Ihsan Ali

Quasi centralized clustering approach for an energy-efficient and vulnerability-aware routing in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we propose a Quasi-Centralized Clustering Approach (QCCA), in which Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) partition into disjoint and equal-sized cells. Each cell has a powerful node, which acts as a cluster head. Hence, we consider a heterogeneous cluster-based WSN, which consists of two types of nodes: powerful clusterheads and ordinary sensor nodes. It leverages the advantages of small transmit distances for most nodes, requiring only a few nodes to transmit far distances to the base station. It completely eliminates redundant transmissions by ensuring, via carrier sensing (CSMA-CA), only one head sensor in each cell transmits and communicates with the sink, which can be either mobile or stationary. This approach reduces both energy consumption and communication bandwidth requirements, and prolongs the lifetime of the WSN. Simulation results show that a large amount of energy is saved using this strategy.

Characterizing the role of vehicular cloud computing in road traffic management

Vehicular cloud computing is envisioned to deliver services that provide traffic safety and efficiency to vehicles. Vehicular cloud computing has great potential to change the contemporary vehicular communication paradigm. Explicitly, the underutilized resources of vehicles can be shared with other vehicles to manage traffic during congestion. These resources include but are not limited to storage, computing power, and Internet connectivity. This study reviews current traffic management systems to analyze the role and significance of vehicular cloud computing in road traffic management. First, an abstraction of the vehicular cloud infrastructure in an urban scenario is presented to explore the vehicular cloud computing process. A taxonomy of vehicular clouds that defines the cloud formation, integration types, and services is presented. A taxonomy of vehicular cloud services is also provided to explore the object types involved and their positions within the vehicular cloud. A comparison of the current state-of-the-art traffic management systems is performed in terms of parameters, such as vehicular ad hoc network infrastructure, Internet dependency, cloud management, scalability, traffic flow control, and emerging services. Potential future challenges and emerging technologies, such as the Internet of vehicles and its incorporation in traffic congestion control, are also discussed. Vehicular cloud computing is envisioned to have a substantial role in the development of smart traffic management solutions and in emerging Internet of vehicles.

A Localization-Free Interference and Energy Holes Minimization Routing for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Interference and energy holes formation in underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) threaten the reliable delivery of data packets from a source to a destination. Interference also causes inefficient utilization of the limited battery power of the sensor nodes in that more power is consumed in the retransmission of the lost packets. Energy holes are dead nodes close to the surface of water, and their early death interrupts data delivery even when the network has live nodes. This paper proposes a localization-free interference and energy holes minimization (LF-IEHM) routing protocol for UWSNs. The proposed algorithm overcomes interference during data packet forwarding by defining a unique packet holding time for every sensor node. The energy holes formation is mitigated by a variable transmission range of the sensor nodes. As compared to the conventional routing protocols, the proposed protocol does not require the localization information of the sensor nodes, which is cumbersome and difficult to obtain, as nodes change their positions with water currents. Simulation results show superior performance of the proposed scheme in terms of packets received at the final destination and end-to-end delay.

Reducing Power Consumption in Wireless Body Area Networks: A Novel Data Segregation and Classification Technique

Chronic health issues such as hypertension, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart attack, and asthma are widespread in our society. Health-care wireless body area networks (WBANs) have been widely deployed by medical professionals to manage the health information of a patient remotely, and various data-management approaches have been used to handle the continuous transmission of WBAN data. The data segregation and classification approach is considered the most promising WBAN data-management technique among the extant state-of-the-art approaches. The technique plays an important role in avoiding network congestion; however, it consumes more energy from a sensor while transmitting a large packet of accumulated information over the network. This research is intended to solve this issue by introducing a novel classification scheme that separates the sensors readings into urgent, semiurgent, and nonurgent packets. Moreover, WBAN systems are highly dependent on gateway devices. This article offers an architectural routing approach for a medical sensor that enables transmitting packets during gateway failure. The performance evaluation of this work using OMNET++ with varied performance metrics shows promising results, because verification outperforms the extant state-of-the-art methods in terms of power consumption, packet delivery ratio, and the number of transmitted packets.

The Role of Vehicular Cloud Computing in Road Traffic Management: A Survey

The vehicular cloud computing (VCC) is an emerging technology that changed the vehicular communication and underlying traffic management applications. The underutilized resources of vehicles can be shared with other vehicles over the VANET to manage the road traffic more efficiently. The cloud computing and its capability of integrating and sharing resources, plays potential role in the development of traffic management systems (TMSs). This paper reviews the VCC based traffic management solutions to analyze the role of VCC in road traffic management. Particularly, an analysis of VANET based and VCC based TMSs is presented. To explore, the VANET infrastructure and services, a comparison of VCC based TMSs is provided. A taxonomy of vehicular clouds is presented, in order to identify and differentiate the type of vehicular cloud’s integration. Potential future challenges and their solutions in respect of emerging technologies are also discussed. The VCC is envision to play an important role in further development of intelligence transportation system.

Data Rate Adaptation Strategy to Avoid Packet Loss in MANETs

Due to mobile and dynamic nature of MANETs, congestion avoidance and control is a challenging issue. Congestion mainly occurs due to the phenomena where data arrival rate is higher than the transmission rate of data packets at a particular node. Congestion results in high packet drop ratio, increased delays and wastage of network resources. In this paper, we propose data rate adaptation technique to avoid packet loss. Proposed technique is based on the analysis of queue length of the forwarding nodes, number of source nodes forwarding data through a particular forwarding node, and rate of link changes. In the proposed strategy, queue length of forwarding nodes is communicated periodically to the neighbor nodes. Keeping in view the queue length of forwarding node, the sending node adapts its sending data rate to avoid congestion and to ensure reliable data communication. Results show that proposed strategy improves network performance as compared to the static data rate adaptation strategy in terms of packet delivery ratio upto \(15\%\) and reduces packet loss due to interface queue overflow upto \(14\%\), respectively.

Searching on Encrypted E-Data Using Random Searchable Encryption (RanSCrypt) Scheme

Cloud computing is intensifying the necessity for searchable encryption (SE) for data protection in cloud storage. SE encrypts data to preserve its confidentiality while offering a secure search facility on the encrypted data. Typical index-based SEs in data sharing scenarios can effectively search secure keyword indexes. However, due to the smaller size of the keyword space, SEs using a public key are susceptible to a Keyword Guessing Attack (KGA) and other statistical information leakage. In this paper, for secure search in a data sharing scenario, we propose Random Searchable enCryption (RanSCrypt) that adds randomness to a transformed keyword to increase its space and aspires to make it irreversible. At the core of the mechanism, two keywords are garbled with randomness, still enabling another party to determine if the two garbled keywords (RanSCrypt’s terms REST and Trapdoor) are the same or not without knowing the actual keywords. As SE in a public key setting suffers from vulnerability to KGA, RanSCrypt transfers into a symmetric key setting with minimum overhead and without losing the features of a data sharing scenario. RanSCrypt also adulterates the search result to add perplexity and provides full control of access only to the data receiver. The receiver can cull out the erroneous results from the search result locally. Finally, we introduce a new type of attack on SE, namely, the Keyword Luring Attack (KLA), and show that RanSCrypt is safe from KLA attack due to adulteration of the result. Our security analysis proves RanSCrypt is invulnerable against KGA and leaks no information.

Routing Protocols for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks: Taxonomy, Research Challenges, Routing Strategies and Future Directions

Recent research in underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) has gained the attention of researchers in academia and industry for a number of applications. They include disaster and earthquake prediction, water quality and environment monitoring, leakage and mine detection, military surveillance and underwater navigation. However, the aquatic medium is associated with a number of limitations and challenges: long multipath delay, high interference and noise, harsh environment, low bandwidth and limited battery life of the sensor nodes. These challenges demand research techniques and strategies to be overcome in an efficient and effective fashion. The design of routing protocols for UWSNs is one of the promising solutions to cope with these challenges. This paper presents a survey of the routing protocols for UWSNs. For the ease of description, the addressed routing protocols are classified into two groups: localization-based and localization-free protocols. These groups are further subdivided according to the problems they address or the major parameters they consider during routing. Unlike the existing surveys, this survey considers only the latest and state-of-the-art routing protocols. In addition, every protocol is described in terms of its routing strategy and the problem it addresses and solves. The merit(s) of each protocol is (are) highlighted along with the cost. A description of the protocols in this fashion has a number of advantages for researchers, as compared to the existing surveys. Firstly, the description of the routing strategy of each protocol makes its routing operation easily understandable. Secondly, the demerit(s) of a protocol provides (provide) insight into overcoming its flaw(s) in future investigation. This, in turn, leads to the foundation of new protocols that are more intelligent, robust and efficient with respect to the desired parameters. Thirdly, a protocol can be selected for the appropriate application based on its described merit(s). Finally, open challenges and research directions are presented for future investigation.

Correction to: Countering Statistical Attacks in Cloud-Based Searchable Encryption

The original article has been published with an incorrect grant number in the acknowledgements which should be RG # 1439-036.

Countering Statistical Attacks in Cloud-Based Searchable Encryption

Searchable encryption (SE) is appearing as a prominent solution in the intersection of privacy protection and efficient retrieval of data outsourced to cloud computing storage. While it preserves privacy by encrypting data, yet supports search operation without data leakage. Due to its applicability, many research communities have proposed different SE schemes under various security definitions with numerous customary features (i.e. multi keyword search, ranked search). However, by reason of multi-keyword ranked search, SE discloses encrypted document list corresponding to multiple (secure) query keywords (or trapdoor). Such disclosure of statistical information helps an attacker to analyze and deduce the content of the data. To counter statistical information leakage in SE, we propose a scheme referred to as Countering Statistical Attack in Cloud based Searchable Encryption (CSA-CSE) that resorts to randomness in all components of an SE. CSA-CSE adopts inverted index that is built with a hash digest of a pair of keywords. Unlike existing schemes, ranking factors (i.e. relevance scores) rank the documents and then they no longer exist in the secure index (neither in order preserving encrypted form). Query keywords are also garbled with randomness in order to hide actual query/result statistics. Our security analysis and experiment on request for comments database ensure the security and efficiency of CSA-CSE.