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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 intersection of cybersecurity and opportunistic networks has ushered in a new era of innovation in the realm of wireless communications. In an increasingly interconnected world, where seamless data exchange is pivotal for both individual users and organizations, the need for efficient, reliable, and sustainable networking solutions has never been more pressing. Opportunistic networks, characterized by intermittent connectivity and dynamic network conditions, present unique challenges that necessitate innovative approaches for optimal performance and sustainability. This paper introduces a groundbreaking paradigm that integrates the principles of cybersecurity with opportunistic networks. At its core, this study presents a novel routing protocol meticulously designed to significantly outperform existing solutions concerning key metrics such as delivery probability, overhead ratio, and communication delay. Leveraging cybersecurity's inherent strengths, our protocol not only fortifies the network's security posture but also provides a foundation for enhancing efficiency and sustainability in opportunistic networks. The overarching goal of this paper is to address the inherent limitations of conventional opportunistic network protocols. By proposing an innovative routing protocol, we aim to optimize data delivery, minimize overhead, and reduce communication latency. These objectives are crucial for ensuring seamless and timely information exchange, especially in scenarios where traditional networking infrastructures fall short. By large-scale simulations, the new model proves its effectiveness in the different scenarios, especially in terms of message delivery probability, while ensuring reasonable overhead and latency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Originating from the concept of cognitive networks (CNs), which are becoming popular in wireless terrestrial communication scenarios, underwater acoustic cognitive networks (UACNs) are drawing more and more attention in the field of the Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT). However, as the implementation of cognitive mechanisms in underwater acoustic networks is different from that of wireless scenarios, it is impossible or difficult for traditional simulation platforms to carry out simulations of UACNs. There is a lack of specialized simulation tools in terms of UACNs. To enable the quantitative evaluation of the effectiveness and performance enhancement of a UACNs in an adverse underwater environment, a simulation platform of acoustic cognitive networks (SPACNet) was designed and investigated in this article. First, based on a state machine-based protocol programming framework, the SPACNet is capable of supporting the implementation of different state-transform types associated with cognitive networking protocols. Moreover, to facilitate the realization of cognitive function at comprehensive levels of signal, information, and link, an underwater acoustic channel model with an environmental parameter input is integrated in SPACNet to generate underwater environment-driven multiple-aspect behaviors. Moreover, a simplified collision model consisting of an environment factor, channel response, and node location is used to reduce the complexity of the simulation of UACNs signal reception. A simulation was carried out to verify the effectiveness of SPACNet in evaluating the cognitive capabilities of UACNs. Finally, a field UACNs experiment was performed to validate the general consistency between the conclusion obtained with the SPACNet-based simulation and that from the field test. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a MAC protocol for ad hoc networks using In-band Full-duplex (IBFD) wireless communications, which are named as AdHoc-FDMAC. To utilize IBFD communications in ad hoc networks, this protocol modifies a number of control frames in the IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) MAC standard. Here, the detailed time sequences for all types of IBFD communications are shown for the data transmission and routing. In this paper, the probability and throughput equations for IBFD communications in different situations have been derived. The performance of the proposed AdHoc-FDMAC has been analysed in terms of probability, throughput, and routing time. The Maximum throughput of AdHoc-FDMAC has been found to be 48.34 Mbps, and it is compared with a recently published ad hoc MAC as well as with the conventional HD MAC. The AdHoc-FDMAC outperforms the recently published ad hoc MAC and conventional HD MAC by 16.80% and 66.50% throughput gain, respectively. AdHoc-FDMAC incorporates the existing Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol, but this AODV routing is utilized here using IBFD communications. This paper also compares the routing time of the IBFD-based AODV with the conventional AODV. The result shows that the IBFD-based AODV requires 33.33% less routing time than that of the conventional AODV for 3-hop distance between the transmitter and receiver. This paper suggests that the AdHoc-FDMAC protocol provides much more throughput in ad hoc networks by utilizing IBFD communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A detailed simulation study, together with real-world experiments, a stateless flooding mechanism for anycast routing in a mobile wireless ad hoc network is studied with a developed model. The model covers reliability aspects of wireless communication in such networks with a routing mechanism using a scheme of orientation-dependent inter-node communication links. Using the mechanism, the paper addresses another issue of locating the nearest server from a group of replicated servers in the network. A class of extended Petri nets is used in the development of the simulation model to explicitly represent parallelism of events and processes in the network. An application layer prototype system is implemented based on the proposed routing model without any changes at lower layers of the network protocol stack. In simulation and real-world experiments, the behavior of five fundamental performance metrics - response ratio, relative traffic, average response time, average number of hops, and duplicate ratio - were investigated by changing distance of transmission, motion pattern and combining with different model parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) finds applicability in different domains such as security, rescue operations, intelligent transportation systems (ITS), etc. VANET has unique features like high mobility, limited mobility patterns, adequate topology modifications, and wireless communication. Despite the benefits of VANET, scalability is a challenging issue which could be addressed by the use of cluster-based routing techniques. It enables the vehicles to perform intercluster communication via chosen CHs and optimal routes. The main drawback of VANET network is the network unsteadiness that results in minimum lifetime. In order to avoid reduced network lifetime in VANET, this paper presents an enhanced metaheuristics based clustering with multihop routing technique for lifetime maximization (EMCMHR-LM) in VANET. The presented EMCMHR-LM model involves the procedure of arranging clusters, cluster head (CH) selection, and route selection appropriate for VANETs. The presented EMCMHR-LM model uses slime mold optimization based clustering (SMO-C) technique to group the vehicles into clusters. Besides, an enhanced wild horse optimization based multihop routing (EWHO-MHR) protocol by the optimization of network parameters. The presented EMCMHR-LM model is simulated using Network Simulator (NS3) tool and the simulation outcomes reported the enhanced performance of the proposed EMCMHR-LM technique over the other models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's world of wireless communication, the prime point of concentration lies on data security. This depends mainly on proper authentication of users who are intended to connect to the network. with modern day technology, the credentials (password), which the legitimate user send to the access points for his/her authorization, can be sniffed and used to enter the system, compromising the system security. WPA2/PSK (Wireless Protected Access/Pre-Shared Key) has a vulnerability which allows an attacker to perform Man-in-the-middle attack by capturing the handshake sent by the legitimate user for authentication. The captured handshake can be used to recover the password using dictionary attack or can be brute forced. To overcome the short comings of the current system, the proposed method uses Frequency Hopping Technique to secure the MIC(Message Integrity Code) before transmitting it. This method reduces the possibility of brute forcing the password, even if the handshake is captured. [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]

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

• 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]

Airborne wireless communications have a great influence on everyday life making life convenient the development of various types of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has become in the fields of electronics and communications are possible. Several efforts have been made to develop multi-drone communications protocols and aviation-dedicated networks (FANETs). However, the network protocol behavior has been simulated in this paper using the framework of AVENS, a hybrid wireless network simulation framework, which is integrated with the LARISSA Model, X-PLANE, and the OMNET++ Simulator. The locations of the UAVs of 15 aircraft were studied and the throughput parameters, time, received packets, and propagation time was calculated. The data was successfully transmitted in the form of a UDP Video Stream using the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol, the propagation time of 17.4569 us, received packets of 52%, the throughput of 88,832 Kbps, and a lifetime of 46.9547s was calculated. In addition, a comparison was also made between the proposed system and other research in terms of the number of drones, packets, propagation time, and the simulator used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantum wireless communication networks are an important part of global quantum networks. Here we propose a measurement-device-independent quantum wireless network communication protocol, which can not only close detector-side-channel loopholes launched by malicious nodes but also remedy the drawback of a perfectly shared Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state between the nodes. Moreover, the correctness of the generated entanglement between the sender and the receiver is checked. The security analysis shows that the proposed protocol is secure against common attacks from malicious nodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medium access control (MAC) protocol design plays a crucial role to increase the performance of wireless communications and networks. The channel access mechanism is provided by MAC layer to share the medium by multiple stations. Different types of wireless networks have different design requirements such as throughput, delay, power consumption, fairness, reliability, and network density, therefore, MAC protocol for these networks must satisfy their requirements. In this work, we proposed two multiplexing methods for modern wireless networks: Massive multiple-input-multipleoutput (MIMO) and power domain non-orthogonal multiple access (PD-NOMA). The first research method namely Massive MIMO uses a massive number of antenna elements to improve both spectral efficiency and energy efficiency. On the other hand, the second research method (PD-NOMA) allows multiple non-orthogonal signals to share the same orthogonal resources by allocating different power level for each station. PD-NOMA has a better spectral efficiency over the orthogonal multiple access methods. A review of previous works regarding the MAC design for different wireless networks is classified based on different categories. The main contribution of this research work is to show the importance of the MAC design with added optimal functionalities to improve the spectral and energy efficiencies of the wireless networks. [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]

The widespread application of wireless communication technology brings great convenience to people, but security and privacy problems also arise. To assess and guarantee the security of wireless networks and user devices, discovering and identifying wireless devices become a foremost task. Currently, effective device identification is still a challenging issue, as device fingerprinting requires huge training datasets and is difficult to expand, and rule-based identification is not accurate and reliable enough. In this paper, we propose WND-Identifier, a universal and extensible framework for the identification of wireless devices, which can generate high-precision device labels (vendor, type, and product model) efficiently without user interaction. We first introduce the concept of device-info-related network protocols. WND-Identifier makes full use of the natural language features in such protocol messages and combines with the device description in the welcome page, thereby utilizing extraction rules to generate concrete device labels. Considering that the device information in the protocol messages may be incomplete or forged, we further take advantage of the application logic independence and stability of the device-info-related protocol, so as to build a multiprotocol text classification model, which maps the device to a known label. We conduct experiments in homes and public networks and present three application scenarios to verify the effectiveness of WND-Identifier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, opportunistic networks (OppNets) are considered as one of the most attractive developments of mobile ad hoc networks that have emerged, thanks to the development of intelligent devices. Owing to the harsh and dynamic topology of these networks, attaining high delivery ratio is a challenging issue. Hence, it is imperative to select which node's attribute must be adjusted to achieve a higher performance in such unpredictable networks. A mutual information‐based weighting scheme (MIWS) that exploits the entropy concept to assess the impact of the nodes' attributes on the network performance was proposed. The weighting procedure aims to figure out the correlative relations between different attributes and delivery ratio performance of the network. The high weight of certain attributes implies a correspondingly high impact in achieving efficient data forwarding. The proposed scheme is proofed conceptually and simulated using the Opportunistic Network Environment simulator. In contrast to previous studies conducted in the context of weight resolution, the proposed approach allows us to address this issue in real‐time stateless non‐social OppNets. Regardless of the deployed routing protocol, experiments show that adjusting nodes' attributes based on the proposed MIWS can improve the performance up to encouraging delivery ratios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless communication over terahertz (THz) frequency bands is envisioned as the key enabler of many applications and services offered in 6G networks. The abundantly available bandwidth in THz frequencies can satisfy the ultra-high user throughput requirements and accommodate a massive number of connected devices. However, poor propagation characteristics, shadowing, and blockages may result in sudden outages and necessitate frequent handovers. Therefore, an inefficient handover procedure will impose severe challenges in meeting the ultra-high reliability and low latency requirements of emerging applications. In blockage driven mmWave and THz networks, a higher multi-connectivity degree and efficient handover procedures are needed to reduce the data plane interruptions and to achieve high reliability. We present an analytical model to study the impact of handover procedures and multi-connectivity degree on the latency and reliability of blockage driven wireless networks. From the network protocol design perspective, our study offers a quick and accurate way to envisage how network architecture and protocols should evolve in terms of multi-connectivity degrees and handover procedural efficiency. Our results suggest that, for THz systems, coverage range should be increased even if it comes at the cost of increased initial access and base station discovery times. [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]

In view of the security threats posed inside and outside the network due to the weaknesses of network protocols and systems, power line and wireless converged communications have security problems in communication connections that appear in environments where heterogeneous networks overlap. In order to cope with the problems of network delay and data transmission security in smart grid, this paper proposes an online monitoring security protection method based on edge nodes, which manages user trust under the premise of not leaking grid user data, and establishes a personalized machine learning model. This method not only guarantees users a secure communication experience, but also ensures users' real-time network connection and content acquisition, and can obtain a fast and personalized user experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication devices communicate and exchange information with each other in an independent manner to perform necessary tasks. The machine communicates with another machine over a wireless network. Wireless communication opens up the environment to huge vulnerabilities, making it very easy for hackers to gain access to sensitive information and carry out malicious actions. This paper proposes an M2M communication system through the internet in Tele-Robotics and provides network performance security. Tele-robotic systems are designed for surgery, treatment and diagnostics to be conducted across short or long distances while utilizing wireless communication networks. The systems also provide a low delay and secure communication system for the tele-robotics community and data security. The system can perform tasks autonomously and intelligently, minimizing the burden on medical staff and improving the quality and system performance of patient care. In the medical field, surgeons and patients are located at different places and connected through public networks. So the design of a medical sensor node network with LEACH protocol for secure and reliable communication ensures through the attack and without attack performance. Finally, the simulation results show low delay and reliable secure network transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A great number of Internet of things (IoT) applications rely on real-time communication (RTC) mechanisms for transmission of media. Essentially, applications analyze and process media to make decisions that typically affect actuation and control of embedded devices. IoT networks, however, are subjected to constrains that limit the computational and resource complexity of all entities involved. This is particularly critical when considering the traditional RTC protocols like real-time protocol (RTP) that was not designed to perform well in the context of low-power lossy networks (LLNs). This paper focuses on alternatives to media transport in IoT networks. Specially, constrained application protocol (CoAP) and the message queuing telemetry transport sensor network protocol (MQTT-SN) are presented as valid technologies for media propagation in LLNs. The paper models and compares CoAP, RTP, and MQTT-SN to determine the most efficient scenario for audio, speech, and video transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researches in wireless mobile ad hoc networks have an inherent challenge of vulnerable diagnosis due to the diverse behaviour pattern of the vulnerable nodes causing heterogeneous vtype1, vtype2, vtupe3 and vtype4 faults. This paper proposes a protocol for the diagnosis of vulnerability nodes with threephases of clustering, vulnerable detection and vulnerable fault classification in wireless networks. This protocol employs the technique of probabilistic neural network for classification of vulnerable nodes and detects vulnerable nodes through timeout mechanism and vtype3, vtype4, vtype1, vtype2 nodes through the method of analysis variance. Network simulator NS-2.3.35 is employed for performance evaluation of the protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless body area networks (WBANs) have become a prospective technology for the next generation healthcare services, in which tiny sensors are placed either on the skin or in the body of human to transmit real-time monitored data to the medical service provider (MSP). In order to protect the transmitted data from leakage, forgery or alteration, constructing a secure data transmission scheme for WBANs that achieves confidentiality, authentication and integrity is necessary. Also, in practical application of WBANs, patient and MSP are in different domain networks in general. In this article, we first design a cross-domain certificateless signcryption (CDCS) scheme, then an efficient cross-domain data transmission scheme for WBANs is proposed based on the new CDCS scheme. The data transmission scheme realizes authentication, confidentiality, anonymity, nonrepudiation, integrity, registration security and KSTI security. Compared to present two security schemes for the WBANs based on certificateless signcryption, our designed scheme entitles patient and MSP to use different cryptographic parameter in different domain networks. Moreover, the new scheme has advantages in communication overhead and computation cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless sensor network establishes a network with randomly distributed sensor devices that are connected together through some types of wireless communication networks. Such sensors are responsible for recognizing the physical or environmental conditions for multi-purpose usability and ease of deployment. This network has some limitations such as prone to network failure, and limited power and capacity of sensor devices. Several routing strategies have been originated by the researchers to improve many applications for such a network. Among the routing techniques, the clustering algorithm can increase the life span and efficiency of the network. The main feature of a cluster-based network is to minimize energy dissipation and delay of the system. This paper investigates the performance of two cluster-based routing protocols namely homogeneous Energy-Aware Multi-Hop Multi-Path Hierarchical (EAMMH), and Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) routing strategies for homogeneous nodes, sink nodes, dead nodes and other common scenarios. In this research paper, we observe that LEACH works better for small networks where there is a small number of nodes, while EAMMH works better for larger networks consisting of a large number of nodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have high value in the field of wireless communications. As the earliest WSN clustering protocol, Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) can effectively reduce the energy consumption of data transmission in sensor networks. However, LEACH has some problems such as cluster head nodes are unevenly distributed. In this paper, a unified heuristic bat algorithm (UHBA) is proposed to optimize elections in cluster heads. This algorithm guarantees that the election of cluster heads can freely transform both global search and local search. Meanwhile, comparing with several other variants of the bat algorithm in CEC2013 test suite, it can be seen from results that UHBA has better performance. Moreover, the application of the algorithm on LEACH is better than other algorithms, which further proves that the algorithm has better results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Networks consisting of wireless sensors are extensively used in many applications. Decentralized Erasure Codes (DEC) were introduced to store the sensed data in the wireless sensor network itself before transmitting the sensed data from wireless nodes to gateway or query nodes. Data at the failed nodes can be reconstructed by accessing other nodes in the network in DEC setup. In a traditional DEC setup, it is required to access k nodes out of n nodes to reconstruct the data at the failed node. Also, the reconstruction at failed node is subjected to intruder attacks raising security concerns. To reduce the number of nodes required to reconstruct the data at failed nodes and to ensure communication security, in this paper, decentralized erasure codes were constructed from optimal locally recoverable codes and Blom's key pre-distribution protocol, which exploits the generator matrix nature of constructed code, was implemented. From the simulations, we can infer that the proposed scheme performs better than other existing methods that use Reed–Solomon codes in terms of network load and error count per sent packet. Furthermore, it is shown that the proposed scheme ensures secure and efficient communication between nodes to overcome intruder interference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless body sensor networks are now very popular for modern healthcare applications like health monitoring, remote healthcare, emergency healthcare etc. This healthcare application mainly used for constant monitoring of health specific data while doing regular activities. The wireless body area network is consisted of small wearing sensors which are implanted in human body for capturing medical data and send to a medical server through a network connector to base station. A major issue is secure transmission of patient's medical healthcare information to the medical server through wireless communication. Also the data collected in this network is very sensitive because on the basis of this clinical data, further treatment will be occurred. Therefore, security requirements such as confidentiality, integrity, authenticity should be guaranteed during communication. This paper proposes a strong mutual authentication protocol based on public key cryptography for satisfying all security requirements. The proposed authentication approach resists the major vulnerable attacks in wireless body sensor networks with low computational and communicational load. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider a three-hop relay system based on interference cancellation technique in Underlay cognitive radio (CR) network. Although underlay CR has been shown as a promising technique to better utilize the source of primary users (PUs), its secondary performance will be severely degraded. On one hand, by adapting the Underlay spectrum sharing pattern, secondary users (SUs) would observe the strict power constraints and be interfered by primary users. On the other hand, limited transmit power results in limited transmission range, which greatly degrade the secondary transmission capacity. To solve the problems above, we propose an interference cancellation protocol for multi-hop wireless communication networks in underlay CR, which could develop the long-distance transmission performance and improve the transmission efficiency significantly. As simulation results shows, proposed scheme significantly reduce the secondary outage probability and increase the secondary diversity than the traditional cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secure data communication is the need of hour today specifically when the wireless communication channel is insecure. We are proposing a protocol which can be customized in variety of situations. We want to use steganography as a complementary tool for cryptography. The protocol utilizes the nature of communication protocol and it is even useful for places where data hiding and cryptography is illegal or can't be performed because of various reasons. We are giving a name to these kinds of networks as disturbed networks. The proposed peer to peer protocol is very useful for insecure channels and disturbed networks and we provide complete analysis to validate its utility. The method is a convenient stop and wait protocol which provides unbeatable security and suitable for mobile phones as well. At the same time, for intruder's perspective, there is no encryption involved which is a very important aspect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malfunctions of a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) protocol caused by a conceptual mistake in the protocol design, rather than unreliable communication, can often be detected only by considering communication among the nodes in the network to be reliable. In Restricted Broadcast Process Theory, which was developed for the specification and verification of MANET protocols, the communication operator is lossy. Replacing unreliable with reliable communication invalidates existing results for this process theory. We examine the effects of this adaptation on the semantics of the framework with regard to the non-blocking property of communication in MANETs, the notion of behavioral equivalence relation and its axiomatization. To utilize our complete axiomatization for analyzing the correctness of protocols at the syntactic level, we introduce a precongruence relation which abstracts away from a sequence of multi-hop communications, leading to an application-level action preconditioned by a multi-hop constraint over the topology. We illustrate the applicability of our framework through a simple routing protocol. To prove its correctness, we introduce a novel proof process, based on our precongruence relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Addressing communication reliability and security has always been of significant importance in wireless networks. Opportunistic routing (OR) protocols comprise a promising area of research that aims to improve the reliability of communications, particularly in lossy networks. The main concept behind OR protocols is to utilize the broadcast nature of the wireless medium and determine a group of neighboring node candidates, known as candidate set, to collaboratively forward packets towards the destination using a candidate coordination approach. However, similar to traditional routing protocols, OR protocols operate poorly in the presence of malicious nodes and attackers. Therefore, researchers have designed and developed a number of security enhancements, considering the specific characteristics of such protocols. In this paper, following a brief overview on OR protocols, we examine, classify, and compare the different categories of security approaches proposed for OR protocols. More precisely, we divide security-related OR protocols into three categories, including trust-based approaches, game-theory-oriented solutions, and other related protocols. Furthermore, the most significant algorithms of each category are investigated as case studies. Finally, a comparison of different protocols is presented considering the main features, advantages, and shortcomings of each protocol. [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]

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]

Presents the table of contents for this issue of the publication. [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]

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]

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]

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]

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 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]

Continuously increasing the data rate in wireless networks is required to satisfy the ever-increasing service demands. Full-duplex (FD), a promising technology for wireless networks, is able to double the data rate theoretically. Although several researchers study the physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) protocols of FD technology, there are few study focusing on the multiuser MAC protocol design for the next generation wireless networks. In this paper, a power control (PC) based multiuser FD MAC protocol, named PC MU-FuPlex, is proposed. Moreover, the probability of establishing FD link is formulated specifically. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed MAC protocol significantly improves the saturation throughput up to 200% compared to that without PC in higher modulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last two decades, there has been a tremendous growth in the use of MANETs, not only due to the development of the technology but also due to their high flexibility. MANETs have challenges and limitations and among the major challenge is the routing process because of high dynamic topology and distributed nature. This is the main reason for quick depletion of network resources. Thus, there is a need to develop a routing protocol to fulfill various application requirements and enhance routing paths according to the topology change. In this paper, two protocols are proposed in order to optimally utilize the constrained network resources and reliably detect high-quality links. They are Hybrid Geo-cast Routing (HGR) protocol and Signal Strength and Congestion Avoidance protocol (SSCA). The optimal and adaptive HGR protocol utilizes geographical location information to limit search area during route discovery process by including only promising search paths to minimize control overhead. Meanwhile, adaptive SSCA uses SSCA mechanism in order to enhance link and node quality detection and reduce packet drop. The experimental results show that the proposed HGR protocol is able to reduce up to 46.67% control overhead. Meanwhile, the proposed adaptive SSCA protocol reduces packet drop to 71.20%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes Census, a protocol for data aggregation and statistical counting in MANETs. Census operates by circulating a set of tokens in the network using biased random walks such that each node is visited by at least one token. The protocol is structure-free so as to avoid high messaging overhead for maintaining structure in the presence of node mobility. It biases the random walks of tokens so as to achieve fast cover time; the bias involves short albeit multi-hop gradients that guide the tokens towards hitherto unvisited nodes. Census thus achieves a cover time of O(N) and message overhead of O(Nlog(N)) where N is the number of nodes. Notably, it enjoys scalability and robustness, which we demonstrate via simulations in networks ranging from 100 to 4000 nodes under different network densities and mobility models. We also observe a speedup by a factor of k when k different tokens are used (1≤k≤N). [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]

The state of the art in wireless communication is highly spectrum efficient but performs poorly in terms of energy efficiency. With widespread deployment, battery operated devices, escalating energy cost, and inherent energy inefficiency of the Carrier Sense Multiple Access protocol in wireless, it is of prime importance today to look for improved energy efficiency in wireless communication. One promising solution is to use multi clock-rate sampling devices in conjunction with frequency agnostic preamble detection. This reduces the power consumed by wireless devices in idle listening, without significantly affecting the throughput and spectrum efficiency. In this paper, we model such a device as a Markov chain and determine its performance in terms of power consumption and goodput, and discuss the elemental trade-off between the two. The analytical results are verified using extensive simulation and compared with existing techniques. A preamble construction scheme that allows devices with different downclocking levels to coexist in the same network is also explored. Finally, we propose a novel preamble compression scheme based on Robust Header Compression to provide improved performance and scalability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]