Security in ZigBee Using Steganography for IoT Communications

This paper introduces a new IEEE standard, IEEE 802.15.5,which provides mesh capability for wireless personal area network (WPAN) devices. The standard provides an architectural framework enabling WPAN devices to promote interoperable, stable, and scalable wireless mesh topologies. It is composed of two parts: low-rate WPAN mesh and high-rate WPAN mesh. In this paper, we present only low-rate WPAN mesh because it is designed to support wireless sensor networks. IEEE 802.15.5 low-rate part is a light-weight scalable mesh routing protocol that caters well to the requirements of resource-constrained wireless sensor networks. By binding logical addresses to the network topology, IEEE 802.15.5 obviates the need for route discovery. This eliminates the initial route discovery latency, saves storage space and reduces the communication overhead and energy consumption. A distributed link state scheme is further built atop the block addressing scheme to improve the quality of routes, robustness, and load balancing. The routing scheme scales well with regard to various performance metrics. The standard also provides enhanced functions such as multicast, reliable broadcast, power saving, time synchronization, route tracing and portability. We also present the performance evaluation of major functions performed with a 50-nodes tested deployed over a whole floor (100 × 140 ft2) at CUNY Engineering building. The results testify that the IEEE 802.15.5 will serve well for wireless personal area networks and wireless sensor networks.

We present a covert (low probability of detection) communication scheme that exploits the node multiplicity and channel variations in wireless broadcast networks. The transmitter hides the covert (private) message by superimposing it onto a non-covert (public) message such that the total transmission power remains the same whether or not the covert message is transmitted. It makes the detection of the covert message impossible unless the non-covert message is decoded. We exploit the multiplicity of non-covert messages (users) to provide a degree of freedom in choosing the non-covert message such that the total detection error probability (sum of the probability of false alarm and missed detection) is maximized. We also exploit the channel variation to minimize the throughput loss on the non-covert message by sending the covert message only when the transmission rate of the non-covert message is low. We show that the total detection error probability converges fast to 1 as the number of non-covert users increases and that the total detection error probability increases as the transmit power increases, without requiring a pre-shared secret among the nodes.

The throughput of WPAN (Wireless Personal Area Network) based on Bluetooth was decided by the interference of Bluetooth piconets in the network. The interference was decided by the hamming correlation of Bluetooth FH (Frequency Hopping) selected sequence. In order to improve the WPAN throughput, the WPAN model and data packet collision model were built and the relations about WPAN throughput, the maximum hamming correlation of FH selected sequence, the numbers of Bluetooth piconets and the SNR of channel were analyzed. The functions of WPAN throughput were deduced. After analyzing the performance of Bluetooth FH selected sequence, the original algorithm was replaced by the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) algorithm. The theoretical analysis proved that the AES FH sequences selected algorithm could improve the WPAN throughput. The simulation results proved the theoretical analysis. The test result with ARM926EJs SoC (System on Chip) + RF (Radio Frequency) chip nRF2401 and CSR's Bluecore4 Bluetooth module got the same conclusion. All of these could prove that the AES algorithm can improve the WPAN throughput efficiently.

The wireless personal area network (WPAN) is an emerging wireless technology for future short range indoor and outdoor communication applications. The IEEE 802.15.3 medium access control (MAC) is proposed to coordinate the access to the wireless medium among the competing devices, especially for short range and high data rate applications in home networks. In this paper we use analytical modeling to study the performance analysis of WPAN (IEEE 802.15.3) MAC in terms of throughput, efficient bandwidth utilization, and delay with various ACK policies under error channel condition. This allows us to introduce a K-Dly-ACK-AGG policy, payload size adjustment mechanism, and Improved Backoff algorithm to improve the performance of the WPAN MAC. Performance evaluation results demonstrate the impact of our improvements on network capacity. Moreover, these results can be very useful to WPAN application designers and protocol architects to easily and correctly implement WPAN for home networking.

As the wireless personal area network (WPAN) gets utilized by more individuals, the interference that collocated WPANs cause to each other, termed self-interference, will be one of the major sources that degrade WPAN's communication performance. The conventional adaptive frequency hopping (AFH) strategies avoid frequency-static interference by reducing the hopset, but this deteriorates the performance if there is also self-interference. In this paper, we propose dynamic AFH (DAFH) mechanisms that are concurrently employed by collocated WPANs in order to avoid the self-interference. With DAFH, WPAN adaptively self-allocates a subset of frequency channels to be hopped, such as to minimize the experienced interference. The packet error rate is the only input to the proposed mechanisms, which enables DAFH to also avoid interference from frequency-static interferer. The optimization of the throughput should not be the sole target of the DAFH because WPAN operates in unlicensed spectrum and arbitrary adaptation of the FH pattern may be harmful to proximate non-WPAN devices. Therefore, we define and adopt an etiquette rule to characterize the behavior of the collocated WPANs with DAFH as a single collective entity that produces interference. The operation of DAFH is robust and adaptive to the dynamic changes in the environment and to the noise errors in the channel. Simulation results show that DAFH significantly increases the throughput of the WPANs in presence of both self-interference and frequency-static interference, while the WPANs employ best effort to minimize changes in the overall interference pattern

Personal area networks such as home or small office LANs are usually more vulnerable to cyber-attacks than those with dedicated support staff and the ability to invest consistently in security defenses. In this paper I propose leveraging physical characteristics of these personal area networks in order to enable non-technical individuals to secure their networks or at least be aware that their devices have been compromised. This proposal leverages records of location for mobile devices, proximity authentication, and individual homophily. In this work, I summarize previous studies on securing personal networks, proximity authentication, and software attestation. I then present a preliminary design for the detection of and recovery from infection for personal area networks. Limitations and future work are also discussed.

A Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) provides wireless links among proximate devices,usually carried by an individual.As WPAN gains momentum in ubiquitous usage, the interference that collocated WPANs cause to each other, termed self-interference, becomes one of the major sources that degrade the communication performance of WPAN. This paper in roduces the Frequency Rolling (FR), a particular instance of frequency hopping (FH) that enables he collocated WPANs to cooperate and avoid the self-interference. The FR uses as input solely the observed packet error rate (PER) and it does not require any exchange of information among he collocated WPANs. The effect of the FR over a longer time in erval is hat the WPANs use he complete set of disposable channels in an implicit time-division and cooperative manner. The parameters of he FR are chosen such that a WPAN which uses FR never occupies the channels in the unlicensed spectrum more than what is permitted by the current regulation. We compare the goodput offered by FR to the goodput of the collocated piconets when conventional pseudorandom FH is used. Our simulation results show that FR has superior goodput performance. In addition, he design of FR is made robust owards the errors due to the channel noise. Some guidance for practical fault-toleran design and future extensions of FR are given. All hese features promote the great potential of FR as a coexistence mechanism for unlicensed operation.

This paper proposes several extensions to IEEE Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) MAC protocol in order to enable a more robust and flexible solution to WPANs and sensor networks. Specifically, four extensions are proposed: a priority access period is added to handle emergency data transmission needed in some use cases, a scheduling protocol to resolve beacon transmission conflict between multiple WPANs operating in the same vicinity, a resource reservation protocol for interference- free data communication in a tree-topology WPAN, and a network alignment method to coordinate multiple coexisting unsynchronized WPANs.

Scatternet formation is one of the most important issues of emerging wireless personal area networks (WPANs). Numerous papers pointed out that the performance of a WPAN highly depends on the scatternet structure; however, for next generation WPANs (IEEE 802.15.3 and 802.15.4) the issue of scatternet formation is not discussed in the literature so far. This paper presents the techniques, constraints and effects of scatternet formation. First, the theoretically based problem is formulated in integer linear programming (ILP) framework. Two heuristic methods are proposed for high-rate WPANs (802.15.3), which can be extended for low-rate WPANs (802.15.4) as well. The constructed networks are analyzed based on two metrics: (1) total network load, (2) amount of piconets. We show that network performance highly depends on the used algorithm: the network load can be reduced by up to 30% by using a proper scatternet formation algorithm. Furthermore, the scatternet can be optimized depending on the actual network traffic and individual objectives

The year 2005 witnesses the third occasion that the Wireless Personal Area and Ad-hoc Networks minitrack is part of the annual HICSS conference. This year there was a substantial increase in submissions (thus a substantial decrease in the acceptance rate), indicating the growing importance of research in this area. The minitrack is also focused on fundamental challenges and issues arising in wireless sensor networks and their applications. Wireless sensor networks differ from other wireless networks in the need for unattended and very low-energy operation, in the possibility of collaboration and distributed sensor calibration, and in the mission oriented nature of most sensor networks. Thus our mini track looks at two very important streams of research. After a strict review process nine papers were selected to be included in the program of the minitrack. The first paper is titled “BT-Crowds: Crowds-style Anonymity with Bluetooth and Java,” presenting an interesting idea on how anonymity can be achieved when sending messages in WPAN environments. Our second paper revisits scatternet formation issues of Bluetooth based ad hoc networks thus the title: “A Dynamic and Distributed Scatternet Formation Protocol for Real-life Bluetooth Scatternets.” The third paper is titled “Secure Dynamic Source Routing” and presents a new variant of the DSR routing protocol with special emphasis on security. In the fourth paper, the discussion concerns “Routing Based Feedback towards Applications in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks,” where routing notifications are relayed via event channels. “A Location Service Mechanism for Position-Based Multicasting in Wireless Mobile Ad hoc Networks” is the title of the fifth paper in the minitrack. It presents some innovative ideas on how location information can be managed for multicast communications in ad-hoc networks. In the sixth paper, “Sliding Window Protocol for Secure Group Communication in Ad Hoc Networks,” the authors propose a sliding window protocol for determining multiple routes in a multi-communications environment. In the seventh paper titled “Ad Hoc Routing Protocol Avoiding Route Breaks Based on AODV,” the authors propose improvements to the well-known AODV ad hoc routing protocol The eight paper, “Joint Scheduling and Routing Algorithm for Ad Hoc Wireless,” presents an innovative and interesting idea wrapped around an iterative algorithm on power control. In the final paper of the minitrack, “Performance Issues of Ad Hoc Routing Protocols in a Network Scenario used for VideoPhone Applications,” the authors present a simulation based performance analysis of different ad hoc routing protocols using the application pointed to in the title. These papers highlight some of the issues and work towards solutions in Personal Area and ad hoc networks which are among the most active research fields in wireless networking. We believe that the papers will provide opportunities for researchers to come together and discuss and debate the results of the interesting experiments that are described in the papers. We are confident that the minitrack will achieve its goal of bringing together leading researchers, to present new results and discuss synergies between the two areas. We also take this opportunity to thank all the reviewers for their valuable and professional work as well as all the authors who submitted papers and thus helped us to create such a strong minitrack. We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to the conference organizers for their hard work and help.

Ultra-wideband (UWB) communications has emerged as a promising technology for high data rate wireless personal area networks (WPANs). In this paper, we address a key issue that impacts the performance of multi-hop, multi-rate UWB-based WPANs, namely joint routing and rate selection. Arbitrary selection of routes (including direct links) and transmission rates along these routes results in unnecessarily long channel reservation time and high blocking rate for prospective reservations, and leads to low network throughput. To remedy this situation, we propose a novel overhearing-aware joint routing and rate selection (ORRS) scheme, which improves the network throughput by exploiting the dependence between the channel reservation time and the multi-rate capability of an UWB system. At the same time, ORRS takes advantage of packet overhearing, a typical characteristic of broadcast communications. For a given source-destination pair, ORRS aims at selecting a path and its transmission rates that achieve the minimum reservation time, leading to low blocking rate for prospective reservations and high network throughput. We show that achieving this goal while simultaneously exploiting packet overhearing and satisfying a target packet delivery probability over the selected route leads to an NP-hard problem. Accordingly, ORRS resorts to approximate solutions (proactive and reactive) to find a near-optimal result with reasonable computational/communication overhead. We further propose other variants that exploit packet overhearing in different ways to improve ORRS performance.

Developing cost-effective solutions to deliver broadband connection to undeserved or under-connected communities using fixed wireless access technology can be achieved by canopy networks. The former can be implemented using MIMO-OFDM technique. The implementations of MIMO-OFDM in systems have shown promising results in terms of system performance improvement. This paper presents high-speed FFT algorithms for wireless personal area network (WPAN) applications which uses high data rate. In WPAN, the FFT/IFFT block plays the major role. To eliminate the huge burden of the computational requirement of the FFT/IFFT process, the divide and conquer algorithm is employed here. This method not only improves the efficiency but is also easy to implement. In this work, the concept of Discrete Fourier Transform is discussed and the same is implemented using MATLAB for the MIMO-OFDM process.

Supporting multimedia traffic is one of the major challenges for the next generation of wireless personal area networks (WPANs). Especially, the IEEE 802.15.4 WPAN standards specify how to guarantee real-time traffic with a type of time division multiple access (TDMA), called the guaranteed time slots (GTS). The GTS mechanism has led many researchers to design techniques aiming to support various real-time applications within the delay jitter. Since the IEEE 802.15.4 standards can operate at low data rate up to 250Kbps, it is limited to guarantee real-time multimedia traffic except voice. The voice traffic has bidirectional characteristics and may go through the multihop in WPAN which can support short-range communications among electronic devices. In this paper, we introduce a virtual cut-through GTS allocation mechanism, namely VC-GTS allocation, for voice traffic in multihop IEEE 802.15.4 systems. The proposed scheme can support bidirectional voice traffic and delivery the traffic to the destination through multihop paths with the minimum end-to-end delay time. The most important thing is that our proposed scheme achieves low delay time and packet error rate without a complex allocation algorithm in multihop IEEE 802.15.4 networks. Our simulation results show that our new scheme outperforms the basic IEEE 802.15.4 GTS mechanism.

In this paper, we investigate multi band OFDM based UWB wireless personal area networks (WPANs) over time varying channels. We first improve the efficiency of the data link layer. In order to maximize the link efficiency, we consider an immediate acknowledgement policy with dynamically and optimally selected frame sizes based on channel conditions. We then propose an opportunistic multiple-link-time scheduling algorithm, where the network controller determines the time allocation of individual connections within the IEEE 802.15.3 WPAN superframe structure. This algorithm determines time allocations proportional to the instantaneous efficiencies of operating links. Simulation results show that the proposed access method enhances the overall network performance compared to equal channel access schemes

Bluetooth Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPAN) is a new standard for low distance communications. In the WPAN, the time delay and bandwidth utilization are the bottleneck of network development. In this paper, an on-demand scheduling algorithm for time-sensitive transactions in the area of WPAN has been proposed. The algorithm referred in this paper is mainly composed of two important parts. On one hand, four final factors referred in the scheduling will be defined including data arrival rate, link load factor, data model factor and time factor. On the other hand, in order to meet the strict requirement of time delay, generally, the cluster identifier (CID) is a good aspect to be utilized to reduce the negative effect of time delay. However, different kinds of CID may have different priorities. The biggest advantages of this algorithm are low time delay and high band utilization. The feasibility of the algorithm can be demonstrated through the simulation.