Connected Vehicles using NDN: Security Concerns and Remaining Challenges

The vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) is that it connects all kinds of things by leveraging the creation of increasingly affordable and small devices that can be embedded for sensing, processing, wireless communication, and actuation. Named data networking (NDN) is a newly emerging Internet paradigm that may replace the current Internet architecture and that fulfills most of the expectations of the IoT. Software-defined networking (SDN) is an emerging paradigm of technology that is highly capable of managing overall networks efficiently and transforming complex network architectures into manageable, simple ones. The combination of the SDN controller, NDN, and IoT can be lethal in the overall performance of the network. Broadcast storms, due to the flooding nature of NDN’s wireless channel, are a serious issue when it comes to forwarding interest and data packets. Energy consumption of sensor nodes in dense IoT scenarios causes problems in forwarding as well as unnecessary delays, decreases network performance, and increases the cost and packet delay for important packets. We took these problems as our baseline and proposed an energy-efficient, priority-based forwarding (EPF) in SDN-enabled NDN–IoT. Our scheme EPF used the efficient flow management of the SDN controller to control the broadcast storm and efficiently forward the priority-based packets. A defer timer mechanism was used to prioritized the packet upon its arrival to the node. An energy threshold mechanism was used to control energy consumption and improve overall energy efficiency. We compared our scheme with the traditional flooding mechanism and geographic interest forwarding; EPF outclassed the other schemes and produced the best results in terms of total number of interests and retransmissions, content retrieval time, total number of priority interests, energy consumption, and network lifetime.

A Lightweight Forwarding Strategy for Named Data Networking in Low-end IoT

In this paper, we study the source mobility problem that exists in the current named data networking (NDN) architecture and propose a proxy-based mobility support approach named PMNDN to overcome the problem. PMNDN proposes using a proxy to efficiently manage source mobility. Besides, functionalities of the NDN access routers are extended to track the mobility status of a source and signal Proxy about a handoff event. With this design, a mobile source does not need to participate in handoff signaling which reduces the consumption of limited wireless bandwidth. PMNDN also features an ID that is structurally similar to the content name so that routing scalability of NDN architecture is maintained and addressing efficiency of Interest packets is improved. We illustrate the performance advantages of our proposed solution by comparing the handoff performance of the mobility support approaches with that in NDN architecture and current Internet architecture via analytical and simulation investigation. We show that PMNDN offers lower handoff cost, shorter handoff latency, and less packet losses during the handoff process.

In Vehicular (Ad-hoc) Network (VANET), besides Vehicle-to-Vehicle communications (V2V), vehicles in VANET also exchange data with Road-Side-Units (RSUs) and Cellular Base Stations (Vehicle-to-Infrastructure communications (V2I)). With the introduction of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), VANETs possess a great potential in enabling surveillance services. The rapid development of wireless communication technologies recently results in empowering data exchange among vehicles, RSUs and Cellular Base Stations, improving various types of applications and services such as safety driving, route planning, traffic alert, and context-aware infotainment. However, the benefits offered by VANETs and ITS cannot be fully realized unless there is a mechanism to effectively defend against fake and erroneous information exchange from malicious or dysfunctional nodes to other vehicles and RSUs for their own purposes. In this regards, trust appears as one of the solutions for VANETs to establish secure connectivity and reliable services. The conceptual idea to tackle down this challenges is that only data from trusted vehicles is taken into account. Thus, the aim is to evaluate trust of a vehicle in exchanging high quality of information. This paper presents the trust concept, key characteristics, a trust evaluation model, and a prototype for trusted data exchange activities in VANETs.

Named data networking (NDN) has been considered as a promising networking architecture for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). However, interest forwarding in NDN suffers severe issues in vehicular environment. Broadcast storms result in much packet loss and huge transmission overhead. Also, link disconnection caused by highly dynamic topology leads to low packet delivery ratio and extreme long delay in data retrieval. Thus, an efficient NDN forwarding strategy to retrieve data is urgently required. In this paper, we propose the density-aware delay-tolerant (DADT) interest forwarding strategy to retrieve traffic data in vehicular NDN. DADT specifically addresses data retrieval during network disruptions using delay tolerant networking (DTN). It makes retransmission decisions based on directional network density. Also, DADT mitigates broadcast storms by using a rebroadcast deferring timer. We compared DADT against other strategies through simulation and the results show that it can achieve a higher satisfaction ratio while maintaining low transmission overhead.

In recent years, Intelligent Transportation systems (ITS) have attracted many researchers. An ITS ecosystem is mainly composed of three components, the driver, the vehicle and the environment which is divided into static and dynamic. The intelligence in the transportation systems is illustrated by the communication between its components. Three communication scenarios exist, vehicle to vehicle, vehicle to environment and hybrid communication that groups both of the latter scenarios. Safety and fluidity are two major issues to take into consideration in ITS. In this paper the focus is on safety in ITS, because it directly impacts people’s safety. Therefore, the security architecture must be well defined. Thus, Vehicular networks (VANETS), are a special type of ad-hoc network used for communication among the components of the traffic eco-systems. According to the objective of this paper, the most important family of protocols in VANETs, the Wireless Access in the vehicular environment (WAVE), is detailed and discussed.

The mechanisms based on the distributed environment have become an obvious choice for solutions, while they have not been limited only to a specific domain (i.e., crypto-currency). Rather, it has influenced other industries to develop robust privacy and security solutions, such as smart houses, smart electrical grids, smart agriculture, smart health care, smart transportation, etc. These Cyber-Physical Systems heavily depend on IoT-based smart devices that constitute a networked system of devices dependent on each other for the smooth operation of the overall system. Hence, security and privacy have become an integral part of all the architectural frameworks they operate in. The adoption of these architectures, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of Cyber-Physical Things (IoCPT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), and Internet of Everything (IoE), has reinforced the need to develop solutions based on a distributed environment. Distributed ledger technology, i.e., Blockchain, has taken the lead and may support the development of solutions with robust privacy and security. We provide an updated review of authentication mechanisms developed on blockchain technology that enforce decentralized architectures. We discuss the security issues regarding the authentication of these IoT-enabled smart devices. We evaluate and analyze the study of the proposed literature schemes that pose authentication challenges in terms of computational costs, communication overheads, and models applied to attain robustness. Hence, lightweight solutions for managing, maintaining, processing, and storing authentication data of IoT-enabled assets are a must. From an integration perspective, cloud computing has provided strong support. In contrast, decentralized ledger technology, i.e., Blockchain, and lightweight cryptosystems are the areas for much more to explore. Finally, we discuss the future research challenges, which present an improvement standpoint to help address the ambiguities.

Internet of Things (IoT) is changing our life for the better. IoT covers various heterogeneous devices which are sensing the environment and/or monitoring a special event in the network. These devices are mostly mobile and are wirelessly connected either to each other or to the Internet. Additionally, IoT devices run many different applications and services which provide the consumers with data and information. This paper focuses on the design and implementation of an Application Programming Interface (API) for IoT services using the Named Data Networking (NDN). NDN provides an efficient and intelligent communication paradigm for constrained devices like in IoT and uses named content to transmit data in the network. We extend the IoT-NDN architecture and add a new layer for IoT services which will effectively improve the performance of communication between the heterogeneous devices and the services integrated in IoT-NDN. Furthermore, we show the usage of our API and give a small example of network time synchronisation on IoT devices. This illustrates how flexible and lightweight is our approach for several services implemented on heterogeneous devices in IoT.

Named data networking (NDN) is an emerging information-centric networking paradigm, in which the Internet of Things (IoT) achieves excellent scalability. Recent literature proposes the concept of NDN-IoT, which maximizes the expansion of IoT applications by deploying NDN in the IoT. In the NDN, the security is built into the network by embedding a public signature in each data package to verify the authenticity and integrity of the content. However, signature schemes in the NDN-IoT environment are facing several challenges, such as signing security challenge for resource-constrained IoT end devices (EDs) and verification efficiency challenge for NDN routers. This article mainly studies the data package authentication scheme in the package-level security mechanism. Based on mobile edge computing (MEC), an efficient certificateless group signature scheme featured with anonymity, unforgeability, traceability, and key escrow resilience is proposed. The regional and edge architecture is utilized to solve the device management problem of IoT, reducing the risks of content pollution attacks from the data source. By offloading signature pressure to MEC servers, the contradiction between heavy overhead and shortage of ED resources is avoided. Moreover, the verification efficiency in NDN router is much improved via batch verification in the proposed scheme. Both security analysis and experimental simulations show that the proposed MEC-based certificateless group signature scheme is provably secure and practical.

CoMap: An efficient virtual network re-mapping strategy based on coalitional matching theory

Vehicular networks are the key cornerstone of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). With the growth of the technical revolution in 5G the next-generation networks, it is expected to meet various future communication requirements of Intelligent ITS. However, no single technology of 5G can efficiently accommodate the broad range of requirements of vehicular networks. However, the aggregation of various communication technologies with the 5G vehicular network could help to achieve ambitious goals like efficient network management, centralized view, and computation. The need for provisioning efficient network control, management, and high resource utilization in vehicular networks motivates the hierarchical 5G Next-generation vehicular networks. Blockchain has emerged as a viable solution to offer decentralization, transparency, and immutability among the stakeholders and manage trust in networking platforms. Motivated by the preceding discussion, in this chapter, we discuss the integration of software-defined networking (SDN), cloud computing over 5G mobile communication in vehicular networks, which is the key requirement of new hierarchical 5G-SDVNs. Then, programmable, efficient, and controllable network architecture is introduced for 5G-SDVN to achieve sustainable network development. Moreover, the centralization and flexibility provided by SDN and 5G communication technologies help to meet customer demand for various ITSs and vehicular network applications like bandwidth, high speed, and ubiquity, that can be employed in next-generation ITS. Finally, we present the SDN and cloud-enabled hierarchical future 5G-vehicular network architecture, its applications, issues, and challenges based on recent advances in technology and research.KeywordsBlockchainSoftware defined network5GIntelligent transport system

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has become a standard facet of modern communications, and information-centric networks have been pointed as an alternative to bypass the restrictions imposed by the traditional Internet protocol networks regarding the mobility of its network elements. However, the improvements imposed by this new paradigm fall short in large scale mobile wireless distributed environments inherent to IoT, due to high node mobility, dynamic topologies and intermittent connectivity. To tackle these issues, we present a named data network (NDN)-based publish–subscribe mechanism with support for both Consumer and Producer mobility. This approach handles the Producer mobility by combining the Data packets with infrastructure specific information, fixing the broken paths between the Producer and the Consumer; and the Consumer mobility by monitoring and anticipating mobile node trajectories while compelling the infrastructure to adjust to new paths. Simulation results, assuming a smart city use case and using real traces of vehicular mobility, have shown that the proposed solution far surpasses the native NDN workflow and traditional publish–subscribe solutions. With respect to the Producer mobility, the proposed solution delivers 79% of Data packets against 14% with the Native implementation, when using 25 mobile Producers; regarding the Consumer mobility, results have shown that our solution achieves almost the same Consumer satisfaction ratio as previous implementations but reducing substantially the network overhead related with the transmission of Interest packets.

With the emergence of fog and edge computing, new possibilities arise regarding the data-driven management of citizens’ mobility in smart cities. Internet of Things (IoT) analytics refers to the use of these technologies, data, and analytical models to describe the current status of the city traffic, to predict its evolution over the coming hours, and to make decisions that increase the efficiency of the transportation system. It involves many challenges such as how to deal and manage real and huge amounts of data, and improving security, privacy, scalability, reliability, and quality of services in the cloud and vehicular network. In this paper, we review the state of the art of IoT in intelligent transportation systems (ITS), identify challenges posed by cloud, fog, and edge computing in ITS, and develop a methodology based on agile optimization algorithms for solving a dynamic ride-sharing problem (DRSP) in the context of edge/fog computing. These algorithms allow us to process, in real time, the data gathered from IoT systems in order to optimize automatic decisions in the city transportation system, including: optimizing the vehicle routing, recommending customized transportation modes to the citizens, generating efficient ride-sharing and car-sharing strategies, create optimal charging station for electric vehicles and different services within urban and interurban areas. A numerical example considering a DRSP is provided, in which the potential of employing edge/fog computing, open data, and agile algorithms is illustrated.

The ongoing deployments of the Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart applications are spurring the adoption of machine learning as a key technology enabler. To overcome the privacy and overhead challenges of centralized machine learning, there has been significant recent interest in the concept of federated learning. Federated learning offers on-device machine learning without the need to transfer end-device data to a third party location. However, federated learning has robustness concerns because it might stop working due to a failure of the aggregation server (e.g., due to a malicious attack or physical defect). Furthermore, federated learning over IoT networks requires a significant amount of communication resources for training. To cope with these issues, we propose a novel framework of dispersed federated learning (DFL) that is based on true decentralization. We opine that DFL will serve as a practical implementation of federated learning for various IoT-based smart applications such as smart industries and intelligent transportation systems. First, the fundamentals of the DFL are presented. Second, a taxonomy is devised with a qualitative analysis of various DFL schemes. Third, a DFL framework for IoT networks is proposed with a matching theory-based solution. Finally, an outlook on future research directions is presented.

LoRaWAN is a long-range, low-power wireless transmission medium, typically used in Internet of Things(IoT) deployments for long range transmission of sensor data and commands for actuator devices. Named Data Networking (NDN) is an emerging information-centric networking architecture with a design suited for handling communication in wireless environments. This work leverages both technologies to create an ad hoc wireless network by creating an application that is able to send and receive NDN packets between LoRaWAN devices without using any IP address. Experimental results gathered in a real environment show that this newly created ad hoc network is capable of transmitting data over distances of at least one kilometer per hop, using NDN features for handling routing and security of data packets. This ad hoc network is suitable for fetching IoT sensor data, sending commands to IoT devices, and for sending small messages between distant nodes in a low-resource, wireless IoT environment with minimal network infrastructure. Furthermore, this system has been used and evaluated while developing an NDN-based IoT sensing platform with built-in security features, such as data signature verification and certificate deployment.