Sherali Zeadally

Cross-layer support for energy efficient routing in wireless sensor networks

The Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) algorithm computes a new route when packet loss occurs. DSR does not have an in-built mechanism to determine whether the packet loss was the result of congestion or node failure causing DSR to compute a new route. This leads to inefficient energy utilization when DSR is used in wireless sensor networks. In this work, we exploit cross-layer optimization techniques that extend DSR to improve its routing energy efficiency by minimizing the frequency of recomputed routes. Our proposed approach enables DSR to initiate a route discovery only when link failure occurs. We conducted extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of our proposed cross-layer DSR routing protocol. The simulation results obtained with our extended DSR routing protocol show that the frequency with which new routes are recomputed is 50% lower compared with the traditional DSR protocol. This improvement is attributed to the fact that, with our proposed cross-layer DSR, we distinguish between congestion and link failure conditions, and new routes are recalculated only for the latter.

Enabling Next-Generation RFID Applications: Solutions and Challenges

Radio-frequency identification technology provides promising benefits such as inventory visibility and business process automation. However, if companies are to realize these benefits, researchers must address major challenges such as data processing, integration architecture design, security, and privacy.

Anonymous Authentication for Wireless Body Area Networks With Provable Security

Advances in wireless communications, embedded systems, and integrated circuit technologies have enabled the wireless body area network (WBAN) to become a promising networking paradigm. Over the last decade, as an important part of the Internet of Things, we have witnessed WBANs playing an increasing role in modern medical systems because of its capabilities to collect real-time biomedical data through intelligent medical sensors in or around the patients’ body and send the collected data to remote medical personnel for clinical diagnostics. WBANs not only bring us conveniences but also bring along the challenge of keeping data’s confidentiality and preserving patients’ privacy. In the past few years, several anonymous authentication (AA) schemes for WBANs were proposed to enhance security by protecting patients’ identities and by encrypting medical data. However, many of these schemes are not secure enough. First, we review the most recent AA scheme for WBANs and point out that it is not secure for medical applications by proposing an impersonation attack. After that, we propose a new AA scheme for WBANs and prove that it is provably secure. Our detailed analysis results demonstrate that our proposed AA scheme not only overcomes the security weaknesses in previous schemes but also has the same computation costs at a client side.

Survey of media access control protocols for vehicular ad hoc networks

Recent advances in various wireless communication technologies and the emergence of computationally rich vehicles are pushing vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) research to the forefront in academia and industry. A lot of research results have been published in various areas (such as routing, broadcasting, security and others) of VANET in the last decade covering both vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) scenarios. One specific area of VANET that still faces significant challenges is the design of reliable and robust media access control (MAC) protocols for V2V communications. The authors present a survey of V2V MAC methods (including various VANET standards) that have been proposed for VANETs over the last few years. The authors also focus on the benefits and limitations of the proposed MAC techniques as well as their ease of implementation in practice and future deployment. In addition some of the challenges that still need to be addressed to enable the implementation of highly efficient and high performance MAC protocols for V2V communications are discussed. Finally, some innovative solutions that can be developed to address these challenges are proposed.

Mobility management across hybrid wireless networks: Trends and challenges

Future generation wireless networks are envisioned to be a combination of diverse but complementary access technologies. Internetworking these types of networks will provide mobile users with ubiquitous connectivity across a wide range of networking environments. The integration of existing and emerging heterogeneous wireless networks requires the design of intelligent handoff and location management schemes to enable mobile users to switch network access and experience uninterrupted service continuity anywhere, anytime. Real deployment of such mobility strategies remains a significant challenge. In this article, we focus on handoff management. We discuss in detail handoff decision and implementation procedures and present recent handoff techniques that aim at providing mobility over a wide range of access technologies. We also discuss some of the capabilities of mobile terminals that are necessary to implement seamless mobility over hybrid wireless networks. Furthermore, we also present and discuss limitations of recent handoff design architectures and protocols as well as outstanding challenges that still need to be addressed to achieve portable and scalable handoff solutions for continuous connectivity across wireless access networks.

Trust management of services in cloud environments: Obstacles and solutions

Trust management is one of the most challenging issues in the emerging cloud computing area. Over the past few years, many studies have proposed different techniques to address trust management issues. However, despite these past efforts, several trust management issues such as identification, privacy, personalization, integration, security, and scalability have been mostly neglected and need to be addressed before cloud computing can be fully embraced. In this article, we present an overview of the cloud service models and we survey the main techniques and research prototypes that efficiently support trust management of services in cloud environments. We present a generic analytical framework that assesses existing trust management research prototypes in cloud computing and relevant areas using a set of assessment criteria. Open research issues for trust management in cloud environments are also discussed.

Security attacks and solutions for vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have attracted a lot of attention over the last few years. They have become a fundamental component of many intelligent transportation systems and VANETs are being used to improve road safety and enable a wide variety of value-added services. Many forms of attacks against VANETs have emerged recently that attempt to compromise the security of such networks. Such security attacks on VANETs may lead to catastrophic results such as the loss of lives or loss of revenue for those value-added services. Therefore making VANETs secure has become a key objective for VANET designers. To develop and deploy secure VANET infrastructures remains a significant challenge. The authors discuss some of the main security threats and attacks that can be exploited in VANETs and present the corresponding security solutions that can be implemented to thwart those attacks.

Authentication protocol for an ambient assisted living system

Recent advances in healthcare technologies along with improved medical care have led to a steady increase in life expectancy over the past few decades. As a result, we have been witnessing a significant growth in the number of elderly people around the world. Ensuring a comfortable living environment for elderly people has gained much attention in recent years. By leveraging information and communication technologies, the AAL system shows great promise in satisfying many requirements of elderly people and enables them to live safely, securely, healthily, and independently. Over the last few years various AAL systems, mostly based on Wireless Body Area Network technologies, have been proposed to improve the quality of life of elderly people. Since the information transmitted in AAL systems is very personal, the security and privacy of such data are becoming important issues that must be dealt with. We first discuss the overall system architecture of a typical AAL system and its associated security requirements. Next we propose an efficient authentication protocol for the AAL system and describe how it meets various security requirements. Finally we compare the performance of the proposed authentication protocol with two other recent authentication protocols and demonstrate its superior efficiency.

Virtualization: Issues, security threats, and solutions

Although system virtualization is not a new paradigm, the way in which it is used in modern system architectures provides a powerful platform for system building, the advantages of which have only been realized in recent years, as a result of the rapid deployment of commodity hardware and software systems. In principle, virtualization involves the use of an encapsulating software layer (Hypervisor or Virtual Machine Monitor) which surrounds or underlies an operating system and provides the same inputs, outputs, and behavior that would be expected from an actual physical device. This abstraction means that an ideal Virtual Machine Monitor provides an environment to the software equivalent to the host system, but which is decoupled from the hardware state. Because a virtual machine is not dependent on the state of the physical hardware, multiple virtual machines may be installed on a single set of hardware. The decoupling of physical and logical states gives virtualization inherent security benefits. However, the design, implementation, and deployment of virtualization technology have also opened up novel threats and security issues which, while not particular to system virtualization, take on new forms in relation to it. Reverse engineering becomes easier due to introspection capabilities, as encryption keys, security algorithms, low-level protection, intrusion detection, or antidebugging measures can become more easily compromised. Furthermore, associated technologies such as virtual routing and networking can create challenging issues for security, intrusion control, and associated forensic processes. We explain the security considerations and some associated methodologies by which security breaches can occur, and offer recommendations for how virtualized environments can best be protected. Finally, we offer a set of generalized recommendations that can be applied to achieve secure virtualized implementations.

Intelligent Device-to-Device Communication in the Internet of Things

Analogous to the way humans use the Internet, devices will be the main users in the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. Therefore, device-to-device (D2D) communication is expected to be an intrinsic part of the IoT. Devices will communicate with each other autonomously without any centralized control and collaborate to gather, share, and forward information in a multihop manner. The ability to gather relevant information in real time is key to leveraging the value of the IoT as such information will be transformed into intelligence, which will facilitate the creation of an intelligent environment. Ultimately, the quality of the information gathered depends on how smart the devices are. In addition, these communicating devices will operate with different networking standards, may experience intermittent connectivity with each other, and many of them will be resource constrained. These characteristics open up several networking challenges that traditional routing protocols cannot solve. Consequently, devices will require intelligent routing protocols in order to achieve intelligent D2D communication. We present an overview of how intelligent D2D communication can be achieved in the IoT ecosystem. In particular, we focus on how state-of-the-art routing algorithms can achieve intelligent D2D communication in the IoT.