This document provides updates to IEEE Std 802.16's MIB for the MAC, PHY and asso- ciated management procedures in order to accommodate recent extensions to the standard.

IEEE Standard for Local and Metropolitan Area Networks Part 16: Air Interface for Fixed Broadband Wireless Access Systems Draft Amendment: Management Information Base Extensions

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is growing rapidly across many civil application domains, including real-time monitoring, providing wireless coverage, remote sensing, search and rescue, delivery of goods, security and surveillance, precision agriculture, and civil infrastructure inspection. Smart UAVs are the next big revolution in the UAV technology promising to provide new opportunities in different applications, especially in civil infrastructure in terms of reduced risks and lower cost. Civil infrastructure is expected to dominate more than $45 Billion market value of UAV usage. In this paper, we present UAV civil applications and their challenges. We also discuss the current research trends and provide future insights for potential UAV uses. Furthermore, we present the key challenges for UAV civil applications, including charging challenges, collision avoidance and swarming challenges, and networking and security-related challenges. Based on our review of the recent literature, we discuss open research challenges and draw high-level insights on how these challenges might be approached.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Survey on Civil Applications and Key Research Challenges

To support bursty traffic on the Internet (and especially WWW) efficiently, optical burst switching (OBS) is proposed as a way to streamline both protocols and hardware in building the future gener...

Optical burst switching (OBS) - a new paradigm for an optical Internet

Space-air-ground integrated network (SAGIN), as an integration of satellite systems, aerial networks, and terrestrial communications, has been becoming an emerging architecture and attracted intensive research interest during the past years. Besides bringing significant benefits for various practical services and applications, SAGIN is also facing many unprecedented challenges due to its specific characteristics, such as heterogeneity, self-organization, and time-variability. Compared to traditional ground or satellite networks, SAGIN is affected by the limited and unbalanced network resources in all three network segments, so that it is difficult to obtain the best performances for traffic delivery. Therefore, the system integration, protocol optimization, resource management, and allocation in SAGIN is of great significance. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to present the state-of-the-art of the SAGIN since existing survey papers focused on either only one single network segment in space or air, or the integration of space-ground, neglecting the integration of all the three network segments. In light of this, we present in this paper a comprehensive review of recent research works concerning SAGIN from network design and resource allocation to performance analysis and optimization. After discussing several existing network architectures, we also point out some technology challenges and future directions.

Space-Air-Ground Integrated Network: A Survey

Computer communications

E-based systems are ubiquitous in the modern world with applications spanning e-commerce, WLANs, health care and government organisations. The secure transfer of information has therefore become a critical area of research, development, and investment. This book presents the fundamental concepts and tools of e-based security and its range of applications. The core areas of e-based security - authentication of users; system integrity; confidentiality of communication; availability of business service; and non-repudiation of transactions - are covered in detail. Throughout the book the major trends, challenges and applications of e-security are presented, with emphasis on public key infrastructure (PKI) systems, biometric-based security systems, trust management systems, and the e-service paradigm. Intrusion detection technologies, virtual private networks (VPNs), malware, and risk management are also discussed. Technically oriented with many practical examples, this book is suitable for practitioners in network security, as well as graduate students and researchers in telecommunications and computer science.

Security of e-Systems and Computer Networks

Pipeline-based applications have become the indispensable part of life. Active monitoring and frequent inspections are critical to maintaining pipeline health. However, these tasks are highly expensive using the traditional maintenance systems, knowing that the pipeline systems can be largely deployed in an inaccessible and hazardous environment. In this paper, we propose a novel cost effective, scalable, customizable, and autonomous sensor-based system, called SPAMMS. It combines robot agent based technologies with sensing technologies for efficiently locating health related events and allows active and corrective monitoring and maintenance of the pipelines. SPAMMS integrates RFID systems with mobile sensors and autonomous robots. While the mobile sensor motion is based on the fluid transported by the pipeline, the fixed sensors provide event and mobile sensor location information and contribute efficiently to the study of health history of the pipeline. In addition, it permits a good tracking of the mobile sensors. Using the output of event analysis, a robot agent gets command from the controlling system, travels inside the pipelines for detailed inspection and repairing of the reported incidents (e.g., damage, leakage, or corrosion). The key innovations of SPAMMS are 3-fold: (a) the system can apply to a large variety of pipeline systems; (b) the solution provided is cost effective since it uses low cost powerless fixed sensors that can be setup while the pipeline system is operating; (c) the robot is autonomous and the localization technique allows controllable errors. The simulation experiments described in this paper along with prototyping activities demonstrate the feasibility of SPAMMS.

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SPAMMS: A sensor-based pipeline autonomous monitoring and maintenance system

In this paper we propose a novel cooperative border surveillance solution, composed of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) deployed terrestrially to detect and track trespassers, and a set of lightweight unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs) in the form of quadcopters that interact with the deployed WSN to improve the border surveillance, the detection and investigation of network failures, the maintenance of the sensor network, the tracking of trespasser, the capture and transmission of realtime video of the intrusion scene, and the response to hostage situations. A heuristic-based scheduling algorithm is described to optimize the tracking mission by increasing the rate of detected trespassers spotted by the quadcopters. Together with the design of the electrical, mechanical and software architecture of the proposed VTail quadcopter, we develop in this paper powerless techniques to accurately localize terrestrial sensors using RFID technology, compute the optimal positions of the new sensors to drop, relay data between isolated islands of nodes, and wake up sensors to track intruders. The developed VTail prototype is tested to provide valid and accurate parameters’ values to the simulation. The latter is conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed WSN-based surveillance solution.

/pdf/border-surveillance-monitoring-using-quadcopter-uav-aided-1qsjf4mbil.pdf

Border surveillance monitoring using Quadcopter UAV-Aided Wireless Sensor Networks

Data muling using UAVs/drones is currently emerging as an alternative to the traditional traffic engineering techniques used in wireless sensor networks, when wireless communication is not an option or the least cost-efficient solution. This paper revisits the issue of traffic engineering in Internet-of-Things (IoT) settings, to assess the relevance of using UAVs for the persistent collection of sensor readings from the sensor nodes located into an environment and their delivery to base stations where further processing is performed. We consider a persistent path planning and UAV allocation model, where a team of UAVs coming from various base stations are used to collect data from ground sensors and deliver the collected information to their closest base stations. This problem is mathematically formalised and proven to be NP-hard. We propose a heuristic solution for the problem and evaluate its relative efficiency through simulation.

Noureddine Boudriga

Papers

Security of e-Systems and Computer Networks

SPAMMS: A sensor-based pipeline autonomous monitoring and maintenance system

Border surveillance monitoring using Quadcopter UAV-Aided Wireless Sensor Networks

Cooperative data muling from ground sensors to base stations using UAVs

Detecting Denial-of-Service attacks using the wavelet transform