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In the modern world, trustworthy and secure identity is essential for a number of uses, such as unlocking personal gadgets and gaining access to secure areas. Conventional techniques, such as PINs and passwords, have shown to be vulnerable to fraud and illegal access. These vulnerabilities have been addressed by the development of biometric authentication, which makes use of an individual's distinct physiological and behavioral characteristics. Unimodal biometric systems concentrate on a single feature, although they frequently face difficulties like noise and spoofing assaults. By merging characteristics from several modalities, multimodal biometric systems provide an answer and improve identification robustness and accuracy. In order to increase identification security and accuracy, this article investigates the combination of hand geometry, palm print, fingerprint, and facial biometrics. Different integration situations and modes of operation for multimodal biometric systems are examined, as well as various fusion methodologies. In summary, the paper ends with implications for biometric systems practitioners, academics, and policymakers as well as a discussion of relevant research topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's world, Cloud Computing (CC) enables the users to access computing resources and services over cloud without any need to own the infrastructure. Cloud Computing is a concept in which a network of devices, located in remote locations, is integrated to perform operations like data collection, processing, data profiling and data storage. In this context, resource allocation and task scheduling are important processes which must be managed based on the requirements of a user. In order to allocate the resources effectively, hybrid cloud is employed since it is a capable solution to process large-scale consumer applications in a pay-by-use manner. Hence, the model is to be designed as a profit-driven framework to reduce cost and make span. With this motivation, the current research work develops a Cost-Effective Optimal Task Scheduling Model (CEOTS). A novel algorithm called Target-based Cost Derivation (TCD) model is used in the proposed work for hybrid clouds. Moreover, the algorithm works on the basis of multi-intentional task completion process with optimal resource allocation. The model was successfully simulated to validate its effectiveness based on factors such as processing time, make span and efficient utilization of virtual machines. The results infer that the proposed model outperformed the existing works and can be relied in future for real-time applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a correction notice for an article titled "Priority Based Energy Efficient MAC Protocol by Varying Data Rate For Wireless Body Area Network." The correction states that a reference (Reference [38]) was wrongly cited in the article and has been removed from the updated list. The authors apologize for any inconvenience caused and assure that the scientific conclusions of the article are unaffected. The original publication has been updated accordingly. The article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. [Extracted from the article]

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) empowered by information-centric paradigm takes popular paradigm place of hostcentric networking of communication networks, which in turn helps prioritizing the labeled content delivery, with no information on the origin of the contents. Security of client and content, originating place, and identity privacy are inherent in ICN paradigm design in contrast to present host centric concept where they are introduced as a second-thought. But, with its genesis, the ICN paradigm exhibits different unresolved challenges in privacy and security. In this work, current literature in ICN privacy and security are explored and open challenges are presented. Especially, three extensive subjects: security threats, risks involved with privacy, access control management techniques are explored. Primary objective of ICN is to modify the present location-based IP network architecture to location-free and content-oriented network framework. ICN can satisfy the demands for caching to the neighbouring edge devices with no more storage deployed. In this work, an several architecture for effective caching at the edge devices for data-centric IoT applications and a rapid content access that depends on novel deep learning techniques and caching processes in ICN. The novel learning-oriented effective caching technique yields the solution to the problem involving the available hash and on-path caching techniques, and the newly introduced content popularity scheme improves the availability content at the devices in the vicinity for minimizing the content transfer time and packet loss ratio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: In this paper, the problem of pinning synchronization for delayed complex directed networks via generalized intermittent adaptive control strategy is considered. First, a dynamical mode of delayed network is investigated. Second, a generalized intermittent adaptive control strategy which unified the traditional periodic intermittent control and the aperiodic case is introduced. Additionally, by constructing a piecewise Lyapunov auxiliary function and making use of piecewise analysis technique, some effective and novel criteria to ensure the global synchronization of delayed complex networks based on the designed control protocols are obtained. Finally, an example with numerical simulations is provided to demonstrate the validness of the theoretical results proposed scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, the distributed event-triggered control strategy is found to cope with the pinning control problem of stochastic discrete-time complex networks with time-varying delay. Under the devised mechanism, exponential mean-square synchronisation can be implemented in the directed networks. By utilising the Lyapunov functional method and the stochastic analysis, several sufficient conditions are established. Moreover, the issue of average synchronisation is investigated. For the stochastic complex networks without reference state, it is demonstrated that all nodes can converge to a time-varying weighted average exponentially by a suitable distributed event-triggered controller. Finally, some numerical examples are presented to indicate the effectiveness of the devised control strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the out lag synchronization of fractional order complex networks (FOCN) including both internal delay and coupling delay and with the employment of pinning control scheme. Using comparison theorem and constructing the auxiliary function, several synchronization criterions by linear feedback pinning control are presented. The model and the obtained results in this work are more general than the previous works. Correctness and effectiveness of the theoretical results are validated through numerical simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) a lot of critical information is shared however without having guarantees about the origin and integrity of the information. Digital signatures can provide important integrity guarantees to prevent illegal users from getting access to private and sensitive data in various IoT applications. Functional signatures, introduced by Boyle, Goldwasser and Ivan (PKC 2014) as signatures with a finegrained access control, allow an authority to generate signing keys corresponding to various functions such that a user with a signing key for a function f, can sign the image of the function f on a message mi.e., can sign f(m). Okamoto and Takashima (PKC 2013) firstly proposed the notion of a decentralized multi-authority functional signature (DMA-FS) scheme, which supports non-monotone access structures combined with inner-product relations. In this paper, we generalise the definition of DMA-FS proposed by Okamoto et al. (PKC13) for even more general policy functions, which support any polynomial-size boolean predicates other than the inner product relation and allow modifications of the original message. In our multi-authority functional signature (MAFS), there are multiple authorities and each one is able to certify a specific function and issue a corresponding functional signing key for each individual with some property, rendering them very useful in application settings such smart homes, smart cities, smart health care etc. We also provide a general transformation from a standard signature scheme to a MAFS scheme. Moreover, we present a way to build a function private MAFS from a FS without function privacy together with SNARKs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the problem of synchronisation for complex networks with hybrid coupling time delays. The control strategy consisting of adaptive control and pinning adaptive control is considered. Together with an augment Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional and using the effective mathematical techniques, several conditions are derived to guarantee a class of complex dynamical networks with hybrid coupling time-varying delays to be synchronised. Finally, some representative examples are simulated to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evacuation planning in three-dimensional (3D) constrained space scenarios is an important kind of emergency management problems. In this paper, we investigate a path planning problem in constrained space evacuation for 3D scenarios, named the Priority-based Route Network Constructing Problem, which has two objectives of maximizing the evacuation exits' utilization efficiency and minimizing the whole evacuation delay. We propose a 3-phase heuristic to construct a route network based on the Minimum Weighted Set Cover. In the experimental evaluation, we compare the proposed algorithm with the existing algorithms and implement our algorithm in underground mine evacuation, which is a typical kind of constrained space scenarios. Both types of results indicate our strategy can enhance the utilization efficiency of the escaping exits and guarantee a tolerable range of the global escaping time-consumption with a low running time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, emerging SDN-based VANET (i.e., vehicular ad hoc network based on software-defined networking) enables VANET management to be programmable and flexible. It introduces SDN controllers to maintain network-wide resources and SDN applications to program configurations through arbitrarily accessing resources via the northbound interface (NBI). However, this brings with it security issues on the NBI, such as network-wide resource exposure and configuration manipulation. Most of the existing works employed permission systems to restrict resource access; these solutions are generally controller-dependent, which means controller codes need to be modified for giving access permissions to external applications. In this paper, we propose a scalable and dynamic access control scheme on the NBI for SDN-based VANET, named BENBI. In the proposed scheme, we dynamically and flexibly control network resources by employing broadcast encryption, rather than altering source codes of the controller or updating permission lists with various degrees of granularity. Moreover, the resources are encrypted during transmission so that they are only available to authorized applications. Finally, we implement a prototype of BENBI. The experimental results demonstrate that the cost of allocating secret keys is independent of the number of SDN entities being appointed, which indicates the scalability of our scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate downlink scheduling in two-hop relay access networks with a central controller. To address the time-varying nature of wireless channels, a channel-aware scheduling scheme is proposed to exploit both spatial and multihop diversity. Given instantaneous channel state information, scheduling decisions are made at every time slot based on the designed priority indexes. The proposed scheme improves throughput and ensures fair transmission among all the active mobile stations in the system. In addition, with optimized scaling factors, the proposed scheme is shown to be close to Pareto-optimal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless sensor network has been widely used in Internet of Things (IoT) applications to support large and dense networks. As sensor nodes are usually tiny and provided with limited hardware resources, the existing multiple access methods, which involve high computational complexity to preserve the protocol performance, is not available under such a scenario. In this paper, we propose an intelligent Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol selection scheme based on machine learning in wireless sensor networks. We jointly consider the impact of inherent behavior and external environments to deal with the application limitation problem of the single type MAC protocol. This scheme can benefit from the combination of the competitive protocols and non-competitive protocols, and help the network nodes to select the MAC protocol that best suits the current network condition. Extensive simulation results validate our work, and it also proven that the accuracy of the proposed MAC protocol selection strategy is higher than the existing work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) provides facility of driving assistance and multimedia services to the road users. To improve the Intelligent Transportation System, Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks are the most prominent area that improve the services of ITS. Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks apply multiple channel medium access control scheme according to the IEEE 1609.4 standard draft. According to the standard draft multiple channel medium access control scheme, channels are split into service channels (SCHs) and control channel (CCHs). This work proposes a dynamic control channel interval (DCI) MAC scheme that can variably fix the time interval between SCHs and CCH efficiently. This work divides the SCHs interval time into small interval time slots according to the current network traffic load. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Intelligent Transportation Systems use Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks to improve road safety. Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC or IEEE 802.11p) and Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE or IEEE 1609 protocol suite) are the two important standards that govern communication in VANETs. However, DSRC based VANETs cannot guarantee to achieve the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements like reliability and latency under high vehicle density scenario due to network congestion. This paper studies the congestion behavior of IEEE802.11p/1609.4 based Medium Access Control by varying vehicle density in urban and highway conditions. Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) is the default medium access mechanism in WAVE MAC. The metrics chosen for evaluating the performance of CSMA/CA are the average end-to-end delay, average throughput, packet delivery ratio, packet loss ratio and the number of packets lost. The simulation is carried out for both urban and highway scenario under varying vehicle density and communication load. The Simulation is performed using Omnet++ and SUMO based veins framework. The simulation results show that under high vehicle density and high communication load, CSMA/CA fails to meet the required QoS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have emerged as one of the prominent area of research in the recent times. Sensor-MAC (S-MAC) protocol is one of the Medium Access Control(MAC)protocols, which follows the idea of periodic listen and sleep. In other words, node is active till the time it receives the data packets, otherwise it goes in sleep mode by turning its radio off. However, this protocol lacks in energy conservation due to unnecessary listening to the channel in idle mode. In this paper, we have proposed a new analytical model in which energy is reduced on the basis of the activities it performs in the active mode. A comparison is made between all the different possibilities which can occur at a node, when it listens unnecessarily to the medium. Various energy consuming modes of S-MAC protocol such as transmission, reception, sensing and listening are considered. The proposed work results in the minimizing the energy and reducing the delay in time as compared to that of basic S-MAC protocol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

JSON Web Tokens provide a scalable solution with significant performance benefits for user access control in decentralized, large-scale distributed systems. Such examples would entail cloud-based, micro-services styled systems or typical Internet of Things solutions. One of the obstacles still preventing the wide-spread use of JSON Web Token-based access control is the problem of invalidating the issued tokens upon clients leaving the system. Token invalidation presently takes a considerable processing overhead or a drastically increased architectural complexity. Solving this problem without losing the main benefits of JSON Web Tokens still remains an open challenge which will be addressed in the article. We are going to propose some solutions to implement low-complexity token revocations and compare their characteristics in different environments with the traditional solutions. The proposed solutions have the benefit of preserving the advantages of JSON Web Tokens, while also adhering to stronger security constraints and possessing a finely tuneable performance cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The long term evolution (LTE) network architecture comprises, among other elements, the base station (eNodeB), which provides and controls the air interface. eNodeB protocol stack is composed of different layers, each one with specific purpose. In terms of air interface performance, the most critical layers of an eNodeB are the physical layer (PHY) and the medium access control layer (MAC). Both must operate on precise timing basis, corresponding to a frame duration of 1 ms. Because of this requirement, PHY layer developers need an effective test architecture, capable to follow time response policies. This article proposes an automated test framework for eNodeB’s physical layer development, comprising procedures for checking data integrity, stability and performance. This framework is based on a simplified LTE MAC layer, which operates as a software element that communicates directly with the physical layer and performs mapping procedures between logical and physical channels, reception and transmission of physical layer data, user data scheduling and data exchange with mobile terminals. All above mentioned procedures are performed with no further dependency on other LTE network elements, thus providing a stand-alone test framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose energy efficient MAC protocols for data gathering tree structure. The basic concept of the proposed protocol is that it reduces traffic overloads in low depth nodes by introducing full sleep state for one frame. To maximize network performance, we only control traffic from non-relay nodes which are leaf nodes in the tree. We introduce a new superframe structure for pre-scheduling to alleviate contentions and packet collisions between children nodes. In addition, leaf nodes go into a full sleep mode for one superframe in heavy traffic loads by using control packets, which results in a considerable reduction of energy consumption at low depth nodes. Simulation results show the proposed protocol saves more energy and achieves better packet delivery ratio compared to the DMAC with a moderate increase of a latency performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud computing has great economical advantages and wide application, more and more data owners store their data in the cloud storage server (CSS) to avoid tedious local data management and insufficient storage resources. But the privacy of data owners faces enormous challenges. The most recent searchable encryption technology adopts the ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE), which is one good method to deal with this security issue. However, the access attributes of the users are transmitted and assigned in plaintext form. In this paper, we propose a based on blinded CP-ABE searchable encryption cloud storage service (BCP-ABE-SECSS) scheme, which can blind the access attributes of the users in order to prevent the collusion attacks of the CSS and the users. Data encryption and keyword index generation are performed by the data owners; meanwhile, we construct that CSS not only executes the access control policy of the data but also performs the pre-decryption operation about the encrypted data to solve higher time cost of decryption calculation to the data users. Security proof results show that this scheme has access attribute security, data confidentiality, indistinguishable security against chosen keyword attack, and resisting the collusion attack between the data user and the CSS. Performance analysis and the experimental results show that this scheme can effectively reduce the computation time cost of the data owners and the data users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the explosive growth of indoor data traffic in forthcoming fifth generation cellular networks, it is imperative for mobile network operators to improve network coverage and capacity. Femtocells are widely recognized as a promising technology to address these demands. As femtocells are sold or loaned by a mobile network operator (MNO) to its residential or enterprise customers, MNOs usually employ refunding scheme to compensate the femtocell holders (FHs) providing indoor access to other subscribers by configuring the femtocell to operate in open or hybrid access mode. Due to the selfishness nature, competition between network operators as well as femtocell holders makes it challenging for operators to select appropriate FHs for trading access resources. This inspires us to develop an effective refunding framework, with aim to improve overall network resource utilization, through promoting FHs to make reasonable access permission for well-matched macro users. In this paper, we develop a two-stage auction-Stackelberg game (ASGF) framework for access permission in femtocell networks, where MNO and mobile virtual network operator lease access resources from multiple FHs. We first design an auction mechanism to determine the winner femtocell that fulfils the access request of macro users. We next formulate the access permission problem between the winner femtocell and operators as a Stackelberg game, and theoretically prove the existence of unique equilibrium. As a higher system payoff can be gained by improving individual players’ payoff in the game, each player can choose the best response to others’ action by implementing access permission, while avoiding solving a complicated optimization problem. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our proposed ASGF based refunding framework and the overall network efficiency can be improved significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective techniques for extending lifetime in multi-hop wireless sensor networks include duty cycling and, more recently introduced, cooperative transmission (CT) range extension. However, a scalable MAC protocol has not been presented that combines both. An On-demand Scheduling Cooperative MAC protocol (OSC-MAC) is proposed to address the energy hole problem in multi-hop wireless sensor networks (WSNs). By combining an on-demand strategy and sensor cooperation intended to extend range, OSC-MAC tackles the spatio-temporal challenges for performing CT in multi-hop WSNs: cooperating nodes are neither on the same duty cycle nor are they necessarily in the same collision domain. We use orthogonal and pipelined duty-cycle scheduling, in part to reduce traffic contention, and devise a reservation-based wake-up scheme to bring cooperating nodes into temporary synchrony to support CT range extension. The efficacy of OSC-MAC is demonstrated using extensive NS-2 simulations for different network scenarios without and with mobility. Compared with existing MAC protocols, simulation results show that while we explicitly account for the overhead of CT and practical failures of control packets in dense traffic, OSC-MAC still gives 80-200 % lifetime improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Pan European Phenology (PEP) project is a European infrastructure to promote and facilitate phenological research, education, and environmental monitoring. The main objective is to maintain and develop a Pan European Phenological database (PEP725) with an open, unrestricted data access for science and education. PEP725 is the successor of the database developed through the COST action 725 “Establishing a European phenological data platform for climatological applications” working as a single access point for European-wide plant phenological data. So far, 32 European meteorological services and project partners from across Europe have joined and supplied data collected by volunteers from 1868 to the present for the PEP725 database. Most of the partners actively provide data on a regular basis. The database presently holds almost 12 million records, about 46 growing stages and 265 plant species (including cultivars), and can be accessed via http://www.pep725.eu/. Users of the PEP725 database have studied a diversity of topics ranging from climate change impact, plant physiological question, phenological modeling, and remote sensing of vegetation to ecosystem productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Major modern day computing and communication rely upon the underlying network used for data transportation. A strong and robust network is a prerequisite for communication oriented applications. One kind of communication networks used for data transportation known as Mobile ad hoc Networks (MANET) have been discussed in this paper and work has been done on their capability enhancement. Mobile ad hoc networks have evolved at a fast pace and provide efficient communication solutions when fixed communication infrastructure is not available and are easily deployable. Traditional mobile ad hoc network works on single wireless communication channel which limits their capacity and capability to handle very large or voluminous data. This limitation can be resolved using multiple physical communication channels. Number of protocols and techniques has been invented to incorporate multi-channel communication capabilities in wireless mobile ad hoc networks each with some pros and cons. In this paper a novel multi-channel wireless communication framework has been presented together with associated techniques and mechanisms. The proposed framework and protocols have been rigorously tested, evaluated and compared with existing benchmarked multi-channel ad hoc network protocols to establish the credibility of the framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: An efficient cryptography mechanism should enforce an access control policy over the encrypted data to provide flexible, fine‐grained, and secure data access control for secure sharing of data in cloud storage. To make a secure cloud data sharing solution, we propose a ciphertext‐policy attribute‐based proxy re‐encryption scheme. In the proposed scheme, we design an efficient fine‐grained revocation mechanism, which enables not only efficient attribute‐level revocation but also efficient policy‐level revocation to achieve backward secrecy and forward secrecy. Moreover, we use a multiauthority key attribute center in the key generation phase to overcome the single‐point performance bottleneck problem and the key escrow problem. By formal security analysis, we illustrate that our proposed scheme achieves confidentiality, secure key distribution, multiple collusions resistance, and policy‐ or attribute‐revocation security. By comprehensive performance and implementation analysis, we illustrate that our proposed scheme improves the practical efficiency of storage, computation cost, and communication cost compared to the other related schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud computing is the reference paradigm to provide data storage and management in a convenient and scalable manner. However, moving data to the cloud raises several issues, including the confidentiality of data and of accesses that are no more under the direct control of the data owner. The shuffle index has been proposed as a solution for addressing these issues when data are stored at an external third party. In this paper, we extend the shuffle index with support for access control, that is, for enforcing authorizations on data. Our approach is based on the use of selective encryption and on the organization of data and authorizations in two shuffle indexes. Owners regulate access to their data through authorizations that allow different users to access different portions of the data, while, at the same time, the confidentiality of accesses is guaranteed. The proposed approach also supports update operations over the outsourced data collection (i.e., insertion, removal, and update) as well as of the access control policy (i.e., grant and revoke). Also, our approach protects the nature of each access operation, making revoke operations and resource removal operations indistinguishable by the storing server and/or observing users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the extension of the internet to the physical world where all objects collect information and interact with their environments with no or little human intervention. They collect and transfer sensitive and private data from various users. This puts security and privacy issues at the forefront: the ability to manage the digital identity of millions of people and billions of devices is fundamental for success. As most of the information contained in IoT environment may be personal or sensitive data, there is a requirement to support anonymity and restrain access to information. This article will focus on access control and authentication mechanisms as well as supporting the cryptography algorithms in constrained devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an automated Physical Access Control System (PACS) as a cloud service for controlling users’ activity, navigation and access in large residential infrastructures (e.g. apartment buildings, shopping malls). The main idea is to install on buildings beacon Bluetooth radio transmitters that broadcast an identifier to nearby devices (e.g. users’ mobile phones) and from there, together with users’ information, to transmit this information safely to a private cloud. The service monitors peoples’ movements and overall traffic in buildings and public facilities and offers prompt response on cases of critical events (i.e. overcrowding, health incidents, attacks etc.). PACS provides a variety of services aiming to inform the infrastructure manager for possible increase of users’ activities or access requests that require permission based on subscriptions or authorization criteria. These services are deployed over secure private clouds capable of dealing safely with sensitive information while ensuring users’ privacy. Collectively, anonymous history (log) data are sent to a public cloud for analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LoRaWAN is a wireless technology for Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN). Today, it is considered as one of the most serious alternatives for IoT thanks to its low cost, low power consumption equipments and its open business model. LoRaWAN specifications proposes interesting solutions regarding Medium Access Control (MAC) layer operations to deliver the best communication performances to connected things. Despite its crucial impact on the overall performances, few researches consider the LoRaWAN MAC layer. This paper presents LoRaWAN MAC layer operations and services based on the LoRaWAN Alliance technical specifications. In addition, it proposes an overview of recent studies related to LoRaWAN performances and stands out the major challenges to be addressed in order to enhance the performance of data exchanges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), emergency traffic handling is essential for saving human life. The traffic must be delivered instantaneously without loss and with least delay since a delay may endanger human life. Because of the importance of emergency traffic handling, several researchers have explored and proposed different emergency traffic protocols. In this paper, we provide a thematic review of the emergency traffic Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols in WBANs. Zigbee standard and baseline MAC as used in WBANs are also analyzed in terms of emergency traffic handling. Furthermore, a comparative analysis of the existing emergency traffic MAC protocols is made and their performance analysis is performed based on delay, Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), and energy consumption. Currently, no review work has been done on emergency traffic MAC protocols in WBANs. This paper, therefore, serves as the first, and adds enhancement to the emergency traffic handling at MAC layer in WBANs. We believe the paper will stimulate a better way of solving the emergency traffic handling problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart home automation enables the users to realize the access control of the in-home appliances by the mobile devices. With the rapid development of mobile cloud computing, offloading computation workloads of the home automation applications to nearby cloudlets has been treated as a promising approach to overcoming inherent flaws of portable devices, such as low battery capacity. The computing capacity of cloudlet is limited compared with the distant public cloud whose elastic computation resources are almost infinite. Therefore, some mobile services should wait for the occupied computation resources in the cloudlet to get released, which is less energy-efficient. In view of this challenge, we model the waiting time spending in the cloudlet as a M/M/m/∞ queue and propose a hybrid computation offloading algorithm for home automation applications to minimize the total energy consumption of the mobile devices within a given constant deadline. The proposed algorithm combines cloudlet with public clouds, providing a more energy-efficient offloading strategy for home automation applications. Technically, a particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based heuristic algorithm is implemented to schedule mobile services. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authentication and key agreement (AKA) is a challenge-response-like security protocol that uses symmetric-key cryptography to establish authenticated keys between 2 parties. Its application in the third-generation mobile system universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) is called UMTS-AKA, and the version applied in the fourth-generation mobile communication system long-term evolution (LTE) is called LTE-AKA. Both UMTS-AKA and LTE-AKA share the same weakness: the network operators need to maintain a large space of authentication vectors for visiting stations, and the transmission of the vectors causes lots of overhead. This weakness will be amplified when there are billions of devices accessing the network in the Internet-of-things scenarios. In addition, these schemes provide only key distribution (not key agreement) and cannot provide session key forward secrecy. In this paper, we propose a range-bound key assignment technique to tackle the challenges. The proposed scheme drastically reduces the communication overhead and greatly strengthens the security robustness. The securities are analyzed and are verified using the AVISPA toolset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is an essential protocol for the operation of local area networks. It is used for mapping the logical address to the physical address. However, ARP was designed without any security features. Therefore, ARP is vulnerable to many ARP spoofing attacks, such as the host impersonation, man-in-the-middle (MITM), and denial of service (DoS) attacks. Many techniques were introduced in the literature for mitigating ARP spoofing attack. However, they could not provide protection against the host impersonation and DoS attacks. This work introduces a new technique to secure address resolution protocol called ARP Authentication (ARP-A). The proposed technique provides authentication for ARP messages and entities. In addition, it converts ARP from a stateless to a stateful protocol. To evaluate the performance of ARP-A, it was implemented on Linux. To investigate the scalability of ARP-A, a new analytical model was designed for it using stochastic reward nets. The results show that, compared with other related schemes introduced in the literature, ARP-A is more efficient in terms of security and performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Temporal role-based access control (TRBAC) extends role-based access control to limit the times at which roles are enabled. This paper presents a new algorithm for mining high-quality TRBAC policies from timed ACLs (i.e., ACLs with time limits in the entries) and optionally user attribute information. Such algorithms have potential to significantly reduce the cost of migration from timed ACLs to TRBAC. The algorithm is parameterized by the policy quality metric. We consider multiple quality metrics, including number of roles, weighted structural complexity (a generalization of policy size), and (when user attribute information is available) interpretability, i.e., how well role membership can be characterized in terms of user attributes. Ours is the first TRBAC policy mining algorithm that produces hierarchical policies, and the first that optimizes weighted structural complexity or interpretability. In experiments with datasets based on real-world ACL policies, our algorithm is more effective than previous algorithms at optimizing policy quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a methodology for the dimensioning of the access network in remote rural areas, considering the progressive introduction of cellular services in these regions. A 3G small cell (SC) network with one or several carriers deployed at the SC, fed with solar panels and connected to a backhaul with limited capacity is considered for the analysis. Because the backhaul may be inexistent or very expensive (e.g., satellite-based backhaul) the network design pursues the minimization of the required backhaul bandwidth. The required backhaul bandwidth and the required energy units (i.e., the size of the solar panels and the required number of batteries) are then obtained as an output of the dimensioning analysis. Both the backhaul minimization objective and the constraints associated with each of the carriers (low maximum radiated power and low number of users connected simultaneously) require a novel methodology compared to the classical dimensioning techniques. We also develop a procedure for switching on/off carriers in order to minimize the energy consumption without affecting the quality of service (QoS) perceived by the users. This technique allows reducing the required size of the energy units, which directly translates into a cost reduction. In the development of this on/off switching strategy, we first assume perfect knowledge of the traffic profile and later, we develop a robust Bayesian approach to account for possible error modeling in the traffic profile information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increased number of IoT devices results in continuously generated massive amounts of raw data. Parts of this data are private and highly sensitive as they reflect owner's behavior, obligations, habits, and preferences. In this paper, we point out that flexible and comprehensive access control policies are "a must" in the IoT domain. The Semantic Web technologies can address many of the challenges that the IoT access control is facing with today. Therefore, we analyze the current state of the art in this area and identify the challenges and opportunities for improved access control in a semantically enriched IoT environment. Applying semantics to IoT access control opens a lot of opportunities, such as semantic inference and reasoning, easy data sharing, data trading, new approaches to authentication, security policies based on a natural language and enhances the interoperability using a common ontology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With its simplicity and feasibility, password-based remote user authentication becomes a popular way to control remote access to network. These years, numerous password-based authentication schemes have been proposed. Recently, Maitra et al proposed a smart card-based scheme which claims to be resistant to various attacks. Unfortunately, we found some important flaws in this scheme. Therefore, in this paper, we will demonstrate that the scheme of Maitra et al is not secure enough as claimed: neither resisting against off-line password guessing attack and insider attack nor preserve forward secrecy. To overcome those flaws, we put forward an improved new scheme which not only is resistant to all known attacks but also provides many attractive attributes, such as user revocation and re-register. Also, we compared the scheme with other related schemes, the result proved the superiority of our scheme. Particularly, we show a new way (beyond the conventional Deffie-Hellman approach) to achieve forward secrecy. Furthermore, we put some efforts into exploring the design principle of authentication schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to meet the requirement of internet of things (IoT) and 5G, the cloud radio access network is a paradigm which converges all base stations computational resources into a cloud baseband unit (BBU) pool, while the distributed radio frequency signals are collected by remote radio head (RRH). A precondition for centralized processing in the BBU pool is an interconnection fronthaul network with high capacity and low delay. However, it has become more complex and frequent in the interaction between RRH and BBU and resource scheduling among BBUs in cloud. Cloud radio over fiber network has been proposed in our previous work already. In order to overcome the complexity and latency, in this paper, we first present a novel cross stratum resources protection (CSRP) architecture in fog-computing-based radio over fiber networks (F-RoFN) for 5G services. Additionally, a cross stratum protection (CSP) scheme considering the network survivability is introduced in the proposed architecture. The CSRP with CSP scheme can effectively pull the remote processing resource locally to implement the cooperative radio resource management, enhance the responsiveness and resilience to the dynamic end-to-end 5G service demands, and globally optimize optical network, wireless and fog resources. The feasibility and efficiency of the proposed architecture with CSP scheme are verified on our software defined networking testbed in terms of service latency, transmission success rate, resource occupation rate and blocking probability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although one of the key characteristics of High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructures are their fast interconnecting networks, the increasingly large computational capacity of HPC nodes and the subsequent growth of data exchanges between them constitute a potential performance bottleneck. To achieve high performance in parallel executions despite network limitations, application developers require tools to measure their codes’ network utilization and to correlate the network’s communication capacity with the performance of their applications. This paper presents a new methodology to measure and understand network behavior. The approach is based in two different techniques that inject extra network communication. The first technique aims to measure the fraction of the network that is utilized by a software component (an application or an individual task) to determine the existence and severity of network contention. The second injects large amounts of network traffic to study how applications behave on less capable or fully utilized networks. The measurements obtained by these techniques are combined to predict the performance slowdown suffered by a particular software component when it shares the network with others. Predictions are obtained by considering several training sets that use raw data from the two measurement techniques. The sensitivity of the training set size is evaluated by considering 12 different scenarios. Our results find the optimum training set size to be around 200 training points. When optimal data sets are used, the proposed methodology provides predictions with an average error of 9.6% considering 36 scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]