Appearing in 1st IEEE International Workshop on Sensor Net Protocols and Applications (SNPA). Anchorage, Alaska, USA. May 11, 2003. RMST: Reliable Data Transport in Sensor Networks Fred Stann, John Heidemann Abstract – Reliable data transport in wireless sensor networks is a multifaceted problem influenced by the physical, MAC, network, and transport layers. Because sensor networks are subject to strict resource constraints and are deployed by single organizations, they encourage revisiting traditional layering and are less bound by standardized placement of services such as reliability. This paper presents analysis and experiments resulting in specific recommendations for implementing reliable data transport in sensor nets. To explore reliability at the transport layer, we present RMST (Reliable Multi- Segment Transport), a new transport layer for Directed Diffusion. RMST provides guaranteed delivery and fragmentation/reassembly for applications that require them. RMST is a selective NACK-based protocol that can be configured for in-network caching and repair. Second, these energy constraints, plus relatively low wireless bandwidths, make in-network processing both feasible and desirable [3]. Third, because nodes in sensor networks are usually collaborating towards a common task, rather than representing independent users, optimization of the shared network focuses on throughput rather than fairness. Finally, because sensor networks are often deployed by a single organization with inexpensive hardware, there is less need for interoperability with existing standards. For all of these reasons, sensor networks provide an environment that encourages rethinking the structure of traditional communications protocols. The main contribution is an evaluation of the placement of reliability for data transport at different levels of the protocol stack. We consider implementing reliability in the MAC, transport layer, application, and combinations of these. We conclude that reliability is important at the MAC layer and the transport layer. MAC-level reliability is important not just to provide hop-by-hop error recovery for the transport layer, but also because it is needed for route discovery and maintenance. (This conclusion differs from previous studies in reliability for sensor nets that did not simulate routing. [4]) Second, we have developed RMST (Reliable Multi-Segment Transport), a new transport layer, in order to understand the role of in- network processing for reliable data transfer. RMST benefits from diffusion routing, adding minimal additional control traffic. RMST guarantees delivery, even when multiple hops exhibit very high error rates. 1 Introduction Wireless sensor networks provide an economical, fully distributed, sensing and computing solution for environments where conventional networks are impractical. This paper explores the design decisions related to providing reliable data transport in sensor nets. The reliable data transport problem in sensor nets is multi-faceted. The emphasis on energy conservation in sensor nets implies that poor paths should not be artificially bolstered via mechanisms such as MAC layer ARQ during route discovery and path selection [1]. Path maintenance, on the other hand, benefits from well- engineered recovery either at the MAC layer or the transport layer, or both. Recovery should not be costly however, since many applications in sensor nets are impervious to occasional packet loss, relying on the regular delivery of coarse-grained event descriptions. Other applications require loss detection and repair. These aspects of reliable data transport include the provision of guaranteed delivery and fragmentation/ reassembly of data entities larger than the network MTU. Sensor networks have different constraints than traditional wired nets. First, energy constraints are paramount in sensor networks since nodes can often not be recharged, so any wasted energy shortens their useful lifetime [2]. This work was supported by DARPA under grant DABT63-99-1-0011 as part of the SCAADS project, and was also made possible in part due to support from Intel Corporation and Xerox Corporation. Fred Stann and John Heidemann are with USC/Information Sciences Institute, 4676 Admiralty Way, Marina Del Rey, CA, USA E-mail: fstann@usc.edu, johnh@isi.edu. 2 Architectural Choices There are a number of key areas to consider when engineering reliability for sensor nets. Many current sensor networks exhibit high loss rates compared to wired networks (2% to 30% to immediate neighbors)[1,5,6]. While error detection and correction at the physical layer are important, approaches at the MAC layer and higher adapt well to the very wide range of loss rates seen in sensor networks and are the focus of this paper. MAC layer protocols can ameliorate PHY layer unreliability, and transport layers can guarantee delivery. An important question for this paper is the trade off between implementation of reliability at the MAC layer (i.e. hop to hop) vs. the Transport layer, which has traditionally been concerned with end-to-end reliability. Because sensor net applications are distributed, we also considered implementing reliability at the application layer. Our goal is to minimize the cost of repair in terms of transmission.

RMST: Reliable Data Transport in Sensor Networks

Current commercial databases allow application programmers to trade off consistency for performance. However, existing definitions of weak consistency levels are either imprecise or they disallow efficient implementation techniques such as optimism. Ruling out these techniques is especially unfortunate because commercial databases support optimistic mechanisms. Furthermore, optimism is likely to be the implementation technique of choice in the geographically distributed and mobile systems of the future. This thesis presents the first implementation-independent specifications of existing ANSI isolation levels and a number of levels that are widely used in commercial systems, e.g., Cursor Stability, Snapshot Isolation. It also specifies a variety of guarantees for predicate-based operations in an implementation-independent manner. Two new levels are defined that provide useful consistency guarantees to application writers; one is the weakest level that ensures consistent reads, while the other captures some useful consistency properties provided by pessimistic implementations. We use a graph-based approach to define different isolation levels in a simple and intuitive manner. The thesis describes new implementation techniques for supporting different weak consistency levels in distributed client-server environments. The mechanisms are based on optimism and make use of multipart timestamps. A new technique is presented that allows multipart timestamps to scale well with the number of clients and servers in our system; the technique takes advantage of loosely synchronized clocks for removing old information in multipart timestamps. This thesis also presents the results of a simulation study to evaluate the performance of our optimistic schemes in data-shipping client-server systems The results show that the cost of providing serializability relative to mechanisms that provide lower consistency guarantees is negligible for low-contention workloads; furthermore, even for workloads with moderate to high-contention workloads, the cost of serializability is low. The simulation study also shows that our mechanisms based on multipart timestamps impose very low CPU, memory, and network costs while providing strong consistency guarantees to read-only and executing transactions. Thesis Supervisor: Barbara H. Liskov Title: Ford Professor of Engineering

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Weak Consistency: A Generalized Theory and Optimistic Implementations for Distributed Transactions

A survey on authentication schemes in VANETs for secured communication

Cloud storage is an increasingly popular application of cloud computing, which can provide on-demand outsourcing data services for both organizations and individuals. However, users may not fully trust the cloud service providers (CSPs) in that it is difficult to determine whether the CSPs meet their legal expectations for data security. Therefore, it is critical to develop efficient auditing techniques to strengthen data owners’ trust and confidence in cloud storage. In this paper, we present a novel public auditing scheme for secure cloud storage based on dynamic hash table (DHT), which is a new two-dimensional data structure located at a third parity auditor (TPA) to record the data property information for dynamic auditing. Differing from the existing works, the proposed scheme migrates the authorized information from the CSP to the TPA, and thereby significantly reduces the computational cost and communication overhead. Meanwhile, exploiting the structural advantages of the DHT, our scheme can also achieve higher updating efficiency than the state-of-the-art schemes. In addition, we extend our scheme to support privacy preservation by combining the homomorphic authenticator based on the public key with the random masking generated by the TPA, and achieve batch auditing by employing the aggregate BLS signature technique. We formally prove the security of the proposed scheme, and evaluate the auditing performance by detailed experiments and comparisons with the existing ones. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can effectively achieve secure auditing for cloud storage, and outperforms the previous schemes in computation complexity, storage costs and communication overhead.

Dynamic-Hash-Table Based Public Auditing for Secure Cloud Storage

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) attract a lot of attention recently. They are expected to assist/replace the human drivers in maneuvering the vehicle, thereby reducing the likelihood of road accidents caused by human error, as a means to improve the road traffic safety. However, AVs have their inherent safety and security challenges, which have to be addressed before they are ready for wide adoption. This paper presents an overview of recent research on AV safety failures and security attacks, as well as the available safety and security countermeasures.

A review on safety failures, security attacks, and available countermeasures for autonomous vehicles

Clock synchronization in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) assures that sensor nodes have the same reference clock time. This is necessary not only for various WSN applications but also for many system level protocols for WSNs such as MAC protocols, and protocols for sleep scheduling of sensor nodes. Clock value of a node at a particular instant of time depends on its initial value and the frequency of the crystal oscillator used in the sensor node. The frequency of the crystal oscillator varies from node to node, and may also change over time depending upon many factors like temperature, humidity, etc. As a result, clock values of different sensor nodes diverge from each other and also from the real time clock, and hence, there is a requirement for clock synchronization in WSNs. Consequently, many clock synchronization protocols for WSNs have been proposed in the recent past. These protocols differ from each other considerably, and so, there is a need to understand them using a common platform. Towards this goal, this survey paper categorizes the features of clock synchronization protocols for WSNs into three types, viz. structural features, technical features, and global objective features. Each of these categories has different options to further segregate the features for better understanding. The features of clock synchronization protocols that have been used in this survey include all the features which have been used in existing surveys as well as new features such as how the clock value is propagated, when the clock value is propagated, and when the physical clock is updated, which are required for better understanding of the clock synchronization protocols in WSNs in a systematic way. This paper also gives a brief description of a few basic clock synchronization protocols for WSNs, and shows how these protocols fit into the above classification criteria. In addition, the recent clock synchronization protocols for WSNs, which are based on the above basic clock synchronization protocols, are also given alongside the corresponding basic clock synchronization protocols. Indeed, the proposed model for characterizing the clock synchronization protocols in WSNs can be used not only for analyzing the existing protocols but also for designing new clock synchronization protocols.

A model for the classification and survey of clock synchronization protocols in WSNs

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of a large number of small and low cost sensor nodes powered by small batteries and equipped with various sensing devices. Usually, for many applications, once a WSN is deployed, probably in an inhospitable terrain, it is expected to gather the required data for quite some time, say for years. Since each sensor node has limited energy, these nodes are usually put to sleep to conserve energy, and this helps to prolong the network lifetime. There are two major approaches to sleep scheduling of sensor nodes, viz. (i) random (ii) synchronized. Any sleep scheduling scheme has to ensure that data can always be routed from source to sink. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for sleep scheduling of sensor nodes using a tree and an energy aware routing protocol which is integrated with the proposed sleep scheduling scheme. The tree is rooted at the sink node. The internal nodes of the tree remain awake and the leaf nodes are made to sleep. This provides an assured path from any node to the sink node. The tree is periodically reconstructed considering the remaining energy of each node with a view to balance energy consumption of nodes, and remove any failed nodes from the tree. The proposed approach also considerably reduces average energy consumption rate of each node as we are able to put more number of nodes to sleep in comparison to other approaches. Additional fault-tolerance is provided by keeping two paths from each node towards the sink. Extensive simulation studies of the proposed routing protocol has been carried out using Castalia simulator, and its performance has been compared with that of a routing protocol, called GSP, which incorporates sleep scheduling using random approach. The simulation results show that the proposed approach has longer network lifetime in comparison to that provided by GSP, and the energy consumption of nodes is also balanced.

An Energy Aware Routing Protocol with Sleep Scheduling for Wireless Sensor Networks

There are many applications such as software for processing customer records in telecom, patient records in hospitals, email processing software accessing a single email in a mailbox etc. which require to access a single record in a database consisting of millions of records. A basic feature of these applications is that they need to access data sets which are very large but simple. Cloud computing provides computing requirements for these kinds of new generation of applications involving very large data sets which cannot possibly be handled efficiently using traditional computing infrastructure. In this paper, we describe storage services provided by three well-known cloud service providers and give a comparison of their features with a view to characterize storage requirements of very large data sets as examples and we hope that it would act as a catalyst for the design of storage services for very large data set requirements in future. We also give a brief overview of other kinds of storage that have come up in the recent past for cloud computing.

A Survey of Cloud Storage Facilities

There are many concurrency control algorithms that use weak consistency of read-only transactions to enhance concurrency in database systems[3,8,18]. We identify these schedules (which become serializable when the weakly consistent read-only transactions are deleted from them) as update serializable schedules. In this paper, we study how update serializable schedules can be produced using locking and the advantages of allowing update serializable schedules in locking protocols. We show that if a locking protocol P which uses exclusive mode locks only is made heterogeneous, then the new locking protocol, called the heterogeneous locking protocol P, ensures update serializability. In addition, we also show that if the original locking protocol is deadlock-free, then a deadlock cycle in the heterogeneous locking protocol involves at least two read-only transactions. We also discuss the advantages that one gets when the guard locking protocol is made heterogeneous. The heterogeneous two phase locking protocol operates on general databases and ensures serializability. We present a simple non-two phase locking protocol on general databases that produces update serializable schedules which are not serializable. This protocol allows the read-only transactions to be non-two phase and restricts the update transactions to access exactly one data item.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F3-540-17187-8_36.pdf

Update serializability in locking

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), contention occurs when two or more nodes in a proximity simultaneously try to access the channel. The contention causes collisions, which are very likely to occur when traffic is correlated. The excessive collision not only affects the reliability and the QoS of the application, but also the lifetime of the network. It is well known that random access mechanisms do not efficiently handle correlated-contention, and therefore, suffer from high collision rate. Most of the existing TDMA scheduling techniques try to find an optimal or a sub-optimal schedule. Usually, the situation of correlated-contention persists only for a short duration, and therefore, it is not worthwhile to take a long time to generate an optimal or a sub-optimal schedule. We propose a randomized distributed TDMA scheduling (RD-TDMA) algorithm to quickly generate a feasible schedule (not necessarily optimal) to handle correlated-contention in WSNs. In RD-TDMA, a node in the network negotiates a slot with its neighbors using the message exchange mechanism. The proposed protocol has been simulated using the Castalia simulator to evaluate its runtime performance. Simulation results show that the RD-TDMA algorithm considerably reduces the time required to schedule.

Ramesh C. Hansdah

Papers

A model for the classification and survey of clock synchronization protocols in WSNs

An Energy Aware Routing Protocol with Sleep Scheduling for Wireless Sensor Networks

A Survey of Cloud Storage Facilities

Update serializability in locking

RD-TDMA: A Randomized Distributed TDMA Scheduling for Correlated Contention in WSNs