In recent years, industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) have emerged as an important research theme with applications spanning a wide range of industries including automation, monitoring, process control, feedback systems, and automotive. Wide scope of IWSNs applications ranging from small production units, large oil and gas industries to nuclear fission control, enables a fast-paced research in this field. Though IWSNs offer advantages of low cost, flexibility, scalability, self-healing, easy deployment, and reformation, yet they pose certain limitations on available potential and introduce challenges on multiple fronts due to their susceptibility to highly complex and uncertain industrial environments. In this paper, a detailed discussion on design objectives, challenges, and solutions, for IWSNs, are presented. A careful evaluation of industrial systems, deadlines, and possible hazards in industrial atmosphere are discussed. This paper also presents a thorough review of the existing standards and industrial protocols and gives a critical evaluation of potential of these standards and protocols along with a detailed discussion on available hardware platforms, specific industrial energy harvesting techniques and their capabilities. This paper lists main service providers for IWSNs solutions and gives insight of future trends and research gaps in the field of IWSNs.

/pdf/a-critical-analysis-of-research-potential-challenges-and-14no6a3bs7.pdf

A Critical Analysis of Research Potential, Challenges, and Future Directives in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Next Generation Wireless Lans 802 11n And 802 11ac

Since the inception of IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) in 1997, wireless networking technologies have tremendously grown in the last few decades. The fundamental IEEE 802.11 physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) protocols have continuously been enriched with new technologies to provide the last mile wireless broadband connectivity to end users. Consequently, several new amendments of the basic IEEE 802.11 gradually came up in the forms of IEEE 802.11a, IEEE 802.11b, and IEEE 802.11g. More recently, IEEE 802.11n, IEEE 802.11ac, and IEEE 802.11ad are introduced with enhanced PHY and MAC layers that boost up physical data rates to the order of Gigabit per second. So, these amendments are generally known as high throughput WLANs (HT-WLANs). In HT-WLANs, PHY layer is enhanced with multiple-input multiple-output antenna technologies, channel bonding, short guard intervals, enhanced modulation and coding schemes. The MAC sublayer overhead is reduced by introducing frame aggregation and block acknowledgement technologies. However, several existing studies reveal that, many a time, the aforesaid PHY and MAC enhancements yield negative impact on various upper layer protocols, that is end-to-end transport and application layer protocols. As a consequence, a large number of researchers have focused on improving the coordination among PHY/MAC and upper layer protocols. In this survey, we discuss impact of HT-WLAN PHY and MAC layer enhancements on various transport and application layer protocols. This paper also summarizes several research works that use aforesaid enhancements effectively to boost up data rate of end-to-end protocols. We also point out limitations of the existing researches and list down different open challenges that can be meaningfully explored for the development of the next generation HT-WLAN technologies.

Impact of IEEE 802.11n/ac PHY/MAC High Throughput Enhancements on Transport and Application Protocols—A Survey

In this paper, a technique for modeling propagation of ultrawideband (UWB) signals in indoor or outdoor environments is proposed, supporting the design of a positioning systems based on round-trip-time (RTT) measurements and on a particle filter. By assuming that nonlinear pulses are transmitted in an additive white Gaussian noise channel and are detected using a threshold-based receiver, it is shown that RTT measurements may be affected by non-Gaussian noise. RTT noise properties are analyzed, and the effects of non-Gaussian noise on the performance of an RTT-based positioning system are investigated. To this aim, a classical least-squares estimator, an extended Kalman filter, and a particle filter are compared when used to detect a slowly moving target in the presence of the modeled noise. It is shown that, in a realistic indoor environment, the particle filter solution may be a competitive solution, at a price of increased computational complexity. Experimental verifications validate the presented approach.

Positioning Techniques in Indoor Environments Based on Stochastic Modeling of UWB Round-Trip-Time Measurements

40th Annual IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are widely used in many industries including smart cities, smart agriculture, smart medical, smart logistics, etc. However, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks pose a serious threat to the security of IoT. Attackers can easily exploit the vulnerabilities of IoT devices and control them as part of botnets to launch DDoS attacks. This is because IoT devices are resource-constrained with limited memory and computing resources. As an emerging technology, Blockchain has the potential to solve the security issues in IoT. Therefore, it is important to analyse various Blockchain-based solutions to mitigate DDoS attacks in IoT. In this survey, a detailed survey of various Blockchain-based solutions to mitigate DDoS attacks in IoT is carried out. First, we discuss how the IoT networks are vulnerable to DDoS attacks, its impact over IoT networks and associated services, the use of Blockchain as a potential technology to address DDoS attacks, in addition to challenges of Blockchain implementation in IoT. We then discuss various existing Blockchain-based solutions to mitigate the DDoS attacks in the IoT environment. Then, we classify existing Blockchain-based solutions into four categories i.e., Distributed Architecture-based solutions, Access Management-based solutions, Traffic Control-based solutions and the Ethereum Platform-based solutions. All the solutions are critically evaluated in terms of their working principles, the DDoS defense mechanism (i.e., prevention, detection, reaction), strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we discuss future research directions that can be explored to design and develop better Blockchain-based solutions to mitigate DDoS attacks in IoT.

/pdf/blockchain-based-solutions-to-mitigate-distributed-denial-of-24zeu0r1.pdf

Blockchain Based Solutions to Mitigate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks in the Internet of Things (IoT): A Survey

IEEE 80211ac is an emerging standard that operates in 5GHz frequency band and provides high data rate as compared to IEEE 80211n In this paper we carry out experiments in a real indoor environment and quantify the gain in average throughput provided by IEEE 80211ac compared to IEEE 80211n in the presence of interference caused by other IEEE 80211n sources The experiments are performed for both Line of Sight (LoS) and Non-Line of Sight (NLoS) conditions We note that IEEE 80211n (24GHz) provides the worst average throughput due to the highly congested 24GHz frequency band in our experimental environment We find that IEEE 80211n (5GHz) with 40MHz channel width provides a gain of 36% in average throughput compared to 20MHz channel width at a distance of 20m from the wireless router in LoS conditions Our experimental results reveal that IEEE 80211ac achieves 42% better average throughput when compared to the IEEE 80211n (5GHz) at a distance of 5m in LoS conditions Similarly, IEEE 80211ac provides 55% improvement over IEEE 80211n (5GHz) at a distance of 15m in NLoS conditions We conclude that IEEE 80211ac can effectively handle interference caused by other IEEE 80211n (5GHz) sources and provides higher throughput than IEEE 80211n for both LoS and NLoS conditions

Throughput comparison of IEEE 802.11ac and IEEE 802.11n in an indoor environment with interference

Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is a widely used protocol that provides a mapping of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses to Media Access Control (MAC) addresses in local area networks. This protocol suffers from many spoofing attacks because of its stateless nature and lack of authentication. One such spoofing attack is the ARP Cache Poisoning attack, in which attackers poison the cache of hosts on the network by sending spoofed ARP requests and replies. Detection and mitigation of ARP Cache Poisoning attack is important as this attack can be used by attackers to further launch Denial of Service (DoS) and Man-In-The Middle (MITM) attacks. As with traditional networks, an ARP Cache Poisoning attack is also a serious concern in Software Defined Networking (SDN) and consequently, many solutions are proposed in the literature to mitigate this attack. In this paper, a detailed survey on various solutions to mitigate ARP Cache Poisoning attack in SDN is carried out. In this survey, various solutions are classified into three categories: Flow Graph based solutions; Traffic Patterns based solutions; IP-MAC Address Bindings based solutions. All these solutions are critically evaluated in terms of their working principles, advantages and shortcomings. Another important feature of this survey is to compare various solutions with respect to different performance metrics, e.g., attack detection time, ARP response time, calculation of delay at the Controller etc. In addition, future research directions are also presented in this survey that can be explored by other researchers to propose better solutions to mitigate the ARP Cache Poisoning attack in SDN.

https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/8/10/1095/pdf

Mitigating ARP Cache Poisoning Attack in Software-Defined Networking (SDN): A Survey

In this work we quantify the usefulness of particle filters applied to the problem of mobile device tracking in Wi-Fi networks, under the assumption of log-normal fading. Our principal aim was to determine if a real-time deployment of a particle filter was possible while still providing factor two gains in the prediction performance relative to a stand-alone optimal Wi-Fi positioning algorithm. We conclude that the required gains are achieved in our adopted filter algorithm when the particle number is set to the relatively small number of 300, meaning that a real-time deployment is possible. In addition, we quantify the performance gain of the particle filter when intermittent GPS information is available to the mobile device. We propose the fusion of the GPS information be implemented as a renormalization of the particle cloud. Finally, we probe the limits of the filter performance under biased-error distributions. Our simulations show that tracking of people, vehicles and robotic devices in an outdoor Wi-Fi network, where non-linear and non-Gaussian conditions exist, can be significantly enhanced by the pragmatic real-time particle filter algorithm presented here

Particle Filters and Position Tracking in Wi-Fi Networks

Location tracking in wireless networks has many applications, including enhanced network performance. In this work we investigate the experimental use of "particle filter" techniques as applied to the mobile device tracking problem in WiFi networks. Particle filters are well suited to the non-Gaussian and biased error conditions characteristic of signals found in most WiFi networks, as well as allowing for seamless data fusion with intermittent GPS availability and prior map information. Our experimental results show that particle filter tracking can indeed deliver significant performance gains. In some physical regions of our test area, factors of three improvement in location accuracy - relative to optimal unfiltered WiFi positioning - is found. We show how these gains are achieved at a relatively small particle number of 300, meaning real-time implementation of the particle filter can be easily achieved.

Zawar Shah

Papers

Blockchain Based Solutions to Mitigate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks in the Internet of Things (IoT): A Survey

Throughput comparison of IEEE 802.11ac and IEEE 802.11n in an indoor environment with interference

Mitigating ARP Cache Poisoning Attack in Software-Defined Networking (SDN): A Survey

Particle Filters and Position Tracking in Wi-Fi Networks

Experimental Deployment of Particle Filters in WiFi Networks