Maha Saadeh

FEAR: Fuzzy-Based Energy Aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are used in different civilian, military, and industrial applications. Recently, many routing protocols have been proposed attempting to find suitable routes to transmit data. In this paper we propose a Fuzzy Energy Aware tree-based Routing (FEAR) protocol that aims to enhance existing tree-based routing protocols and prolong the network’s life time by considering sensors’ limited energy. The design and implementation of the new protocol is based on cross-layer structure where information from different layers are utilized to achieve the best power saving. Each node maintains a list of its neighbors in order to use neighbors’links in addition to the parent-child links. The protocol is tested and compared with other tree-based protocols and the simulation results show that FEAR protocol is more energy-efficient than comparable protocols. According to the results FEAR protocol saves up to 70.5% in the number of generated control messages and up to 55.08% in the consumed power.

Security Model for Tree-based Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks: Structure and Evaluation

The need for securing Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is essential especially in mission critical fields such as military and medical applications. Security techniques that are used to secure any network depend on the security requirements that should be achieved to protect the network from different types of attacks. Furthermore, the characteristics of wireless networks should be taken into consideration when applying security techniques to these networks. In this paper, energy efficient Security Model for Tree-based Routing protocols (SMTR) is proposed. In SMTR, different attacks that could face any tree-based routing protocol in WSNs are studied to design a security reference model that achieves authentication and data integrity using either Message Authentication Code (MAC) or Digital Signature (DS) techniques. The SMTR communication and processing costs are mathematically analyzed. Moreover, SMTR evaluation is performed by firstly, evaluating several MAC and DS techniques by applying them to tree-based routing protocol and assess their efficiency in terms of their power requirements. Secondly, the results of this assessment are utilized to evaluate SMTR phases in terms of energy saving, packet delivery success ratio and network life time.

Authentication Techniques for the Internet of Things: A Survey

Internet of Things (IoT) consists of a large number of connected objects that are communicating with each other. In order to support trusted communication between IoT objects, effective authentication procedures should be applied between the communicating entities. In this paper a survey of IoT authentication techniques, which are proposed in the literature, is presented. The survey aims to help other researchers in delving into the details of such techniques by going through their classification and comparison. The classification has been done based on the inherent features of these authentication technique such as being distributed vs. centralized, flat vs. hierarchical, and more others. A comparison between these techniques according to the used evaluation models and their security analysis is illustrated.

Geographical Route Selection Based on User Public Transportation and Service Preferences

With the wide spread of devices that support mobile computing environment and applications, there is a need to develop new services that satisfy the needs of a mobile user. In this paper, we propose a new approach of selecting routes in a public transport networks using a combined criteria to provide a service that finds geographical routes from a source to a destination based on user public transportation and service preferences. Based on the proposed criteria we allow a path selection to depend on two main preferences. The first preference is the public transport media which could include bus, train, metro, and walking etc. The second preference is a service related one and includes the best network connection availability, such as GPRS, 3G, and 4G etc, along the available paths. We think that a combination of these two preferences is of high importance in our current daily life since a continuous availability of internet connection is crucial even while we are on the move using any public transport media. The proposed approach have been modelled and simulated via a C++ program. The simulation has been used to evaluate the proposed combined criteria in comparison with other approaches which are based just on the first preference, namely the public transport media, and with the simple shortest route selection approach. Results show that our combined criteria allow a mobile user to select geographical routes according to the preferred public transport media while being able to stay connected with higher transmission rate network connections.

Hierarchical architecture and protocol for mobile object authentication in the context of IoT smart cities

Abstract The deployment of smart technologies such as smart meters, smart phones, and smart chips has facilitated the development of smart cities. Smart cities include different smart systems such as smart homes, smart grids, etc. These smart systems should be connected together along with huge number of smart objects in the world largest network known as the Internet of Things (IoT). Trusted communication between an IoT object, which could be any device, and smart systems is an essential objective for the security over the IoT. This can be supported by authentication enforcers which, with the large number of connected objects in the IoT, should impose efficient and scalable mobile object authentication solutions. In this paper, a four-layer architecture for mobile object authentication in the context of IoT smart cities is proposed. This architecture is designed to address different IoT challenges such as scalability, mobility, and heterogeneity. Moreover, the architecture is supported by the applicability of a proposed hierarchical elliptic curve identity based signature authentication protocol. The proposed architecture and the proposed authentication protocol have been compared with other related works proposed in the literature. Various design goals of IoT in smart cities have been considered in the comparison along with the computation cost on both the sender and the receiver entities. Results show that the proposed architecture supports more design goals of IoT in smart city than its rival architectures and the proposed authentication protocol has lower computation cost than the other related protocols.

Flower classification using deep convolutional neural networks

Flower classification is a challenging task due to the wide range of flower species, which have a similar shape, appearance or surrounding objects such as leaves and grass. In this study, the authors propose a novel two-step deep learning classifier to distinguish flowers of a wide range of species. First, the flower region is automatically segmented to allow localisation of the minimum bounding box around it. The proposed flower segmentation approach is modelled as a binary classifier in a fully convolutional network framework. Second, they build a robust convolutional neural network classifier to distinguish the different flower types. They propose novel steps during the training stage to ensure robust, accurate and real-time classification. They evaluate their method on three well known flower datasets. Their classification results exceed 97% on all datasets, which are better than the state-of-the-art in this domain.