A Lightweight Data Integrity Scheme for Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), comprising of tiny nodes with limited energy, computational and communication resources, are being widely used in various application areas ranging from pollution and weather monitoring to military. Even though every application may not require data to be exchanged in a secure manner, few WSN applications may have certain security requirements. The data is encrypted by a sender and sent over the wireless links and the same is decrypted at the receiver. To meet this purpose, symmetric key cryptographic (SKC) algorithms may be used. Such SKC primitives require keys to be made available before carrying out the data transfer between the nodes. Alternately, Public Key Cryptographic techniques, such as RSA algorithm can be considered. Even though, RSA is a popular algorithm providing good security level, it is computationally intensive involving large key sizes. The RSA can not be used in WSNs, as the nodes have limited resources. Presently, it is infeasible to implement the RSA algorithm using any of the WSN nodes commercially available. Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), another public key cryptographic (PKC) algorithm providing same level of security with smaller key size requirements, can be used as an alternative in order to provide security in WSN applications. ECC encryption and decryption use domain parameters, which includes the Generator point to be published. In most of the outdoor WSN applications, the deployment of the nodes is random and the nodes could be captured and an attacker could launch man-in-middle (MIM) attack, and break the public key thereby leading to security breach in the network. A technique to overcome such an attack is proposed in this work and the same is compared with two other similar approaches.

The exponential growth of Internet of Things (IoT) deployments in resource-constrained environments has necessitated the development of secure and efficient cryptographic mechanisms tailored for limited computational, memory, and energy capacities. This book chapter provides a comprehensive exploration into the foundations of lightweight cryptography with a focus on its applicability to constrained IoT devices. It examines the design and evaluation of lightweight block ciphers, stream ciphers, hash functions, authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD), and public key cryptographic algorithms, emphasizing their resilience against advanced cryptanalytic techniques including differential, linear, and algebraic attacks. Implementation challenges such as key size, energy footprint, computation time, and resistance to side-channel and replay attacks are critically analyzed to highlight the trade-offs between performance and security. The chapter addresses current research gaps, emerging standards, and future directions in the domain of low-power cryptographic systems, aiming to guide both theoretical advancements and practical implementations.

Using wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in delay and reliability critical environments is highly desired due to their unique advantages such as low cost, ease of deployment, and redundancy. However, successful deployment of resource-limited WSNs in such applications requires strict quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning techniques to meet the desired latency and reliability targets of those applications. Implementation of QoS techniques in WSNs is significantly challenging since WSNs have been initially devised for low-data-rate non-real-time applications. Therefore, WSN designers and developers resort to different cross-layer interaction and optimization techniques to provision QoS in WSNs. In this paper, we present a survey on the state of the art of cross-layer QoS approaches in wireless terrestrial sensor networks to achieve delay and reliability bounds in critical applications. Our paper provides a unique classification of cross-layer QoS approaches in WSNs that allows surveying a large amount of studies with utmost clarity. Furthermore, we highlight the main challenges of implementing QoS protocols in WSNs and present an overview of QoS-aware WSN applications.

Wireless industrial sensor networks are wireless sensor networks which have been adapted to industrial applications. Most techniques for wireless sensor networks can be applied to wireless industrial sensor networks. However, for industrial applications of wireless industrial sensor networks, new requirements such as real-time, reliable delivery need to be considered. In this paper, we propose EARQ, which is a novel routing protocol for wireless industrial sensor networks. It provides real-time, reliable delivery of a packet, while considering energy awareness. In EARQ, a node estimates the energy cost, delay and reliability of a path to the sink node, based only on information from neighboring nodes. Then, it calculates the probability of selecting a path, using the estimates. When packet forwarding is required, it randomly selects the next node. A path with lower energy cost is likely to be selected, because the probability is inversely proportional to the energy cost to the sink node. To achieve real-time delivery, only paths that may deliver a packet in time are selected. To achieve reliability, it may send a redundant packet via an alternate path, but only if it is a source of a packet. Experimental results show that EARQ is suitable for industrial applications, due to its capability for energy efficient, real-time, reliable communications.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been recognized for their utility in a variety of different fields including military sensing and tracking, environmental monitoring, patient monitoring and tracking smart environments. The more scientists try to develop further cost and energy efficient computing devices and algorithms for WSNs, the more challenging it becomes to fit the security of WSNs into such a constrained environment. Thus, familiarity with the security aspects of WSNs is essential before designing WSN systems. In order to provide effective integrity, confidentiality, and authentication during communication, the need for additional security measures in WSNs emerges. In this paper, the authors review the security requirements for WSNs, the different kinds of possible attacks, and security mechanisms used to overcome these attacks. The authors also present some statistical data for such attacks in WSN and some tables that indicate a comparison between different security mechanisms.

Wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) are heterogeneous networks composed of many different nodes that can cooperatively sense the environment, determine an appropriate action to take, then change the environment’s state after acting on it. As a natural extension of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), WSANs inherit from them a variety of research challenges and bring forth many new ones. These challenges are related to dealing with imprecise and vague information, solving complicated optimization problems or collecting and processing data from multiple sources. Computational intelligence (CI) is an overarching term denoting a conglomerate of biologically and linguistically inspired techniques that provide robust solutions to NP-hard problems, reason in imprecise terms and yield high-quality yet computationally tractable approximate solutions to real-world problems. Many researchers have consequently turned to CI in hope of finding answers to a plethora of WSAN-related challenges. This paper reviews the application of several methodologies under the CI umbrella to the WSAN field. We describe and categorize existing works leaning on fuzzy systems , neural networks , evolutionary computation , swarm intelligence , learning systems , and their hybridizations to well-known or emerging WSAN problems along five major axes: 1) actuation; 2) communication; 3) sink mobility; 4) topology control; and 5) localization. The survey offers informative discussions to help reason through all the studies under consideration. Finally, we point to future research avenues by: 1) suggesting suitable CI techniques to specific problems; 2) borrowing concepts from WSNs that have yet to be applied to WSANs; or 3) describing the shortcomings of current methods in order to spark interest on the development of more refined models.

A wireless sensor is a small, low-cost, low-powered device with sensing, wireless communication, and computation capabilities. While the tiny size and low cost of sensors make them lucrative for use in various applications and services, the constraints associated with those also curb exploitation of computation intensive tasks. This in fact comes as the major concern while thinking about using public key cryptography (PKC) in wireless sensor network (WSN). Within the last few years, we have seen a steep growth of research works addressing various aspects of security in wireless sensor networks. While most of the works suggest using symmetric key cryptography, a good number of works also present their success stories of using PKC in WSN. In this chapter, we present a survey on these noteworthy implementations done so far in this area. Alongside presenting the survey of the significant implementations, we also give an overview of PKC, discuss why and how it is needed for WSN, and the major hurdles to its implementation in WSN.

In recent years, there has been intense research and considerable progress in solving numerous wireless sensor networking challenges. However, the key problem of enabling real-time quality-aware multimedia transmission over wireless sensor networks is largely unexplored. The large amount of data generated by most multimedia applications (compared to traditional scalar sensor networks), along with the higher QoS requirements make it difficult to meet the low energy use requirements of practical sensor networks. We explore the use of compressed sensing (aka “compressive sampling”) to reduce the energy required to encode and transmit high quality video in a severely resource-constrained environment. In this chapter, we will examine some of the major challenges of wireless multimedia sensor network (WMSN) implementation. Specifically, we examine what it would take to develop a WMSN that has similar performance (and restrictions) as a traditional scalar wireless sensor network (WSN). We then examine how we can use the new paradigm of compressed sensing (CS) to solve many of these problems.KeywordsSensor NodeWireless Sensor NetworkDiscrete Cosine TransformVideo QualityCompress SenseThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The use of wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) for surveillance applications has attracted the interest of many researchers. As with traditional sensor networks, it is easy to deploy and operate WMSNs. With inclusion of multimedia devices in wireless sensor networks, it is possible to provide data to users that is more meaningful than that provided by scalar sensor-based systems alone; however, producing, storing, processing, analyzing, and transmitting multimedia data in sensor networks requires consideration of additional constraints, including energy, processing power, storage capacity, and communication. Furthermore, as multimedia sensors produce much more data than scalar sensors, more manpower is required to analyze multimedia data. To overcome these constraints and challenges, this paper aimed to propose a system architecture and a set of procedures for WMSNs that facilitate automatic classification of moving objects using scalar and multimedia sensors. Methods and standards for detecting and classifying a moving object, as well as transmission of the results, are described in detail. The hardware for each sensor node includes a built-in camera, a passive infrared motion sensor, a vibration sensor, and an acoustic sensor. An application using our proposed methods was developed and embedded in the multimedia sensor node. In addition, a sink station was set up and the data produced by the sensor network was collected by this server. The classification performance of the application was tested using video recorded by the sensor node. The effect of the proposed methods on power consumption was also tested and measured. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is sufficiently lightweight to be used for real-world surveillance applications.

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a network that consists of a large number of sensor nodes. In the network, routing protocols are used for communication. Routing protocols discover the appropriate way to transmit data and convoy the routes in the network. A lot of routing techniques have been proposed in WSNs. But the use of these protocols becomes limited without security. It is also a important task to provide secure communication between the nodes. The sensor network application domain continues to increase with the need for an effective security mechanism. The fact that Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) often deal with sensitive data operating in hostile and unexpected environments, makes the concept of security considered essential. However, because of limited resources and low computing capacity of a sensor node, the development of a mechanism that ensures security is a real design challenge. In this paper we have tried to propose a new security mechanism dedicated to WSN. Our main objective is to secure the process of transferring data to the base station. The proposed protocol protects transferred data against intruder nodes attacks, using a security mechanism based on the use of control message MAC (Message Authentication Code) for authentication.

Moisture sensor acquires data of moisture content and water height of farmland; the data are transmitted by wireless sensor network and stored in data server to provide data mining and decision support for users, the utilization of wireless moisture sensor network could facilitate the excellent growth of crops and sustainable development of water resources. Based on self-design moisture sensor and actual monitoring needs of farmland moisture, this paper presents the architecture of wireless moisture sensor network and format of moisture data packet, designs the mechanisms of hierarchical storage, hierarchical error control and retransmission. Especially, the paper analyzes and simulates the mechanism of error control from respects of consuming time and correcting error ability, simulation results show that BCH coding is more suitable for wireless moisture sensor network than RS coding.

The appearance of wireless sensor networks has attracted worldwide attention. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) consist of wirelessly interconnected sensor nodes organised arbitrarily or deterministically in an environmental area which can gather, distribute and route information in different application areas. Power consumption in these networks is the foremost problem. WSNs are a recent generation of sensor networks, have an ample range of applications, their expansion and application will convey about extensive impact in human life and construction of all areas. Some of the applications include disaster management, landslide detection, glacial monitoring, wildlife tracking, healthcare, military applications, environmental monitoring, security surveillance, industrial process control and a large number of applications to robotics and Internet of Things (IOT) projects. This paper will demonstrate the elementary description of WSN followed by different energy-efficient power consumption protocols. Here we have performed the comparative performance analysis of different energy-efficient protocols. In our work we have compared MODLEACH with TSEP followed by TSEP with RELSEP.

This pager surveys the use of wireless sensors and sensor networks in monitoring Dam safety. Engineers paid much attention to fucus on the research of Dam safety monitoring (DSM), Since it could increase the safety and reduce the maintenance costs of engineering structures. Recently, wireless sensor network (WSN) has been explored for adoption to improve the centralized cable-based DSM system performances. This paper presents a multi-agent design method and system evaluation for wireless sensor network based Dam safety monitoring to validate the efficiency of the multi-agent technology. Through the cooperation of four different agents for DSM applications, the distributed wireless sensor network can automatically allocate DSHM tasks; self-organize the sensor network and aggregate different sensor information.

Congestion in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) occurs when traffic load allocated to any sensor node is beyond its capacity. It is necessary to control the congestion traffic to support traditional quality of service (such as packet loss ratios, packet delay, wasting energy and throughput) especially, multimedia application of Wireless Multimedia Sensor Network (WMSN). Congestion control in WSN has been shown to be very effective with respect to extending lifespan of system. Hence to avoid the congestion in WSN, we proposed an efficient protocol called Priority-based Congestion Control Protocol (PCCP) which prevents an upstream congestion in WSN. The PCCP creates priority table based an importance of each node, and then sends this information to all the nodes within the network. Secondly, the major function of PCCP is to measure congestion level in the network using ratio of packet inter-arrival time along over packet service time. PCCP uses to control upstream congestion along with congestion degree and packet table. PCCP is hop-by-hop upstream congestion control protocol for WSN. PCCP provides work for packet-based computation to optimize congestion control. It can work under both single path & multipath routing. PCCP ensures guarantee of packet loss as well as delay, resulting each node can avoid unfairness and achieve flexible throughput. In this paper, we have proposed that PCCP provides better QoS by controlling network recourse management and network traffic to consuming efficient energy.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are used to collect large amounts of data over a wide area. However, the sensor nodes used in WSNs have a short lifespan because they are generally battery-operated. Research is actively underway to increase the lifespan of WSNs via techniques such as energy harvesting and wireless power transfer (WPT). This study proposes a scheme for clustering and adjusting the WSN data collection rate to alleviate the hotspot problem and improve network connectivity. The proposed scheme is targeted at WSNs in which the sensor nodes harvest solar energy. In addition, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) traverses along a given path and delivers energy to sensor nodes using WPT, while collecting data as a sink node. In this scheme, the number of cluster heads is determined by considering the number of nodes at each hop distance and the maximum amount of data that can be transferred with the available energy. Further, sensor nodes limit the amount of data they collect to reduce the relay load on intermediate nodes. To achieve this, nodes consider the amount of data transferred by parent nodes, especially nodes in the hotspot, and the number of child nodes. The sink node traverses along a given path, and collects the data accumulated in the cluster head while supplying its remaining energy to the cluster head. The amount of energy it transfers is determined by considering the number of cluster heads. Consequently, nodes in the hotspot are prevented from becoming blacked out from a lack of energy, and the energy harvesting efficiency is increased. Simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme reduces the number of blackout nodes in the hotspot areas near cluster heads. Furthermore, the data collection and monitoring performance increases with the increase in network connectivity.