Andreas Pitsillides

Survey in Smart Grid and Smart Home Security: Issues, Challenges and Countermeasures

The electricity industry is now at the verge of a new era-an era that promises, through the evolution of the existing electrical grids to smart grids, more efficient and effective power management, better reliability, reduced production costs, and more environmentally friendly energy generation. Numerous initiatives across the globe, led by both industry and academia, reflect the mounting interest around not only the enormous benefits but also the great risks introduced by this evolution. This paper focuses on issues related to the security of the smart grid and the smart home, which we present as an integral part of the smart grid. Based on several scenarios, we aim to present some of the most representative threats to the smart home/smart grid environment. The threats detected are categorized according to specific security goals set for the smart home/smart grid environment, and their impact on the overall system security is evaluated. A review of contemporary literature is then conducted with the aim of presenting promising security countermeasures with respect to the identified specific security goals for each presented scenario. An effort to shed light on open issues and future research directions concludes this paper.

A survey on secure multipath routing protocols in WSNs

Routing protocols in wireless sensor networks (WSN) have been substantially investigated by researches. Most state-of-the-art surveys have focused on reviewing the different routing schemes that have been proposed for WSN and classifying them based on the networks type and protocols operation. Security aspects in routing protocols have not been given enough attention, since most of the routing protocols in WSNs have not been designed with security requirements in mind. However, taking into consideration that WSN applications need to support critical infrastructures (i.e., military, healthcare, environmental, etc.), security becomes an issue. And since these infrastructures are highly depended on the availability of resources, focus has especially been given to support a secure, resilient and reliable environment, with multipath routing being one of the added functionalities. The need for security in sensitive WSN application has lead researchers to design secure multipath routing protocols from the beginning or design security extensions for existing protocols. This paper surveys the current state-of-the-art of secure multipath routing protocols in WSNs, classifies the protocols in categories according to their security-related operational objectives, defines a new threat model in the routing procedure and identifies open research issues in the area.

Effective control of traffic flow in ATM networks using fuzzy explicit rate marking (FERM)

We describe the fuzzy explicit fate marking (FERM) traffic flow control algorithm for a class of best effort service, known as available bit rate (ABR), proposed by the ATM Forum. FERM is an explicit rate marking scheme in which an explicit rate is calculated at the asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switch and sent back to the ABR traffic sources encapsulated within resource management (RM) cells. The flow rate is calculated by the fuzzy congestion control (FCC) module by monitoring the average ABR queue length and its rate of change, then by using a set of linguistic rules. We use simulation to compare the steady-state and transient performance of FERM with EPRCA (a current favourite by the ATM Forum) in the presence of high priority variable bit rate (VBR) video and constant bit rate (CBR) in both a local-area network (LAN) and a wide-area network (WAN) environment. Our experiments show that FERM exhibits a robust behavior, even under extreme network loading conditions, and ensures fair share of the bandwidth for all virtual channels (VCs) regardless of the number of hops they traverse. Additionally, FERM controls congestion substantially better than EPRCA, offers faster transient response, leads to lower end-to-end delay and better network utilization.

Exploring the use of DNS as a search engine for the Web of Things

Sensor technology is becoming pervasive in our everyday lives, measuring the real world around us. The Internet of Things enables sensor devices to become active citizens of the Internet, while the Web of Things envisions interoperability between these devices and their services. An important problem remains the need for discovering these devices and services globally, ad hoc in real-time, within acceptable time delays. Attempting to solve this problem using the existing Internet infrastructure, we explore the exploitation of the Domain Name System (DNS) as a scalable and ubiquitous directory mechanism for embedded devices. We examine the feasibility of this approach by performing a simulation involving up to one million embedded devices, to test system performance and scalability. Finally, we discuss practical issues and the overall potential of this approach.

m-Health e-Emergency Systems: Current Status and Future Directions [Wireless corner]

Rapid advances in wireless communications and networking technologies, linked with advances in computing and medical technologies, facilitate the development and offering of emerging mobile systems and services in the healthcare sector. The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the current status and challenges of mobile health systems (m-health) in emergency healthcare systems and services (e-emergency). The paper covers a review of recent e-emergency systems, including the wireless technologies used, as well as the data transmitted (electronic patient record, bio-signals, medical images and video, subject video, and other). Furthermore, emerging wireless video systems for reliable communications in these applications are presented. We anticipate that m-health e-emergency systems will significantly affect the delivery of healthcare; however, their exploitation in daily practice still remains to be achieved

Adaptive nonlinear congestion controller for a differentiated-services framework

The growing demand of computer usage requires efficient ways of managing network traffic in order to avoid or at least limit the level of congestion in cases where increases in bandwidth are not desirable or possible. In this paper we developed and analyzed a generic Integrated Dynamic Congestion Control (IDCC) scheme for controlling traffic using information on the status of each queue in the network. The IDCC scheme is designed using nonlinear control theory based on a nonlinear model of the network that is generated using fluid flow considerations. The methodology used is general and independent of technology, as for example TCP/IP or ATM. We assume a differentiated-services network framework and formulate our control strategy in the same spirit as IP DiffServ for three types of services: Premium Service, Ordinary Service, and Best Effort Service. The three differentiated classes of traffic operate at each output port of a router/switch. An IDCC scheme is designed for each output port, and a simple to implement nonlinear controller, with proven performance, is designed and analyzed. Using analysis performance bounds are derived for provable controlled network behavior, as dictated by reference values of the desired or acceptable length of the associated queues. By tightly controlling each output port, the overall network performance is also expected to be tightly controlled. The IDCC methodology has been applied to an ATM network. We use OPNET simulations to demonstrate that the proposed control methodology achieves the desired behavior of the network, and possesses important attributes, as e.g., stable and robust behavior, high utilization with bounded delay and loss, together with good steady-state and transient behavior.

Atherosclerotic Plaque Ultrasound Video Encoding, Wireless Transmission, and Quality Assessment Using H.264

We propose a unifying framework for efficient encoding, transmission, and quality assessment of atherosclerotic plaque ultrasound video. The approach is based on a spatially varying encoding scheme, where video-slice quantization parameters are varied as a function of diagnostic significance. Video slices are automatically set based on a segmentation algorithm. They are then encoded using a modified version of H.264/AVC flexible macroblock ordering (FMO) technique that allows variable quality slice encoding and redundant slices (RSs) for resilience over error-prone transmission channels. We evaluate our scheme on a representative collection of ten ultrasound videos of the carotid artery for packet loss rates up to 30%. Extensive simulations incorporating three FMO encoding methods, different quantization parameters, and different packet loss scenarios are investigated. Quality assessment is based on a new clinical rating system that provides independent evaluations of the different parts of the video (subjective). We also use objective video-quality assessment metrics and estimate their correlation to the clinical quality assessment of plaque type. We find that some objective quality assessment measures computed over the plaque video slices gave very good correlations to mean opinion scores (MOSs). Here, MOSs were computed using two medical experts. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves enhanced performance in noisy environments, while at the same time achieving significant bandwidth demands reductions, providing transmission over 3G (and beyond) wireless networks.

Key issues for the design and development of mobile commerce services and applications

This paper suggests a new approach for developing m-commerce services and applications based on a scheme that divides m-applications into directory- and transaction-oriented classes, identifies mobile user requirements, and takes into consideration the constraints of current technologies for mobile and wireless computing. The efficacy of the proposed approach in a real scenario is discussed.

The Smart Home meets the Web of Things

In recent years, the merging of computing with physical things, enabled the transformation of everyday objects into information appliances. We propose to reuse the central principles of the modern Web architecture to fully integrate physical objects to the Web and build an interoperable Smart Home. We present an application framework that offers support for multiple home residents concurrently. We show that by using the Web as application layer we can build flexible applications on top of heterogeneous embedded devices with only a few lines of code, transforming home automation into a trivial task. We address many issues related to Web-enabling these devices, from their discovery and service description to the uniform interaction with them. Our evaluation efforts indicate that our framework offers acceptable performance and reliability.

HomeWeb: An application framework for Web-based smart homes

Household appliances are being equipped with embedded micro-controllers and wireless transceivers, offering smart behavior. These augmented appliances form wireless networks and transform residential areas into smart homes. Advancements such as the effective penetration of the Internet in embedded computing and the promising practice of the Web of Things, allow the realization of Web-oriented smart homes. In a previous work, we developed a Web-based application framework for smart homes, supporting concurrent interaction from multiple family members. In this paper, we improve the functionality of our system by including a 6LoWPAN-based wireless sensor network inside the home environment, addressing issues such as device discovery and service description. Web techniques such as HTTP caching and push messaging, facilitate the efficient operation of a fully Web-based smart home. Through a technical evaluation, we show the benefits of directly Web-enabling embedded sensors in terms of performance and energy conservation. The development of a Web-based graphical application abstracts home automation procedure for typical residents.