Computationally Efficient Cooperative Public Key Authentication Protocols in Ubiquitous Sensor Network

The use of public key algorithms to sensor networks brings all merits of these algorithms to such networks: nodes do not need to encounter each other in advance in order to be able to communicate securely. However, this will not be possible unless “good” key management primitives that guarantee the functionality of these algorithms in the wireless sensor networks are provided. Among these primitives is public key authentication: before sensor nodes can use public keys of other nodes in the network to encrypt traffic to them, they need to make sure that the key provided for a particular node is authentic. In the near past, several researchers have addressed the problem and proposed solutions for it as well. In this chapter we review these solutions. We further discuss a new scheme which uses collaboration among sensor nodes for public key authentication. Unlike the existing solutions for public key authentication in sensor network, which demand a fixed, yet high amount of resources, the discussed work is dynamic; it meets a desirable security requirement at a given overhead constraints that need to be provided. It is scalable where the accuracy of the authentication and level of security are merely dependent upon the desirable level of resource consumption that the network operator wants to put into the authentication operation.

Evaluating the Performance of the IEEE 802.15.4 Standard in Supporting Time-Critical Wireless Sensor Networks

The performance of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) at monitoring time-critical events is an important research topic, mainly due to the need to ensure that the actions to be taken upon these events are timely. To determine the effectiveness of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard at monitoring time-critical events in WSNs, we introduce a routing scheme based on drain announcements that seeks minimum routing overhead. We carried out a novel performance evaluation of the IEEE 802.15.4 technology under different conditions, to determine whether or not near-real-time event monitoring is feasible. By analyzing different simulation metrics such as packet loss rate, average end-to-end delay, and routing overhead, we determine the degree of effectiveness of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard at supporting time-critical tasks in multi-hop WSNs, evidencing its limitations upon the size and the amount of traffic flowing through the network.

Service Provision Evolution in Self-Managed Future Internet Environments

Future Internet is based on the concepts of autonomicity and cognition, where each network element is able to monitor its surrounding environment, evaluate the situation, and decide the action that should be applied. In such context, the traditional service provisioning approaches necessitate a paradigm shift so as to incorporate the Cognitive Cycle. Towards this end, in this chapter, we introduce a Cognitive Service Provision framework suitable for Future Internet Networks. The proposed approach supports cognition by modeling a service as an aggregation of software components bundled together through a graph. Consequently, each service is composed by various components and is tailored to the operational context of the requestor. In order to prove the viability and applicability of the proposed approach we also introduce the enhancement of the IP Multimedia Subsystem through our Cognitive Service Provision framework. Finally, based on our work, we discuss future research directions and the link between service and network management.

End-to-End Dataflow Parallelism for Transfer Throughput Optimization

The emerging petascale increase in the data produced by large-scale scientific applications necessitates innovative solutions for efficient transfer of data through the advanced infrastructure provided by today’s high-speed networks and complex computer-architectures (e.g. supercomputers, parallel storage systems). Although the current optical networking technology reached transport speeds of 100Gbps, the applications still suffer from the inadequate transport protocols and end-system bottlenecks such as processor speed, disk I/O speed and network interface card limits that cause underutilization of the existing network infrastructure and let the application achieve only a small portion of the theoretical performance. Fortunately, with the parallelism provided by usage of multiple CPUs/nodes and multiple disks present in today’s systems, these bottlenecks could be eliminated. However it is necessary to understand the characteristics of the end-systems and the transport protocol used. In this book chapter, we analyze methodologies that will improve the data transfer speed of applications and provide maximal speeds that could be obtained from the available end-system resources and high-speed networks through usage of end-to-end dataflow parallelism.

Service Level Provisioning for Cloud-Based Applications Service Level Provisioning for Cloud-Based Applications

Cloud computing has recently emerged in the landscape of Information Technology as a compelling paradigm for managing and delivering services over the Internet in a performance- and cost-effective way. However, its development is still at its infancy, with many issues worthy to be investigated. In this chapter, we analyze the problem of service level provisioning and the possible strategies that can be used to tackle it at the various layers of the cloud architecture, focusing on the perspective of cloud-based application providers. We also propose an approach for the dynamic QoS provisioning of cloud-based applications which takes into account that the provider has to fulfill the service level settled with the application users while minimizing the resources outsourced from the cloud infrastructure in such a way to maximize its profits.

Service-Oriented Networking for the Next Generation Distributed Computing

With the rapid development of various emerging technologies, such as Web services, Grid computing, and cloud computing, computer networks have become the integrant of the next generation distributed computing systems. Networking systems have a significant impact on distributed application performance; therefore, they must be integrated with other computational resources in distributed computing systems to support the requirements of high-performance distributed applications. This chapter presents a new Service-Oriented Networking (SON) paradigm that enables the integration of networking and distributed computing systems. The SON applies the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) principle and employs network virtualization for abstracting networking resources in the form of network services, which can be described, discovered, and composed in distributed computing environments. This chapter particularly discusses network service description and discovery as key technologies for realizing the SON, and describes a network service broker system for discovering the network services that meet the performance requirements of distributed applications. A general modeling approach to describing network service capabilities and an information updating mechanism are also presented in this chapter, which can improve the performance of the network service broker system in heterogeneous and dynamic networking environments.

A WSN-Based Building Management Framework to Support Energy-Saving Applications in Buildings

Using wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for auditing and managing the energy consumption in a building is an emerging research area that includes a number of novel applications such as activity pattern recognition, adaptive load shifting, and building energy profiling in domestic and industrial settings. This chapter defines the specific requirements for applications of energy management in the building context and proposes a novel framework for building management (BMF) to support heterogeneous platforms. To allow flexible node activity grouping, BMF defines roles and operations derived from the mathematical set theory, while it optimizes transmissions through a mechanism of adaptive packet size. BMF has been implemented and tested in TinyOS. Results show an increase in reliability with respect to existing transmission schemes that can be traded off to reduce energy consumption.

Data Gathering with Multi-Attribute Fusion in Wireless Sensor Networks

This chapter addresses the problem of data gathering with multi-attribute fusion over a bandwidth and energy constrained wireless sensor network (WSN). As there are strong correlations between data gathered from sensor nodes in close physical proximity, effective in-network fusion schemes involve minimizing such redundancy and hence reducing the load in wireless sensor networks. Considering a complicated environment, each sensor node must be equipped with more than one type of sensor module to monitor multi-targets; hence, the complexity for the fusion process is increased due to the existence of various physical attributes. In this chapter, by investigating the process and performance of multi-attribute fusion in data gathering of WSNs, we design a self-adaptive threshold to balance the different change rates of each attributive data. Furthermore, we present a method to measure the energy-conservation efficiency of multi-attribute fusion. Then, a novel energy equilibrium routing method is proposed to balance and save energy in WSNs, which is named multi-attribute fusion tree (MAFT). The establishment of MAFT is determined by the remaining energy of sensor nodes and the energy-conservation efficiency of data fusion. Finally, the energy saving performance of the scheme is demonstrated through comprehensive simulations. The chapter concludes by identifying some open research issues on this topic.

MINTCar

Discovering a network topology and inferring its performances for the client/server case is a well known field of study. However, client/server model is no longer accurate when dealing with Grids, as those platforms involve coordinated transfers from multiple sources to multiple destinations. In this chapter, we first review existing work, introduce a representation of the inferred knowledge from multiple sources and multiple destinations measurements that allows to obtain a well-posed problem, algorithms in order to reconstruct such a representation, a method to probe network, and give some experimental results.

Security Issues on Outlier Detection and Countermeasure for Distributed Hierarchical Wireless Sensor Networks

Outliers in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are sensor nodes that launch attacks by abnormal behaviors and fake message dissemination. However, existing cryptographic techniques have difficulty in detecting these outliers, which makes outlier recognition a critical and challenging issue for reliable and secure data dissemination when outliers exist in WSNs. This chapter is concerned about detection and elimination problems of outlier. To efficiently identify and isolate outliers, we present a novel “Outlier Detection and Countermeasure Scheme” (ODCS), which consists of three mechanisms: (1) An abnormal event observation mechanism (AEOM) for network surveillance; (2) An exceptional message supervision mechanism (EMSM) for distinguishing fake messages by exploiting spatiotemporal correlation and consistency; (3) An abnormal frequency supervision mechanism (AFSM) for the evaluation of node behavior. The chapter also provides a heuristic methodology which does not need the knowledge of normal or malicious sensors in advance. This property makes the ODCS not only to distinguish and deal with various dynamic attacks automatically without advance learning but also reduces the requirement of capability for constrained nodes. In our solution, the communication is limited to a local range, such as one-hop or a cluster, which can reduce the communication frequency and circumscribe the session range further. Moreover, the chapter also provides countermeasures for different types of attacks, such as the rerouting scheme and the rekey security scheme, which can separate outliers from normal sensors and enhance the robustness of network, even when some nodes are compromised by adversary. Simulation results indicate that our approach can effectively detect and defend the outlier attack.