Editorial

189 KiB

Open AccessEditorial

Trusted and Secure Wireless Sensor Network Designs and Deployments

by Ignacio Bravo, Esther Palomar, Alfredo Gardel and José Luis Lázaro

Sensors 2017, 17(8), 1787; https://doi.org/10.3390/s17081787 - 04 Aug 2017

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 3030

The deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a realistic solution for many markets, such as manufacturing and environment monitoring, military and critical infrastructure monitoring, and, more recently, in energy-efficiency and healthcare sectors, due to their great capabilities in acquiring and transmitting data [...] Read more.

The deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a realistic solution for many markets, such as manufacturing and environment monitoring, military and critical infrastructure monitoring, and, more recently, in energy-efficiency and healthcare sectors, due to their great capabilities in acquiring and transmitting data and processing them for different purposes.[...] Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Trusted and Secure Wireless Sensor Network Designs and Deployments)

Research

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626 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Reciprocally-Benefited Secure Transmission for Spectrum Sensing-Based Cognitive Radio Sensor Networks

by Dawei Wang, Pinyi Ren, Qinghe Du, Li Sun and Yichen Wang

Sensors 2016, 16(12), 1998; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16121998 - 25 Nov 2016

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 3957

Abstract

The rapid proliferation of independently-designed and -deployed wireless sensor networks extremely crowds the wireless spectrum and promotes the emergence of cognitive radio sensor networks (CRSN). In CRSN, the sensor node (SN) can make full use of the unutilized licensed spectrum, and the spectrum [...] Read more.

The rapid proliferation of independently-designed and -deployed wireless sensor networks extremely crowds the wireless spectrum and promotes the emergence of cognitive radio sensor networks (CRSN). In CRSN, the sensor node (SN) can make full use of the unutilized licensed spectrum, and the spectrum efficiency is greatly improved. However, inevitable spectrum sensing errors will adversely interfere with the primary transmission, which may result in primary transmission outage. To compensate the adverse effect of spectrum sensing errors, we propose a reciprocally-benefited secure transmission strategy, in which SN’s interference to the eavesdropper is employed to protect the primary confidential messages while the CRSN is also rewarded with a loose spectrum sensing error probability constraint. Specifically, according to the spectrum sensing results and primary users’ activities, there are four system states in this strategy. For each state, we analyze the primary secrecy rate and the SN’s transmission rate by taking into account the spectrum sensing errors. Then, the SN’s transmit power is optimally allocated for each state so that the average transmission rate of CRSN is maximized under the constraint of the primary maximum permitted secrecy outage probability. In addition, the performance tradeoff between the transmission rate of CRSN and the primary secrecy outage probability is investigated. Moreover, we analyze the primary secrecy rate for the asymptotic scenarios and derive the closed-form expression of the SN’s transmission outage probability. Simulation results show that: (1) the performance of the SN’s average throughput in the proposed strategy outperforms the conventional overlay strategy; (2) both the primary network and CRSN benefit from the proposed strategy. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Trusted and Secure Wireless Sensor Network Designs and Deployments)

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6366 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Simulation of Attacks for Security in Wireless Sensor Network

by Alvaro Diaz and Pablo Sanchez

Sensors 2016, 16(11), 1932; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16111932 - 18 Nov 2016

Cited by 44 | Viewed by 13153

Abstract

The increasing complexity and low-power constraints of current Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) require efficient methodologies for network simulation and embedded software performance analysis of nodes. In addition, security is also a very important feature that has to be addressed in most WSNs, since [...] Read more.

The increasing complexity and low-power constraints of current Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) require efficient methodologies for network simulation and embedded software performance analysis of nodes. In addition, security is also a very important feature that has to be addressed in most WSNs, since they may work with sensitive data and operate in hostile unattended environments. In this paper, a methodology for security analysis of Wireless Sensor Networks is presented. The methodology allows designing attack-aware embedded software/firmware or attack countermeasures to provide security in WSNs. The proposed methodology includes attacker modeling and attack simulation with performance analysis (node’s software execution time and power consumption estimation). After an analysis of different WSN attack types, an attacker model is proposed. This model defines three different types of attackers that can emulate most WSN attacks. In addition, this paper presents a virtual platform that is able to model the node hardware, embedded software and basic wireless channel features. This virtual simulation analyzes the embedded software behavior and node power consumption while it takes into account the network deployment and topology. Additionally, this simulator integrates the previously mentioned attacker model. Thus, the impact of attacks on power consumption and software behavior/execution-time can be analyzed. This provides developers with essential information about the effects that one or multiple attacks could have on the network, helping them to develop more secure WSN systems. This WSN attack simulator is an essential element of the attack-aware embedded software development methodology that is also introduced in this work. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Trusted and Secure Wireless Sensor Network Designs and Deployments)

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498 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Secure Multiuser Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks with TAS and Cooperative Jamming

by Maoqiang Yang, Bangning Zhang, Yuzhen Huang, Nan Yang, Daoxing Guo and Bin Gao

Sensors 2016, 16(11), 1908; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16111908 - 12 Nov 2016

Cited by 16 | Viewed by 5448

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the secure transmission in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consisting of one multiple-antenna base station (BS), multiple single-antenna legitimate users, one single-antenna eavesdropper and one multiple-antenna cooperative jammer. In an effort to reduce the scheduling complexity and extend the [...] Read more.

In this paper, we investigate the secure transmission in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consisting of one multiple-antenna base station (BS), multiple single-antenna legitimate users, one single-antenna eavesdropper and one multiple-antenna cooperative jammer. In an effort to reduce the scheduling complexity and extend the battery lifetime of the sensor nodes, the switch-and-stay combining (SSC) scheduling scheme is exploited over the sensor nodes. Meanwhile, transmit antenna selection (TAS) is employed at the BS and cooperative jamming (CJ) is adopted at the jammer node, aiming at achieving a satisfactory secrecy performance. Moreover, depending on whether the jammer node has the global channel state information (CSI) of both the legitimate channel and the eavesdropper’s channel, it explores a zero-forcing beamforming (ZFB) scheme or a null-space artificial noise (NAN) scheme to confound the eavesdropper while avoiding the interference to the legitimate user. Building on this, we propose two novel hybrid secure transmission schemes, termed TAS-SSC-ZFB and TAS-SSC-NAN, for WSNs. We then derive the exact closed-form expressions for the secrecy outage probability and the effective secrecy throughput of both schemes to characterize the secrecy performance. Using these closed-form expressions, we further determine the optimal switching threshold and obtain the optimal power allocation factor between the BS and jammer node for both schemes to minimize the secrecy outage probability, while the optimal secrecy rate is decided to maximize the effective secrecy throughput for both schemes. Numerical results are provided to verify the theoretical analysis and illustrate the impact of key system parameters on the secrecy performance. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Trusted and Secure Wireless Sensor Network Designs and Deployments)

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1912 KiB

Open AccessArticle

DARAL: A Dynamic and Adaptive Routing Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

by Francisco José Estévez, Peter Glösekötter and Jesús González

Sensors 2016, 16(7), 960; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16070960 - 24 Jun 2016

Cited by 11 | Viewed by 6085

Abstract

The evolution of Smart City projects is pushing researchers and companies to develop more efficient embedded hardware and also more efficient communication technologies. These communication technologies are the focus of this work, presenting a new routing algorithm based on dynamically-allocated sub-networks and node [...] Read more.

The evolution of Smart City projects is pushing researchers and companies to develop more efficient embedded hardware and also more efficient communication technologies. These communication technologies are the focus of this work, presenting a new routing algorithm based on dynamically-allocated sub-networks and node roles. Among these features, our algorithm presents a fast set-up time, a reduced overhead and a hierarchical organization, which allows for the application of complex management techniques. This work presents a routing algorithm based on a dynamically-allocated hierarchical clustering, which uses the link quality indicator as a reference parameter, maximizing the network coverage and minimizing the control message overhead and the convergence time. The present work based its test scenario and analysis in the density measure, considered as a node degree. The routing algorithm is compared with some of the most well known routing algorithms for different scenario densities. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Trusted and Secure Wireless Sensor Network Designs and Deployments)

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1035 KiB

Open AccessArticle

FuGeF: A Resource Bound Secure Forwarding Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

by Idris Abubakar Umar, Zurina Mohd Hanapi, A. Sali and Zuriati A. Zulkarnain

Sensors 2016, 16(6), 943; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16060943 - 22 Jun 2016

Cited by 12 | Viewed by 5527

Abstract

Resource bound security solutions have facilitated the mitigation of spatio-temporal attacks by altering protocol semantics to provide minimal security while maintaining an acceptable level of performance. The Dynamic Window Secured Implicit Geographic Forwarding (DWSIGF) routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has been [...] Read more.

Resource bound security solutions have facilitated the mitigation of spatio-temporal attacks by altering protocol semantics to provide minimal security while maintaining an acceptable level of performance. The Dynamic Window Secured Implicit Geographic Forwarding (DWSIGF) routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has been proposed to achieve a minimal selection of malicious nodes by introducing a dynamic collection window period to the protocol’s semantics. However, its selection scheme suffers substantial packet losses due to the utilization of a single distance based parameter for node selection. In this paper, we propose a Fuzzy-based Geographic Forwarding protocol (FuGeF) to minimize packet loss, while maintaining performance. The FuGeF utilizes a new form of dynamism and introduces three selection parameters: remaining energy, connectivity cost, and progressive distance, as well as a Fuzzy Logic System (FLS) for node selection. These introduced mechanisms ensure the appropriate selection of a non-malicious node. Extensive simulation experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed FuGeF protocol as compared to DWSIGF variants. The simulation results show that the proposed FuGeF outperforms the two DWSIGF variants (DWSIGF-P and DWSIGF-R) in terms of packet delivery. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Trusted and Secure Wireless Sensor Network Designs and Deployments)

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Graphical abstract

821 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Optimization of the Coverage and Accuracy of an Indoor Positioning System with a Variable Number of Sensors

by Francisco Domingo-Perez, Jose Luis Lazaro-Galilea, Ignacio Bravo, Alfredo Gardel and David Rodriguez

Sensors 2016, 16(6), 934; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16060934 - 22 Jun 2016

Cited by 32 | Viewed by 5836

Abstract

This paper focuses on optimal sensor deployment for indoor localization with a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm. Our goal is to obtain an algorithm to deploy sensors taking the number of sensors, accuracy and coverage into account. Contrary to most works in the literature, we [...] Read more.

This paper focuses on optimal sensor deployment for indoor localization with a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm. Our goal is to obtain an algorithm to deploy sensors taking the number of sensors, accuracy and coverage into account. Contrary to most works in the literature, we consider the presence of obstacles in the region of interest (ROI) that can cause occlusions between the target and some sensors. In addition, we aim to obtain all of the Pareto optimal solutions regarding the number of sensors, coverage and accuracy. To deal with a variable number of sensors, we add speciation and structural mutations to the well-known non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II). Speciation allows one to keep the evolution of sensor sets under control and to apply genetic operators to them so that they compete with other sets of the same size. We show some case studies of the sensor placement of an infrared range-difference indoor positioning system with a fairly complex model of the error of the measurements. The results obtained by our algorithm are compared to sensor placement patterns obtained with random deployment to highlight the relevance of using such a deployment algorithm. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Trusted and Secure Wireless Sensor Network Designs and Deployments)

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Review

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Open AccessReview

Game Theory Meets Wireless Sensor Networks Security Requirements and Threats Mitigation: A Survey

by Mohamed S. Abdalzaher, Karim Seddik, Maha Elsabrouty, Osamu Muta, Hiroshi Furukawa and Adel Abdel-Rahman

Sensors 2016, 16(7), 1003; https://doi.org/10.3390/s16071003 - 29 Jun 2016

Cited by 98 | Viewed by 13219

Abstract

We present a study of using game theory for protecting wireless sensor networks (WSNs) from selfish behavior or malicious nodes. Due to scalability, low complexity and disseminated nature of WSNs, malicious attacks can be modeled effectively using game theory. In this study, we [...] Read more.

We present a study of using game theory for protecting wireless sensor networks (WSNs) from selfish behavior or malicious nodes. Due to scalability, low complexity and disseminated nature of WSNs, malicious attacks can be modeled effectively using game theory. In this study, we survey the different game-theoretic defense strategies for WSNs. We present a taxonomy of the game theory approaches based on the nature of the attack, whether it is caused by an external attacker or it is the result of an internal node acting selfishly or maliciously. We also present a general trust model using game theory for decision making. We, finally, identify the significant role of evolutionary games for WSNs security against intelligent attacks; then, we list several prospect applications of game theory to enhance the data trustworthiness and node cooperation in different WSNs. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Trusted and Secure Wireless Sensor Network Designs and Deployments)

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