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Over the years, there has been a significant surge in the popularity of instant messaging applications (IMAs). However, the message notification functionality in IMAs exhibits certain limitations. Some IMAs fail to alert users about new messages after their phone restarts unless they unlock the phone. This is a consequence of end-to-end encryption (E2EE) and the app not knowing the message is in the queue until the app decrypts it. This approach using E2EE is used to prevent offline attacks, as the key is unavailable to decrypt the notification messages. In this paper, we introduce a novel design and implementation of a message notification protocol for IMAs based on the Signal protocol. The proposed protocol aims to securely display notifications on a locked device and ensures that cryptographic keys are stored in a location that is isolated from the user's device to prevent offline attacks. This approach enhances the security of private key storage, safeguarding private keys against various external threats. The innovative design strengthens the off-site key management system, rendering it resilient against offline attacks and mitigating the risk of key compromise. Additionally, the proposed protocol is highly efficient, requiring no specialized hardware for implementation. It offers confidentiality of cryptographic keys and protection against offline attacks, further enhancing the overall security of the system. We evaluate the protocol's effectiveness by analyzing multiple independent implementations that pass a suite of formal tests via ProVerif. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network protocol syntax information plays a crucial role in grammar-based fuzzing. Current network protocol syntax extraction methods are less versatile, inefficient, and the extracted information is not comprehensive. This paper proposes a novel method for extracting syntax information, which innovatively extracts network protocol syntax from Wireshark protocol dissector files. The extracted syntax information includes packet types of the protocol, the constituent fields of each packet type, and detailed attributes of each field. Based on this method, an automated system for network protocol syntax information extraction was developed. The experiment was conducted with this system on a variety of protocols including DCCP, DNP3.0, Modbus TCP, and S7COMM. The experimental results show that compared with the current methods, our method has a better performance in terms of efficiency and versatility and at the same time ensures the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the extracted syntax information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of the topic under investigation stems from the burgeoning prominence of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm and the consequent imperative to devise and institute an efficacious methodology for neighbour detection that facilitates supplementary connections to mobile nodes. This research primarily aims to elucidate a mobile handover technique aligning with the neighbour discovery paradigm inherent in 6LoWPAN. The methodological framework employed herein amalgamates a systematic analysis of the foundational tenets governing 6LoWPAN communication standards over the IPv6 protocol in the context of IEEE 802.15.4aa personal wireless networks, supplemented with empirical evaluation of message propagation dynamics among discrete nodes of a designated personal wireless network. The findings of this investigation underscore the pre-eminence of the 6LoWPAN networking standard as a prime vehicle for bolstering the dependable communication of IoT's remote entities, contingent upon the utilization of the IPv6 communication protocol. This iteration of the Internet protocol is superior, particularly in surveillance contexts, given its expansive address capacity (128 bits) juxtaposed against its antecedent, the IPv4 protocol (32 bits). The inherent adaptability of this network connection augments the quality of mobile handover, especially when one considers the real-world application of 6LoWPAN's neighbour discovery auxiliary communication standard. The tangible implications of these findings beckon their potential utility in satiating the demands of IoT system users and actualizing the network collaboration ethos intrinsic to the 6LoWPAN communication standard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the years, there has been a significant surge in the popularity of instant messaging applications (IMAs). However, the message notification functionality in IMAs exhibits certain limitations. Some IMAs fail to alert users about new messages after their phone restarts unless they unlock the phone. This is a consequence of end-to-end encryption (E2EE) and the app not knowing the message is in the queue until the app decrypts it. This approach using E2EE is used to prevent offline attacks, as the key is unavailable to decrypt the notification messages. In this paper, we introduce a novel design and implementation of a message notification protocol for IMAs based on the Signal protocol. The proposed protocol aims to securely display notifications on a locked device and ensures that cryptographic keys are stored in a location that is isolated from the user’s device to prevent offline attacks. This approach enhances the security of private key storage, safeguarding private keys against various external threats. The innovative design strengthens the off-site key management system, rendering it resilient against offline attacks and mitigating the risk of key compromise. Additionally, the proposed protocol is highly efficient, requiring no specialized hardware for implementation. It offers confidentiality of cryptographic keys and protection against offline attacks, further enhancing the overall security of the system. We evaluate the protocol’s effectiveness by analyzing multiple independent implementations that pass a suite of formal tests via ProVerif.

One of the most vastly used protocols to protect services traffic like the web and email is Transport Layer Security (TLS). In 2018 the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standardized the latest version TLS 1.3, Introduced a significant enhancement in the protocol performance, and presented some new features. One of the new features is zero round trip-time (0-RTT) handshake mode, where the client can send the application data to the server within the handshake messages before the TLS connection is fully established. However, this application data is replayable. The replay attacks in 0-RTT handshake mode have been studied, and several mechanisms are proposed for protection, these proposed mechanisms are not able to prevent replay attacks when the server functionality is provided by a distributed environment such as multiple servers in a cloud computing environment or a CDN. This paper introduces TLS Guard as a new mechanism that extends TLS 1.3 to prevent replay attacks in a distributed environment. We evaluated a prototype TLS Guard implementation in controlled experiments and showed that its effect comes at the cost of some CPU overhead. More importantly, we showed that TLS Guard is scalable and tolerates faults without any required changes on the client side.

Network protocol syntax information plays a crucial role in grammar-based fuzzing. Current network protocol syntax extraction methods are less versatile, inefficient, and the extracted information is not comprehensive. This paper proposes a novel method for extracting syntax information, which innovatively extracts network protocol syntax from Wireshark protocol dissector files. The extracted syntax information includes packet types of the protocol, the constituent fields of each packet type, and detailed attributes of each field. Based on this method, an automated system for network protocol syntax information extraction was developed. The experiment was conducted with this system on a variety of protocols including DCCP, DNP3.0, Modbus TCP, and S7COMM. The experimental results show that compared with the current methods, our method has a better performance in terms of efficiency and versatility and at the same time ensures the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the extracted syntax information.

Network protocols, as the communication rules among computer network devices, are the foundation for the normal operation of networks. However, security issues arising from design flaws and implementation vulnerabilities in network protocols pose significant risks to network operations and security. Network protocol fuzzing is an effective technique for discovering and mitigating security flaws in network protocols. It offers unparalleled advantages compared to other security analysis techniques thanks to the minimal requirement for prior knowledge of the target and low deployment complexity. Nevertheless, the randomness in test case generation, uncontrollable test coverage, and unstable testing efficiency introduce challenges in ensuring the controllability of the testing process and results. In order to comprehensively survey the development of network protocol fuzzing techniques and analyze their advantages and existing issues, in this paper, we categorized and summarized the protocol fuzzing and its related techniques based on the generation methods of test cases and testing conditions. Specifically, we overviewed the development trajectory and patterns of these techniques over the past two decades according to chronological order. Based on this analysis, we further predict the future directions of fuzzing techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At present,targets of network protocol fuzzing tend to be large protocol entities,and traditional testcase filtering me-thods are mainly based on the running status information of the test object.The larger the test object,the longer it takes to execute a single testcase.Therefore,in view of the problems of long invalid execution time and low efficiency in traditional testcase filtering methods for network protocol fuzzing,a testcase filtering method based on QRNN for network protocol fuzzing is proposed according to strong abilities of recurrent neural network models to process and predict sequence data.The method can automatically filter invalid testcases by learning structural characteristics of the network protocol,including the value range of fields and constraint relationships between fields,and reduce the number of testcases executed by the protocol entity.Experimental results show that,compared with traditional testcase filtering methods for network protocol fuzzing,the proposed method can effectively reduce the time cost of network protocol vulnerability discovery and dramatically improve the efficiency of network protocol fuzzing.

Underwater acoustic (UWA) network protocol design is a challenging task due to several factors, such as slow propagation of acoustic waves, low frequency bandwidth and high bit error and frame error rates often encountered in real UWA environments. In this paper, we consider the design of a robust and scalable data gathering protocol for UWA sensor networks (UASNs), focusing on practical considerations and lessons learnt from multiple lake and sea trials. A cross-layer protocol is presented that integrates a network discovery process, intelligent routing, scheduling via Transmit Delay Allocation MAC (TDA-MAC) and multi-node Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ), to facilitate reliable data gathering in practical UASN deployments. Furthermore, this paper presents the details of a novel experimental testbed and underwater sensor node prototype that were used for the trials reported in this study. Based on the results of the trials, important conclusions are drawn on the protocol features required to achieve reliable networked communication in realistic UWA environments. The insights gained from the trials are valuable both for further development of the proposed data gathering protocol, and for the wider UWA networking research community concerned with developing practical solutions for real-world UASN deployments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article connects mobile terminals through improved network protocols, and connects monitoring devices through improved network protocols in the local area network. At the same time, it can convert mobile terminal requests into requests that comply with improved network protocols and forward them to monitoring devices. Method of three-dimensional feature extraction based on dynamic data. First, normalize the coordinates and scales of the three-dimensional calculus model, and use two kinds of data (voxel representation and pixel representation) to deal with video object recognition. Then construct a convolutional neural network as an input to the network, extract visual information and geometric information, and use deep learning to improve the recognition ability of single-modal features. Based on the convolutional neural network, the geometric descriptor and the view descriptor of the three-dimensional calculus model are extracted separately, and the two feature descriptors are fused in a network to find the association between the patterns. After forming the fused feature descriptor, it is applied to micro Classification and retrieval of integral 3D features. The multi-feature fusion layer can not only learn more distinguishing features of the two descriptors, but also supplement relevant information between the two descriptors. Compared with using these two representations alone, this method produces a much better classifier and improves retrieval efficiency.

Recently, with the discovery of various security threats, diversification of hacking attacks, and changes in the network environment such as the Internet of Things, security threats on the network are increasing. Attack graph is being actively studied to cope with the recent increase in cyber threats. However, the conventional attack graph generation method is costly and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a cheap and simple method for generating the attack graph. The proposed approach consists of learning and generating stages. First, it learns how to generate an attack path from the attack graph, which is created based on the vulnerability database, using machine learning and deep learning. Second, it generates the attack graph using network topology and system information with a machine learning model that is trained with the attack graph generated from the vulnerability database. We construct the dataset for attack graph generation with topological and system information. The attack graph generation problem is recast as a multi-output learning and binary classification problem. It shows attack path detection accuracy of 89.52% in the multi-output learning approach and 80.68% in the binary classification approach using the in-house dataset, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mega-constellations have the potential for providing 6G Internet owing to the unique advantage of global coverage. However, current satellite technologies are not omnipotent. There are still many challenging problems that need to be solved for mega-constellations to support 6G, e.g., efficient resource allocation, gratifying mobility management, and large-scale full-time TT&C (tracking, telemetry, and command). This paper starts with a novel definition of LEO mega-constellations and a brief review regarding the current typical mega-constellations, discussing the development direction of the mega-constellation air interface. Then, the key technologies development status of satellite networks is illustrated and analyzed from five aspects: network protocol, multiple access, satellite handover, TT&C, and interference mitigation, especially their adaptability in mega-constellations for 6G global coverage. Finally, considering the features and requirements of 6G, future challenges for mega-constellations and some potential solutions are proposed.

Since decentralized organizations such as blockchain are not recognized as legal persons, questions arise regarding the ability to detect anti-competitive practices and their perpetrators. Under certain circumstances, if a competitor is unreasonably refused in access to technology, it may well be interpreted as creating an obstacle to his/her entry into the market, which may constitute a violation of the legislation of a country on the protection of economic competition. The exchange of information between players of the same market can present antitrust risks if it helps to fix prices for their products/services or to establish other forms of coordination between such players. The purpose of this study is to provide a description of current EU anticompetitive practices in the field of blockchain-technologies application, as well as to identify challenges in the EU antitrust law related to the emergence of blockchain. This article highlights the challenges blockchain poses for analyzing unilateral anti-competitive practices. This study suggests that EU competition law has a lack of operational and measurement tools to map competitive interactions taking place outside the relevant market, which could lead to rather short-sighted competition law enforcement focusing only on horizontal competition restrictions on relevant markets. The relevance of the topic is associated with the fact that the increased popularity of the use of blockchain technology requires an answer to the question of its legal nature and inclusion in the legal field in order to balance the interests of all parties to economic and legal relations.

This article connects mobile terminals through improved network protocols, and connects monitoring devices through improved network protocols in the local area network. At the same time, it can convert mobile terminal requests into requests that comply with improved network protocols and forward them to monitoring devices. Method of three-dimensional feature extraction based on dynamic data. First, normalize the coordinates and scales of the three-dimensional calculus model, and use two kinds of data (voxel representation and pixel representation) to deal with video object recognition. Then construct a convolutional neural network as an input to the network, extract visual information and geometric information, and use deep learning to improve the recognition ability of single-modal features. Based on the convolutional neural network, the geometric descriptor and the view descriptor of the three-dimensional calculus model are extracted separately, and the two feature descriptors are fused in a network to find the association between the patterns. After forming the fused feature descriptor, it is applied to micro Classification and retrieval of integral 3D features. The multi-feature fusion layer can not only learn more distinguishing features of the two descriptors, but also supplement relevant information between the two descriptors. Compared with using these two representations alone, this method produces a much better classifier and improves retrieval efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underwater acoustic (UWA) network protocol design is a challenging task due to several factors, such as slow propagation of acoustic waves, low frequency bandwidth and high bit error and frame error rates often encountered in real UWA environments. In this paper, we consider the design of a robust and scalable data gathering protocol for UWA sensor networks (UASNs), focusing on practical considerations and lessons learnt from multiple lake and sea trials. A cross-layer protocol is presented that integrates a network discovery process, intelligent routing, scheduling via Transmit Delay Allocation MAC (TDA-MAC) and multi-node Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ), to facilitate reliable data gathering in practical UASN deployments. Furthermore, this paper presents the details of a novel experimental testbed and underwater sensor node prototype that were used for the trials reported in this study. Based on the results of the trials, important conclusions are drawn on the protocol features required to achieve reliable networked communication in realistic UWA environments. The insights gained from the trials are valuable both for further development of the proposed data gathering protocol, and for the wider UWA networking research community concerned with developing practical solutions for real-world UASN deployments.

Since decentralized organizations such as blockchain are not recognized as legal persons, questions arise regarding the ability to detect anti-competitive practices and their perpetrators. Under certain circumstances, if a competitor is unreasonably refused in access to technology, it may well be interpreted as creating an obstacle to his/her entry into the market, which may constitute a violation of the legislation of a country on the protection of economic competition. The exchange of information between players of the same market can present antitrust risks if it helps to fix prices for their products/services or to establish other forms of coordination between such players. The purpose of this study is to provide a description of current EU anticompetitive practices in the field of blockchain-technologies application, as well as to identify challenges in the EU antitrust law related to the emergence of blockchain. This article highlights the challenges blockchain poses for analyzing unilateral anti-competitive practices. This study suggests that EU competition law has a lack of operational and measurement tools to map competitive interactions taking place outside the relevant market, which could lead to rather short-sighted competition law enforcement focusing only on horizontal competition restrictions on relevant markets. The relevance of the topic is associated with the fact that the increased popularity of the use of blockchain technology requires an answer to the question of its legal nature and inclusion in the legal field in order to balance the interests of all parties to economic and legal relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the analysis of the evolution history of existing network protocol technologies,the innovative guiding principles applicable to the future data network unified protocol system was proposed.By dividing the nature of network functions into the connections between network elements,five areas of protocol innovation such as data plane,control plane,user plane,management control and intrinsic network security were proposed.The implementation and application of the protocol system in many heterogeneous scenario were analyzed.Finally,the rationality of the protocol innovation guidelines was verified by analyzing the protocol innovation process in deterministic network forwarding technology and intrinsic security network technology.

In recent years, the fuzzing technology is widely used to detect the software vulnerabilities owing to the coverage improvement in the target program and the easiness of use. However, it is less efficient to fuzz the stateful protocols due to the difficulties like maintaining states and dependencies of messages. To address these challenges, we present SPFuzz, a framework for building flexible, coverage-guided stateful protocol fuzzing. We define a language in SPFuzz to describe the protocol specifications, protocol states transitions and dependencies for generating valuable test cases, maintaining correct messages in session states and handling protocol dependencies by updating message data in time. The SPFuzz adopts a three-level mutation strategy, namely head, content, and sequence mutation strategy to drive the fuzzing process to cover more paths, in conjunction with the method to randomly assign weights to messages and strategies. We use the following metrics to evaluate the performance of SPFuzz and other frameworks upon three protocol implementations, i.e., Proftpd, Oftpd, and OpenSSL, which are three-granularity coverages specifically function, basic block, and edge. In experiments, the SPFuzz framework outperforms the existing stateful protocol fuzzing tool Boofuzz by an average of 69.12% in three granularities coverage tests. This demonstrates that the SPFuzz has the ability to explore more and deeper paths of the target program. We further triggered CVE-2015-0291 in OpenSSL 1.0.2 with the SPFuzz, which proves the validity and utility of our framework.

With the development of the terrestrial network and the increase in demand for providing global Internet access, using the integrated space-terrestrial network (ISTN) has attracted significant attention to provide the global Internet service. However, ISTN faces a unique set of challenges, such as time-varying link quality and dynamic link connection in its space network, and the significant differences between space network and the terrestrial network of ITSN. These unique characteristics may impose an adverse impact on network protocols of ISTN. The focus of this paper is to design a network protocol validation testbed (NPVT) for ISTN. Using the static hardware devices with real network protocols, the proposed testbed was designed to emulate the dynamic space network based on the satellite operational data, and then to provide a near-real space network environment for the validation of diverse network protocols. To further support network protocol validation when space network and terrestrial network are integrated, we integrated the testbed with the terrestrial operational next-generation Internet (i.e., CERNET2) and mobile communication network at the backbone level. The extensive experiments demonstrated that NPVT is capable of validating diverse network protocols in complicated and dynamic scenarios.

With the ever growing number of edge devices, the idea of resource sharing systems is becoming more appealing. Multiplayer games are a growing area of interest due to the scalability issues of current client-server architectures. A paradigm shift from centralized to decentralized architectures that would allow greater scalability has gained a lot of interest within the industry and academic community. Research on peer to peer network protocols for multiplayer games was mainly focused on cheat detection. Previously proposed solutions address the cheat detection issues on a protocol level but do not provide a holistic solution for the architecture. Additionally, existing solutions introduce some level of centralization, which inherently introduces single point of failures. We propose a blockchain-based, completely decentralized architecture for edge devices with no single point of failure. Our solution relies on an innovative consensus mechanism based on verifiable delay functions that additionally allows the network to derive verifiable randomness. We present simulation results that show the assignment of players and referees to instances is pseudo-random, which inherently prevents collusion-based cheats and vulnerabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces the OSI-interlayer consistency problem, gives the possible solution through the use of developed theoretical foundations the OSI-interlayer protocol consistency. It is known that the formation and organization of data transfer subject to TCP/IP protocol stack, which is the most popular and common in today's networks. In fact, TCP/IP – a systematic set of protocols, is divided into four levels, which are correlated to the OSI reference model. Analysis of the existing scientific approaches to solve the network management problems led to the conclusion about need of their further development and identify contradictory situation, which became the basis of new actual problem. Namely, there are contradictions between the requirements for ICS:between the requirement to improve the effectiveness of ICS, which requires additional costs and the requirement of reducing the cost of the ICS building&between the requirement to improve the effectiveness of ICS, which requires protocols development, and requirement to reduce the protocols cost. The basic hypothesis is advanced that the effective maintenance of interlayer coordination is possible through the use of the proposed technology of permanent horizontal communication in the OSI model layer.

One of the most vastly used protocols to protect services traffic like the web and email is Transport Layer Security (TLS). In 2018 the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standardized the latest version TLS 1.3, Introduced a significant enhancement in the protocol performance, and presented some new features. One of the new features is zero round trip-time (0-RTT) handshake mode, where the client can send the application data to the server within the handshake messages before the TLS connection is fully established. However, this application data is replayable. The replay attacks in 0-RTT handshake mode have been studied, and several mechanisms are proposed for protection, these proposed mechanisms are not able to prevent replay attacks when the server functionality is provided by a distributed environment such as multiple servers in a cloud computing environment or a CDN. This paper introduces TLS Guard as a new mechanism that extends TLS 1.3 to prevent replay attacks in a distributed environment. We evaluated a prototype TLS Guard implementation in controlled experiments and showed that its effect comes at the cost of some CPU overhead. More importantly, we showed that TLS Guard is scalable and tolerates faults without any required changes on the client side. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The identities of packet senders and receivers are treated as important privacy information in communication networks. Any packet can be attributed to its sender for evaluating its credibility. Existing studies mainly rely on third-party agents that contain the packet sender's identity to ensure the sender's privacy preservation and credibility. In this case, packet senders run the risk that their privacy might be leaked by the agent. To this end, this paper proposes a Privacy Preserved and Credible Network Protocol (PCNP), which authorizes the agent to hide the identities of senders and receivers, while guaranteeing the credibility of a packet. The feasibility of the PCNP deployment is analyzed, and its performance is evaluated through extensive experiments. • Privacy Protection for both the sender and the receiver. • Avoiding the risk of privacy leak by a third-party proxy. • New credibility metrics are proposed to determine how long to block the unwanted traffic. • Good compatibility with the existing and future network architectures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teleconferencing is the act of meeting and exchanging information through a telecommunication medium. In teleconferencing system, network engineers are faced with different challenges like best protocols requirements; impact of Quality of Service (QoS) to be used to meet up with the latest network protocols and appliances in the design of teleconference system. This paper presented a comparative analysis on two network protocols in a teleconference system, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) versus a User Datagram Protocol (UDP) was evaluated and compared applying Optimized Network Engineering Tools (OPNET) simulator. The experimental result showed differences in number of videoconference sessions, with few Packet Per Seconds (PPS) recorded in both the UDP and TCP, thereby reflecting the correctness of this comparative evaluation task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Connection establishment is a fundamental function for any connection-oriented network protocol and the efficiency of this function defines the flexibility and responsiveness of the protocol. This process initializes data transmission and performs transmission parameters negotiation, what makes it mandatory process and integral part of entire transmission. Thus, the duration of the connection establishment will affect the transmission process duration. This paper describes an implementation of a handshake algorithm, designed for connection with multiple peers, that is used in Reliable Multi-Destination Transport (RMDT) protocol, its optimization and testing.

The publish/subscribe model has gained prominence in the Internet of things (IoT) network, and both Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) support it. However, existing coverage-based fuzzers may miss some paths when fuzzing such publish/subscribe protocols, because they implicitly assume that there are only two parties in a protocol, which is not true now since there are three parties, i.e., the publisher, the subscriber and the broker. In this paper, we propose MultiFuzz, a new coverage-based multiparty-protocol fuzzer. First, it embeds multiple-connection information in a single input. Second, it uses a message mutation algorithm to stimulate protocol state transitions, without the need of protocol specifications. Third, it uses a new desockmulti module to feed the network messages into the program under test. desockmulti is similar to desock (Preeny), a tool widely used by the community, but it is specially designed for fuzzing and is 10x faster. We implement MultiFuzz based on AFL, and use it to fuzz two popular projects Eclipse Mosquitto and libCoAP. We reported discovered problems to the projects. In addition, we compare MultiFuzz with AFL and two state-of-the-art fuzzers, MOPT and AFLNET, and find it discovering more paths and crashes.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) can be effectively used for time-critical sensing applications. UAVs can be used to collect the sensed data from sensors and transfer them to a base station. The real-time transfer of data is highly desired in the time-critical applications. However, the medium access control (MAC) protocols designed for UWSNs so far are primarily focused on the efficient use of UAVs to collect data in the sensing areas. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient and fast MAC (EF-MAC) protocol in UWSNs for time-critical sensing applications. EF-MAC adopts carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) for the registration of sensor nodes with a UAV and time division multiple access (TDMA) with variable slot time for the transmission of collected data. The UAV is equipped with two transceivers to minimize both energy consumption and delay in air-to-ground communication. The energy consumption and delay are formally analyzed and the performance of EF-MAC is evaluated via extensive simulation. The simulation results show that the proposed EF-MAC outperforms the conventional MAC protocols in terms of energy efficiency and communication delay.

This article describes the organization principles for wireless mesh-networks (software-defined net-works of mobile objects). The emphasis is on the questions of getting effective routing algorithms for such networks. The mathematical model of the system is the standard transportation network. The key parameter of the routing system is the node reachability coefficient — the function depending on several basic and additional parameters (“mesh-factors”), which characterize the route between two network nodes. Each pair (arc, node) is juxtaposed to a composite parameter which characterizes the “reacha-bility” of the node by the route which begins with this arc. The best (“shortest”) route between two nodes is the route with the maximum reachability coefficient. The rules of building and refreshing the routing tables by the network nodes are described. With the announcement from the neighbor the node gets the information about the connection energy and reliability, the announcement time of receipt, the absence of transitional nodes and also about the connection capability. On the basis of this informationthe node applies the penalization (decreasing the reachability coefficient) or the reward (increasing the reachability coefficient) to all routes through this neighbor node. The penalization / reward scheme has some separate aspects: 1. Penalization for the actuality of information. 2. Penalization / reward for the reliability of a node. 3. Penalization for the connection energy. 4. Penalization for the present connection capability. The simulator of the wireless mesh-network of mobile objects is written. It is based on the suggested heuristic algorithms. The description and characteristics of the simulator are stated in the article. The peculiarities of its program realization are also examined.

A predictive-hashing based Denial-of-Service (DoS) resistant multicast authentication protocol was proposed based upon predictive-hashing, one-way key chain, erasure codes, and distillation codes techniques [4, 5]. It was claimed that this new scheme should be more resistant to various types of DoS attacks, and its worst-case resource requirements were derived in terms of coarse-level system parameters including CPU times for signature verification and erasure/distillation decoding operations, attack levels, etc. To show the effectiveness of our approach and to analyze exact resource requirements in various attack scenarios with different parameter settings, we designed and implemented an attack simulator which is platformindependent. Various attack scenarios may be created with different attack types and parameters against a receiver equipped with the predictive-hashing based protocol. The design of the simulator is explained, and the simulation results are presented with detailed resource usage statistics. In addition, resistance level to various types of DoS attacks is formulated with a newly defined resistance metric. By comparing these results to those from another approach, PRABS [8], we show that the resistance level of our protocol is greatly enhanced even in the presence of many attack streams.

Time synchronization in wireless sensor node networks is a hot topic. Many papers present various software algorithms and hardware solutions to keep accurate time information on mobile nodes. In terms of real life applications wireless sensor nodes are preferred in many domains, starting with simple room monitoring and finishing with pipeline surveillance projects. Positioning applications are far more restrictive on timekeeping accuracy, as for the velocity of nodes calculations precise time or time difference values are needed. The accuracy of time information on nodes has to be always correlated with the application requirements. In this paper, we present some considerations regarding time synchronization linked with specific needs for individual practical applications. A practical low energy method of time keeping at node level is proposed and tested. The performances of the proposed solution in terms of short and long term stability and energy requirements are analyzed and compared with existing solutions. Simulation and experimental results, some advantages and disadvantages of the method are presented at the end of the paper.

The increase of application areas in wireless sensor networks demands novel solutions in terms of energy consumption and radio frequency management. Cognitive radio sensor networks (CRSNs) are key for ensuring efficient spectrum management, by making it possible to use the unused licensed frequency spectrum together with the unlicensed frequency spectrum. Sensor nodes powered by energy-constrained batteries necessarily require energy-efficient protocols at the routing and medium access control (MAC) layers. In CRSNs, energy efficiency is more important because the sensor nodes consume additional energy for spectrum sensing and management. To the best of authors’ knowledge, there is no survey on “energy-efficient„ MAC protocols for CRSNs in the literature, even though a conceptual review on MAC protocols for CRSNs was presented at a conference recently. In this paper, energy-efficient MAC protocols for CRSNs are extensively surveyed and qualitatively compared. Open issues, and research challenges in the design of MAC protocols for CRSNs, are also discussed.

With the advent of cheap, miniaturized electronics, ubiquitous networking has reached an unprecedented level of complexity, scale and heterogeneity, becoming the core of several modern applications such as smart industry, smart buildings and smart cities. A crucial element for network performance is the protocol stack, namely the sets of rules and data formats that determine how the nodes in the network exchange information. A great effort has been put to devise formal techniques to synthesize (offline) network protocols, starting from system specifications and strict assumptions on the network environment. However, offline design can be hard to apply in the most modern network applications, either due to numerical complexity, or to the fact that the environment might be unknown and the specifications might not available. In these cases, online protocol design and adaptation has the potential to offer a much more scalable and robust solution. Nevertheless, so far only a few attempts have been done towards online automatic protocol design. These approaches, however, typically require a central coordinator, or need to build and update a model of the environment, which adds complexity. Here, instead, we envision a protocol as an emergent property of a network, obtained by an environment-driven Distributed Hill Climbing (DHC) algorithm that uses node-local reinforcement signals to evolve, at runtime and without any central coordination, a network protocol from scratch, without needing a model of the environment. We test this approach with a 3-state Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol and we observe its emergence in networks of various scales and with various settings. We also show how DHC can reach different trade-offs in terms of energy consumption and protocol performance. • We propose Distributed Hill Climbing + local reinforcement to evolve TDMA protocols. • We extensively test several reinforcement rule variants over grid or random networks. • Different reinforcement rule assignments produce different kinds of TDMA protocols. • Some rules find minimal-energy protocols even if energy is not explicitly optimized. • The proposed approach is more scalable and robust than compared optimization methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present an ant-based multipath QoS routing protocol that utilizes a single link metric combiningmultiple weighted criteria. The metric is applied to the proposed energy efficient multipath algorithm that considers both energy and latency. Energy efficiency is an important issue in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) since node energy supplies are stored in batteries. In order to increase the network lifetime it is important to maximize the minimum node energy along a path. As the network topology changes, failures may occur on active routes,resulting in the need for new route discoveries if only singleroutes per flow are maintained. Frequent new route discovery would, however, increase routing overhead and increase mean and peak packet latency. Using multiple routes simultaneously per flow can be a solution to these problems. Also, a special case of the multipath QoS routing protocol that considers throughput is applied to a security context. A compromised node can obstruct network communication by simply dropping packets that are supposed to be forwarded. In our approach, messages aredistributed over multiple paths between source and destination using ant-based QoS routing. In proportion to the throughput of each path, a pheromone-aided routing table is updated and, subsequently, paths that contain malicious nodes are naturally avoided.

The advent of computer networks makes network protocols - running on this unprotected environment - vulnerable against various attacks and malefactions. Hence, methods for automatic security verification of protocols in the early stages of protocol design are absolutely required and cause efficiency and security enhancement. Much work has been carried out in the context of protocol vulnerability analysis using model checking, but most of them focus on security protocols that aim to provide data security and integrity, whereas there are other communication network protocols, that need a specific level of security and have their own safety characteristics. These kinds of network protocols often send some control packets and use the timing information to obtain the appropriate degree of security. However, time is abstracted away in most proposed methods for protocol vulnerability analysis to avoid state space explosion. Therefore, it is not possible to verify timing behaviors. In this article, we propose timed automata-based method for formal verification of network protocols' security properties with the appropriate abstraction level. We apply our method to analyze Mobile Internet Protocol version 6 and show how to avoid state space explosion using time concepts in the protocol model. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a group of mobile nodes which cooperate in forwarding packets in a multi-hop fashion without any centralized administration. One of its key challenges is finding the malicious node in MANETs. In the literature many techniques have been proposed by researchers. In this paper we have proposed a scheme in which we are sending a control sequence to the neighbour nodes and we are expecting the nodes response. Based on the node response we can identify the malicious node. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]