Worcester Polytechnic Institute

About: Worcester Polytechnic Institute is a education organization based out in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Computer science & Population. The organization has 6270 authors who have published 12704 publications receiving 332081 citations. The organization is also known as: WPI.

Mobile power management for wireless communication networks

Abstract: For fixed quality-of-service constraints and varying channel interference, how should a mobile node in a wireless network adjust its transmitter power so that energy consumption is minimized? Several transmission schemes are considered, and optimal solutions are obtained for channels with stationary, extraneous interference. A simple dynamic power management algorithm based on these solutions is developed. The algorithm is tested by a series of simulations, including the extraneous-interference case and the more general case where multiple, mutually interfering transmitters operate in a therefore highly responsive interference environment. Power management is compared with conventional power control for models based on FDMA/TDMA and CDMA cellular networks. Results show improved network capacity and stability in addition to substantially improved battery life at the mobile terminals.

Dependable and Secure Sensor Data Storage with Dynamic Integrity Assurance

Abstract: Recently, distributed data storage has gained increasing popularity for efficient and robust data management in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The distributed architecture makes it challenging to build a highly secure and dependable yet lightweight data storage system. On the one hand, sensor data are subject to not only Byzantine failures, but also dynamic pollution attacks, as along the time the adversary may modify/pollute the stored data by compromising individual sensors. On the other hand, the resource-constrained nature of WSNs precludes the applicability of heavyweight security designs. To address the challenge, in this article we propose a novel dependable and secure data storage scheme with dynamic integrity assurance. Based on the principle of secret sharing and erasure coding, we first propose a hybrid share generation and distribution scheme to achieve reliable and fault-tolerant initial data storage by providing redundancy for original data components. To further dynamically ensure the integrity of the distributed data shares, we then propose an efficient data integrity verification scheme exploiting the techniques of algebraic signature and spot-checking. The proposed scheme enables individual sensors to verify in one protocol execution the correctness of all the pertaining data shares simultaneously in the absence of the original data. Extensive security analysis shows that the proposed scheme has strong resistance against various data pollution attacks. The efficiency of the scheme is demonstrated by experiments on sensor platforms Tmote Sky and iMote2.