Farouk Mezghani

Evaluation of Sybil attack detection approaches in the Internet of Things content dissemination

The Internet of Things (IoT) comprises a diversity of heterogeneous objects that collects data in order to disseminate information to applications. The IoT data dissemination service can be tampered by several types of attackers. Among these, the Sybil attack emerged as the most critical since it operates in the data confidentiality. Although there are approaches against Sybil attack in several services, they disregard the presence of heterogeneous devices and have complex solutions. This paper presents a study highlighting strengths and weaknesses of Sybil attack detection approaches when applied in the IoT content dissemination. An evaluation of the LSD solution was made to assess its effectiveness and efficiency in a IoT network.

Virtual and unified address assignment for continuous communication in mobile networks

Mobile devices connections to heterogeneous networks require the management of the network interfaces, as well as addressing service for each access network. However, the frequent association and dissociation of devices to the network and several communications patterns hamper the address control and negotiation. In general, addressing strategies for heterogeneous wireless networks are individualized and do not adapt fast enough to several address patterns from each communication technology, hindering the seamless handoffs. This paper presents an innovative dynamic address scheme for heterogeneous wireless networks founded on Network Function Virtualization (NFV) approach aiming to support the avoidance of interruptions in end-to-end communications and providing seamless handoffs. It is described a method for the unification of the network address formats on mobile devices and for the negotiation of dynamic addresses in order to offer continuous communication. The proposed method has been evaluated by simulations, taking into account WiFi and WiMAX communication technologies. Simulation results show the strategy effectiveness and the maintenance of the end-to-end communication under handoff scenarios.

Utility-based forwarder selection for content dissemination in vehicular networks

Recent work has shown that content dissemination protocols in vehicular networks can achieve throughput and fan-out delay optimization by either simple network flooding or destination-driven dissemination. While those content dissemination schemes work well, they require all nodes in the network to forward every data packet, which has inherent inefficiencies for non-flooding traffic patterns, where not all nodes need to receive the data. Hence, they support adequately safety applications, being not efficient for non-safety applications, whereby the flow of information is interest-driven rather than destination-driven, e.g. restaurant recommendation and sale advertisement. In this work, the concept of “useful” forwarder is formalized aiming at maximizing content utility for end users. Further, it presents I-SEND, a forwarder selection approach, which enables nodes to choose the most appropriate forwarders. Incorporating I-SEND on trace-driven and synthetic simulation scenarios can produce higher content utility than other concurrent schemes.

Contact lifespan and interest-based content dissemination in vehicular networks

The popularity of vehicular applications, enhancing road traffic and user comfort, has instigated commuters to use short-range connectivity, e.g. WiFi, to opportunistically share content based on their interests. Recent works have proposed content dissemination protocols aiming mainly to optimize throughput and fan-out delay, without considering content utility. This paper presents I-PICK, a cross-layer content dissemination protocol, aware simultaneously of heterogeneous user interests (application layer) and node connectivity lifespan (link layer) on vehicular networks. In order to maximize content utility, the protocol improves data propagation on the link layer taking as reference the duration of the nodes contact and user interests as decision criteria to the forward scheduling mechanism. Results from trace-driven and synthetic simulations show that I-PICK outperforms relevant protocols in the literature.

Interest-Based Forwarding for Satisfying User Preferences in Vehicular Networks

Daily roadway commutes provide driving patterns in time and in space motivating the formation of mobile vehicular groups based on common backgrounds and interests. These groups can be used to reduce the propagation of irrelevant and redundant information and can be used also for group-based applications such as caravaning. This paper investigates the groups formation behavior under the dynamic topology of vehicular networks through different traces and synthetic scenarios. Next, to show the impact of group on content dissemination scheduling, a comparison of group-based scheduling with other relevant data dissemination scheduling schemes is conducted by simulations in terms of delivery ratio and latency. Simulation results show that groups can be used in order to share information in an intelligent way such that to reduce the propagation of irrelevant and redundant information. Additionally, this paper shows that group-based data dissemination can enhance the delivery ratio and latency compared to other relevant scheduling schemes.