minimum rate constraint, and an efficient algorithm is also presented to solve the optimal solution by a line search strategy. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed schemes significantly increase the far user's rate, which in turn improves user fairness and transmission delay. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Efficient and scalable media access control (MAC) protocol design is crucial to guarantee the reliable broadcast of safety messages in vehicular ad hoc networks. To devise a MAC for safety message broadcasting with reliability and minimum delay, in this paper, we propose a novel time slot-sharing MAC, referred to as SS-MAC, which can support diverse periodical broadcasting rates. In specific, we first introduce a circular recording queue to online perceive time slot occupying status. We then design a distributed time slot sharing (DTSS) algorithm and random index first fit (RIFF) algorithm, to efficiently share the time slot and make the online vehicle-slot matching, respectively. We prove theoretically the efficacy of DTSS algorithm, and evaluate the efficiency of RIFF algorithm by using MATLAB simulations. Finally, we conduct extensive simulations considering various driving scenarios and resource conditions to demonstrate the SS-MAC performance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Aiming at the problems of the WPKI certificate verification schemes based on online certificate status protocol (OCSP), this paper proposes a WPKI certificate verification scheme based on the certificate digest signature-online certificate status protocol (CDS_OCSP). Compared with the existing schemes, the proposed scheme optimizes the number of communication connections between the communication entities and the network, reduces the consumption of the wireless network bandwidth in the certificate verification process, and uses the elliptic curves cipher- (ECC-) based encrypting/decrypting functions to sign and verify the certificate digest, which ensures the consistency of the verified certificates among the communication entities. The proposed scheme makes the certificate verification process more efficient and secure. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme effectively reduces the communication consumption of the wireless network and saves the storage space of the wireless entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we propose a novel networking paradigm called Small-world SSDNet, servicing applications such as public safety, proximity based services, and fog computing based on device-todevice multi-hop wireless communications. The "small-world" feature is determined by the service area, whose size is usually within a community level, and the well known small-world properties existing in SSDNets; the "super-dense" feature comes from the fact that the increased direct communication range and the popularity of 5G and IoT devices jointly result in a large number of devices within a single-hop communication range. This article first formally defines SSDNet. Then the challenges and the opportunities brought by the design and the implementation of the SSDNet protocols and applications are addressed. Finally, the broader discussions on issues relevant to modeling, engineering, and dissemination are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a large-scale wireless powered communication network (WPCN), which consists of a hybrid access point (H-AP) and numerous nodes. The H-AP broadcasts energy to all nodes, and the nodes harvest the energy and then use the harvested energy to transmit information. For the large-scale WPCN, we also propose a novel hybrid multiple access protocol, termed hybrid multiple access-based dual harvest-then-transmit. The proposed protocol utilizes both time division multiple access (TDMA) and carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA), in order to deal with various traffic patterns and transmission reliability of different applications in large-scale networks. We consider a dual wireless energy transfer (WET) at the H-AP. The main WET is performed in TDMA and the other WET is performed at space holes in CSMA, to increase the channel utilization and harvested energy. For the considerations, we study the sum-throughput maximization in the large-scale WPCN based on hybrid multiple access-based dual harvest-then-transmit. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol outperforms the conventional protocol in large-scale WPCN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the secrecy rate for the multiple-input single-output optical wireless scattering communication, where the detected signal can be characterized by discrete photoelectrons. Assuming a legitimate receiver and an eavesdropper, we propose two secure communication protocols, the non-jamming protocol, and the cooperative jamming protocol, where for the former the transmitter does not send jamming signals but for the latter the transmitter sends jamming signals. We formulate the corresponding power and duty cycle optimization problems for both protocols. We also analyze the properties on the optimal solution, and adopt the alternating optimization to obtain a tractable solution. Moreover, we analyze the condition on the positive secrecy rate for the case where all the sub-channels to the receiver are weaker than their counterparts to the eavesdropper, where the secrecy transmission cannot be realized via a non-jamming protocol. The performance of the proposed two protocols is evaluated by numerical results. It is seen that for the iterative optimization solution, two to three iterations suffice for the convergence of the secrecy rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are mobile networks, which are automatically outspread on a geographically limited region, without requiring any preexisting infrastructure. Mostly, nodes are both self-governed and self-organized without requiring a central monitoring. Because of their distributed characteristic, MANETs are vulnerable to a particular routing misbehavior, called wormhole attack. In wormhole attack, one attacker node tunnels packet from its position to the other attacker nodes. Such wormhole attack results in a fake route with fewer hop count. If source node selects this fictitious route, attacker nodes have the options of delivering the packets or dropping them. For this reason, this paper proposes an improvement over AODV routing protocol to design a wormhole-immune routing protocol. The proposed protocol called defending against wormhole attack (DAWA) employs fuzzy logic system and artificial immune system to defend against wormhole attacks. DAWA is evaluated through extensive simulations in the NS-2 environment. The results show that DAWA outperforms other existing solutions in terms of false negative ratio, false positive ratio, detection ratio, packet delivery ratio, packets loss ratio and packets drop ratio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RFID is one of the most important automatic identification techniques in the future IoT world. Compared with the other techniques, RFID has various advantages such as no requirement of line of sight, the capability of wireless communication, low cost, small size, and so on. This article discusses two types of anomaly tags, i.e., missing tags and unknown tags, which usually appear due to theft or product misplacement. Generally, there are two categories of anomaly tag pinpointing protocols: boolean detection, which aims at probabilistically determining whether there exist anomaly tags or not; and exact identification, which aims at identifying all anomaly tag IDs. This article first conducts a comprehensive survey of the existing anomaly tag pinpointing protocols, particularly emphasizing their evolution road. After that, we also conduct a taxonomy of the existing protocols and summarize their pros and cons. Finally, we discuss some technical challenges and problems that have not been covered yet, and point out the potential opportunities in RFID research and applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Driven by the increasing demand on marine exploration, UWANs are confronted with the rigorous challenge of improving network throughput. To deal with this challenge, this article proposes to apply the IBFD technique to UWANs. The IBFD technique can potentially double link capacity by simultaneously transmitting and receiving on the same frequency band, which has been recently demonstrated to be feasible for wireless communications. In this article, novel MAC protocols are specifically proposed for the acoustic IBFD network to overcome the inherent issues in underwater acoustic communications, such as long packet delay, large node collision probability, and high power consumption. Numerical results verify that our proposals can effectively mitigate these effects and improve the overall performance of the UWANs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a secure cross-layer-based routing technique (SCLARDI) for a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is proposed. This technique makes use of ad hoc on-demand routing protocol (AODV) algorithms and honey pot technology to detect and isolate black hole attacks from MANETs. This novel system is compared with the single-layer design techniques and existing cross-layer detection techniques. Out of the tested models, the proposed cross-layer design is the most suitable for MANET security. First, the vulnerabilities of the AODV routing protocol against black hole attacks are analyzed. Second, a secure cross-layer-based AODV routing technique is proposed. The proposed SCLARDI technique detects and isolates black hole attacks from MANET. Finally, the results are compared with the existing techniques. The simulations are done using NS-2. The simulation results show that the proposed technique improves the packet delivery ratio and reduces network overhead, normalized routing load, and packet drop ratio compared to other existing single-layer and cross-layer techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current networking technologies are not perfectly equipped to support Quality of Service (QoS), which is vital for real-time multimedia applications in Wireless Community Mesh Networks (WCNs). Therefore, there is a need to devise innovative routing algorithms to support QoS on top of existing standards. Thus, this paper presents a cross layer relay node selection model for routing protocols in order to offer optimal routes to real-time applications. To the best of our knowledge, our two proposed routing metrics, Packet Priority-Oriented routing metric (PPO) and Packet Priority-oriented QoS routing metric (PP-QoS) , are the first to provide differentiated priorities and service levels to applications with different needs. PPO considers the application priority. Moreover, PP-QoS also considers the channel busy level to improve the performance of path selection. The simulation confirms the superiority of the proposed model against a number of existing counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the Reliable Bidirectional Control Protocol (RBCP) protocol, which is a transport protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), focused on managing sensors' behaviour. It aims to be a utility for reliable control data transferring from source to destination unit in the network. Considering the related studies on transport protocols, which are mostly dedicated to a single-direction reliable data transport, RBCP is the answer for the lack of control mechanisms in WSNs based on bidirectional communication. The first part of this paper is focused on general presentation of the proposed solution. In the next part, evaluation of the idea and final functionality are discussed. It will finally show the results of undergone testing stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a type of mobile ad hoc network (MANET) that provides an exchange of messages between vehicles. VANETs encourage researchers to create safety and comfort applications that will lead to intelligent transport systems. Conventional ad hoc routing methods may cause ooding of packets to find routes in a VANET. Hence, finding a route from the source to the destination vehicle by local broadcast techniques in densely populated urban areas may create a broadcast storm and network bandwidth is unnecessarily wasted to discover routes between source and destination vehicles. In this paper, an efficient routing protocol (ERP) is proposed to utilize the network bandwidth efficiently by avoiding unnecessary rebroadcast. This new protocol finds a minimum connected dominating set of vehicles (MCDSV) and treats them as a virtual backbone for communication in VANETs. Vehicles in the virtual backbone act as forwarders and are responsible for local broadcasting in the network. Vehicles that are not in the MCDSV are not allowed to broadcast packets as forwarders and hence the bandwidth utilization is minimized. The proposed protocol has been implemented in NS2 and its performance is compared with other routing protocols for packet delivery ratio, control overhead ratio, and average end-to-end delay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RFID applications such as monitoring an object for a long time need to identify tags repeatedly within the scope of the reader. Re-identification process can be improved using the information obtained from the previous tag identification process. Couple-resolution blocking (CRB) protocol utilizes the blocking technique that prevents staying tags from being collided by newly arriving tags. Staying tags can be efficiently re-identified by utilizing the retained information. After staying tags are separately all identified, arriving tags are identified. In this paper, we argue that CRB may work more poorly than other protocols which do not consider the repeated tag identification, such as query tree (QT) and collision tree (CT) protocol, when only few tags stay. To tackle the problem, we propose an adaptive CRB (ACRB) protocol. In ACRB, the reader estimates the tag staying ratio during the re-identification process for staying tags. If the estimated ratio is lower than a certain threshold, the blocking technique is immediately abandoned. Instead, staying tags and arriving tags are identified together without considering the retained information. In addition, we propose to improve CRB further using CT protocol, instead of QT protocol. Through computer simulation, we show that ACRB improves the identification efficiency of CRB, especially when the tag staying ratio is low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underwater sensor networks have enabled a new era in scientific and industrial underwater monitoring and exploration applications. However, these networks are energy-constrained and, more problematically, energy-hungry, as a consequence of the use of underwater acoustic links. In this work, we thoroughly review potential techniques for greening underwater sensor networks. In a top-down approach, we discuss the principal design and challenges of the appealing highlighted techniques. We also exemplify their use by surveying recent proposals in underwater sensor networks. Finally, we describe potential future research directions for energy conservation in underwater networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mobile multihop relay (MMR) WiMAX networks have attracted lots of interest in the wireless communication industry recently because of its scalable coverage, improved data rates, and relatively low cost. However, security of MMR WiMAX networks is the main challenge to be addressed. In this paper, we first identify several possible attacks on MMR WiMAX networks in which a rogue base station (BS) or relay station (RS) can get authenticated and gain control over the connections and show that the current standard does not address this problem well. We then propose a set of new authentication protocols for protecting MMR WiMAX networks from rogue BS attack, rogue RS attack, and suppress-replay attack. Our protocols can provide centralized authentication by using a trusted authentication server to support mutual authentication between RS and BS, between RS and RS, and between mobile station (MS) and RS. Moreover, our protocols can also provide distributed authentication with a license issued by the trusted server. We use a formal tool called Scyther to analyze and verify the security properties of our protocols. The results show that our protocols can counter rogue BS and RS attacks and suppress-replay attack and are not susceptible to any known attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transmission of system-critical control information plays a key role in efficient management of limited wireless network resources and successful reception of payload data information. This paper uses an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) architecture to investigate the detection performance of a time-domain approach used to detect deterministic control signalling information. It considers a type of control information chosen from a finite set of information, which is known at both transmitting and receiving wireless terminals. Unlike the maximum likelihood (ML) estimation method, which is often used, the time-domain detection technique requires no channel estimation and no pilots as it uses a form of time-domain correlation as the means of detection. Results show that when compared with the ML method, the time-domain approach improves detection performance even in the presence of synchronisation error caused by carrier frequency offset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the near future, wireless networks will be one of the key technologies for road traffic management in smart cities. Vehicles and dedicated roadside units should be interconnected through wireless technologies such as IEEE 802.11p (WAVE). Traffic lights and road signs may also take their place in this architecture, forming a large-scale network of small devices that report measurements, take orders from a control center, and are able to take decisions autonomously based on their local perception. Such a network shares many similarities with classical wireless sensor and actuator networks, starting with its distributed organization and with the role of the control center. However, its topology, and, subsequently, the appropriate selection of protocols and algorithms, will be strongly influenced by each city's characteristics. In this paper, we characterize and discuss probable topologies of these networks. The aim of this work is to provide network models that can be used to evaluate protocols and algorithms using realistic scenarios in place of generic random graphs. We deploy such networks over 52 city maps extracted from OpenStreetMap and characterize the resulting graphs, with particular focus on the connectivity aspects (degree distribution and connected components). The tools, the complete data sets, and OMNeT++ network models are freely available online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Buffer sizing is an important network configuration parameter that impacts the quality of service characteristics of data traffic. With falling memory costs and the fallacy that "more is better," network devices are being overprovisioned with large buffers. This may increase queueing delays experienced by a packet and subsequently impact stability of core protocols such as TCP. The problem has been studied extensively for wired networks. However, there is little work addressing the unique challenges of wireless environments such as time-varying channel capacity, variable packet inter-service time, and packet aggregation, among others. In this article we discuss these challenges, classify the current state-of-the-art solutions, discuss their limitations, and provide directions for future research in the area. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The recent increase in the use of wireless networks for video transmission has led to the increase in the use of rate-adaptive protocols to maximize the resource utilization and increase the efficiency in the transmission. However, a number of these protocols lead to interactions among the users that are subjective in nature and affect the overall performance. In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of interplay between the wireless network dynamics and video transmission dynamics in the light of subjective perceptions of the end users in their interactions. We investigate video exchange applications in which two users interact repeatedly over a wireless relay channel. Each user is driven by three conflicting objectives: maximizing the Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) of the received video, while minimizing the transmission cost. Non-cooperative repeated games model precisely interactions among users with independent agendas. We show that adaptive video exchange is impossible if the duration of the interaction is determined. However, if the users interact indefinitely, they achieve cooperation via exchange of video streams. Our simulations evidence the tradeoff between users' QoS and QoE of their received video. The expected duration of the interaction plays a role and draws the region of solution trade-offs. We propose further means of shaping this region using Pareto optimality and user-fairness arguments. This work proposes a concrete game theoretical framework that allows the optimal use of traditional protocols by taking into account the subjective interactions that occur in practical scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographic routing has been considered as an attractive approach for wireless mobile ad hoc and sensor networks due to its effectiveness and scalability. Over the past few decades, numerous geographic routing protocols have been proposed extensively in 2D space. However, these protocols are no longer valid if ad hoc or sensor networks are distributed in 3D environments, such as space, atmosphere, and ocean. Because of the surprisingly difficulty of designing geographic routing protocols for 3D networks compared to 2D networks, only a few prior studies have focused on 3D geographic routing specifically designed for ad hoc and sensor networks. In this article, we first illustrate the principles of 3D geographic routing, and categorize current research work based on different criteria. Then we compare the 3DGR protocols under study through comprehensive analysis. Finally, we point out the open issues and opportunities for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although widely used, TCP has many limitations in meeting the throughput and latency requirements of applications in wireless networks, high-speed data center networks, and heterogeneous multi-path networks. Instead of relying purely on retransmission upon packet loss, coding has potential to improve the performance of TCP by ensuring better transmission reliability. Coding has been verified to work well at the link layer but has not been fully studied at the transport layer. There are many advantages but also challenges in exploiting coding at the transport layer. In this article, we focus on how to leverage end-to-end coding in TCP. We reveal the problems TCP faces and the opportunities coding can bring to improve TCP performance. We further analyze the challenges faced when applying the coding techniques to TCP and present the current applications of coding in TCP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RFID is one of the most prominent identification schemes in the field of pervasive systems. Nonline of sight capability makes RFID systems much better choice than its contended systems (such as barcode, magnetic tape, etc.). Since the RFID uses wireless channel for communication with its associated devices, there should be some optimal encryption methods to secure the communicating data from adversaries. Several researchers have proposed ultralightweight mutual authentication protocols (UMAPs) to secure the RFID systems in cost effective manner. Unfortunately most of the previously proposed UMAPs are later found to be vulnerable against various desynchronization, Denial of Service (DoS), traceability, and full disclosure attacks. In this paper, we present a more sophisticated UMAP to provide Strong Authentication and Strong Integrity (SASI) using recursive hash function. The proposed protocol incorporates only simple bitwise logical operators XOR, Rot, and nontriangular function (recursive hash) in its design, which can be efficiently implemented with a low cost passive RFID tag. The performance analysis of the protocol proves the conformation of the proposed protocol with EPC-C1G2 passive tags. In addition to privacy and security, small chip area (miniaturization) is another design constraint (which is mandatory requirement for a protocol to be considered as ultralightweight authentication protocol). We have also proposed and implemented the efficient hardware design of the proposed protocol for EPC-C1G2 tags. Both the FPGA and ASIC implementation flows have been adopted. The FPGA flow is primarily used to validate the functionality of the proposed hardware design whereas ASIC flow (using TSMC 0.35 μm library) is used to validate the gate count. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first FPGA and ASIC implementation of any ultralightweight RFID authentication protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authentication protocol plays an important role in the short-range wireless communications for the Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. Due to the shared nature of wireless communication networks, there are several kinds of security vulnerabilities. Recently, a pseudonym-based NFC protocol (PBNFCP) has been proposed to withstand the security pitfalls found in the existing conditional privacy preserving security protocol (CPPNFC). However, this paper further analyzes PBNFCP and shows that it still fails to prevent the claimed security properties, such as impersonation attacks against an adversary, who is a malicious registered user having a valid pseudonym and corresponding private key. In order to overcome these security drawbacks, this paper proposes a secure and efficient authentication protocol (SEAP) for NFC applications using lifetime-based pseudonyms. The proposed SEAP is simulated for the formal security verification using the widely-accepted AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool. The simulation results show that SEAP is secure. The rigorous security and performance analysis shows that the proposed SEAP is secure and efficient as compared to the related existing authentication protocols for NFC applications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While energy consumption is widely considered the primary challenge of wireless networked devices, energy harvesting emerges as a promising way of powering the Internet of Things (IoT). In the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer of the communication stack, energy harvesting introduces spatial and temporal uncertainty in the availability of energy. In this context, this paper focuses on the design and implementation of the MAC layer of wireless embedded systems that are powered by energy harvesting; providing novel protocol features and practical experiences to designers of consumer electronics who opt for tailoring their own protocol solutions instead of using the standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With ever growing mobile Internet and the explosion of its applications, users are experiencing abundant services from different content providers via different network service providers in the heterogeneous network. The information-centric network (ICN) advocates getting rid of the current host-centric network protocol because information dissemination rather than end-to-end communication contributes to the majority of today's network traffic. Furthermore, it is better for network entities to converge as a whole in order to take advantage of open, scalable, and smart traffic transmission. The cloud radio access network is one of the emerging architecture evolutions on the wireless side for easier infrastructure deployment and network management. Therefore, when the information-centric network meets the C-RAN in the Het-Net, it is worthwhile and consequential to integrate ICN protocol with C-RAN architecture to achieve more efficient communication and information management. Moreover, SDN has been recognized as another promising architecture evolution to achieve the flexibility and reconfigurability of dense HetNets; its inherent advantage lies in global uniform control of the wired network. Thus, any of ICN, C-RAN and SDN is the complementary to the others. In this article, we contribute to a fresh proposal for and elaboration of the integration of the ICN, CRAN, and SDN for the HetNet to achieve a win-win situation. The vision of the proposed system is demonstrated, followed by the advantages and challenges. We further present a hybrid system in a large-scale wireless heterogeneous campus network. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recently, the IEEE 802.15.6 Task Group introduced a new wireless communication standard that provides a suitable framework specifically to support the requirements of wireless body area networks (WBANs). The standardization dictates the physical (PHY) layer and medium access control (MAC) layer protocols for WBAN-based communications. Unlike the pre-existing wireless communication standards, IEEE 802.15.6 standardization supports short-range, extremely low power wireless communication with high quality of service and support for high data rates upto 10 Mbps in the vicinity of living tissues. In this work, we construct a discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC) that efficiently depicts the states of an IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA-based WBAN. Following this, we put forward a thorough analysis of the standard in terms of reliability, throughput, average delay, and power consumption. The work concerns non-ideal channel characteristics and a saturated network traffic regime. The major shortcoming of the existing literature on Markov chain-based analysis of IEEE 802.15.6 is that the authors did not take into consideration the time spent by a node awaiting the acknowledgement frame after transmission of a packet, until time-out occurs. Also, most of the work assume that ideal channel characteristics persist for the network which is hardly the case in practice. This work remains distinctive as we take into account the waiting time of a node after it transmits a packet while constructing the DTMC. Based on the DTMC, we perform a user priority (UP)-wise analysis, and justify the importance of the standard from a medical perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless technology will be widely used in libraries with the development of the mobile network in the near future. This paper focuses on MAC protocol for wireless network based on ultra-wideband band (UWB) to solve the problems of real-time and reliability in the wireless transmitting. According to the particular signal characteristics such as low energy consumption and excellent location, we propose a multichannel MAC protocol (UWBIMAC) based on status-adaptive to choose the channel mechanism. Simulation results show that the protocol had the ability of stronger antijamming, improved network throughput, and provided better average delay performance than IEEE802.15.4 MAC, IEEE802.11 MAC, and other UWBIMAC protocols. This method could be used in the process of wireless transmission service in the library or other similar scenarios. To a certain extent, it solves the problem of real-time and reliable performance in the process of wireless communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liu, Y.; Xu, Y.; Zhang, K., and Feng, Y., 2019. Hardware design of marine buoy data communication terminal based on the 1st generation Beidou navigation positioning system. In: Guido-Aldana, P.A. and Mulahasan, S. (eds.), Advances in Water Resources and Exploration. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 93, pp. 639–645. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. Aiming at the actual situation of marine buoy data monitoring and the problems of poor anti-interference performance, low fault tolerance coefficient and high energy consumption in current communication system, the hardware design of marine buoy data communication terminal based on the 1st generation Beidou navigation positioning system is proposed. Based on the marine buoy system, the overall structure of communication terminal is designed. The main components of the hardware are Beidou communication module and wireless network communication module, and the auxiliary parts are antenna and power supply module. The long-distance part uses the inherent data transmission mode of Beidou navigation system to communicate, while the short-range part uses the radio network communication protocol to complete the data transmission. There are two UART interfaces in the hardware, one is connected with the auxiliary cabin, which is responsible for receiving the related data of the auxiliary cabin, including azimuth, attitude and pressure sensing, and the other UART interface is connected with the Beidou communication module, which is responsible for receiving positioning and navigation data and transmitting remote data. The experimental results show that the design has high signal-to-noise ratio, strong fault-tolerant performance, high positioning accuracy and communication success rate, low energy consumption and perfect performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a family of wireless networks that usually operate with irreplaceable batteries. The energy sources limitation raises the need for designing specific protocols to prolong the operational lifetime of such networks. These protocols are responsible for messages exchanging through the wireless communications medium from the sensors to the base station (sink node). Therefore, the determination of the optimal location of the sink node becomes crucial to assure both the prolongation of the network’s operation and the quality of the provided services. This paper proposes a novel algorithm based on a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) approach for designing an energy-aware topology control protocol. The deliverable of the algorithm is the optimal sink node location within a deployment area. The proposed objective function is based on a number of topology control protocol’s characteristics such as numbers of neighbors per node, the nodes’ residual energy, and how they are far from the center of the deployment area. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm reveals significant effectiveness to both topology construction and maintenance phases of a topology control protocol in terms of the number of active nodes, the topology construction time, the number of topology reconstructions, and the operational network’s lifetime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]