The wireless sensor network (WSN) technology spawns a surge of unforeseen applications. The diversity of these emerging applications represents the great success of this technology. A fundamental ...performance benchmark of such applications is topology control, which characterizes how well a sensing field is monitored and how well each pair of sensors is mutually connected in WSNs. This paper provides an overview of topology control techniques. We classify existing topology control techniques into two categories: network coverage and network connectivity. For each category, a surge of existing protocols and techniques are presented with the focus on blanket coverage, barrier coverage, sweep coverage, power management, and power control, five rising aspects that attract significant research attention in recent years. In this survey, we emphasize the basic principles of topology control to understand the state of the arts, while we explore future research directions in the new open areas and propose a series of design guidelines under this topic.
The majority of work in cognitive radio networks have focused on single-hop networks with mainly challenges at the physical and MAC layers. Recently, multi-hop secondary networks have gained ...attention as a promising design to leverage the full potential of cognitive radio networks. One of the main features of routing protocols in multi-hop networks is the routing metric used to select the best route for forwarding packets. In this paper, we survey the state-of-the-art routing metrics for cognitive radio networks. We start by listing the challenges that have to be addressed in designing a good routing metric for cognitive radio networks. We then provide a taxonomy of the different metrics and a survey of the way they have been used in different routing protocols. Then we present a case study to compare different classes of metrics. After that, we discuss how to combine individual routing metrics to obtain a global one. We end the paper with a discussion of the open issues in the design of future metrics for cognitive radio networks.
Internet of Things (IoT) related applications have emerged as an important field for both engineers and researchers, reflecting the magnitude and impact of data-related problems to be solved in ...contemporary business organizations especially in cloud computing. This paper first provides a functional framework that identifies the acquisition, management, processing and mining areas of IoT big data, and several associated technical modules are defined and described in terms of their key characteristics and capabilities. Then current research in IoT application is analyzed, moreover, the challenges and opportunities associated with IoT big data research are identified. We also report a study of critical IoT application publications and research topics based on related academic and industry publications. Finally, some open issues and some typical examples are given under the proposed IoT-related research framework.
Internet of Things (IoT) is playing a more and more important role after its showing up, it covers from traditional equipment to general household objects such as WSNs and RFID. With the great ...potential of IoT, there come all kinds of challenges. This paper focuses on the security problems among all other challenges. As IoT is built on the basis of the Internet, security problems of the Internet will also show up in IoT. And as IoT contains three layers: perception layer, transportation layer and application layer, this paper will analyze the security problems of each layer separately and try to find new problems and solutions. This paper also analyzes the cross-layer heterogeneous integration issues and security issues in detail and discusses the security issues of IoT as a whole and tries to find solutions to them. In the end, this paper compares security issues between IoT and traditional network, and discusses opening security issues of IoT.
The cloud computing exhibits, remarkable potential to provide cost effective, easy to manage, elastic, and powerful resources on the fly, over the Internet. The cloud computing, upsurges the ...capabilities of the hardware resources by optimal and shared utilization. The above mentioned features encourage the organizations and individual users to shift their applications and services to the cloud. Even the critical infrastructure, for example, power generation and distribution plants are being migrated to the cloud computing paradigm. However, the services provided by third-party cloud service providers entail additional security threats. The migration of user’s assets (data, applications, etc.) outside the administrative control in a shared environment where numerous users are collocated escalates the security concerns. This survey details the security issues that arise due to the very nature of cloud computing. Moreover, the survey presents the recent solutions presented in the literature to counter the security issues. Furthermore, a brief view of security vulnerabilities in the mobile cloud computing are also highlighted. In the end, the discussion on the open issues and future research directions is also presented.
Mobile edge caching is a promising technology for next-generation mobile networks to effectively offer service environments and cloud-storage capabilities at the edge of networks. By exploiting the ...storage and computing resources at the network edge, mobile edge caching can significantly reduce service latency, decrease network load, and improve the user experience. On the other hand, edge caching is subject to a number of threats regarding privacy violations and security breaches. In this article, we first introduce the architecture of mobile edge caching, and address the key problems regarding why, where, what, and how to cache. Then we examine the potential cyber threats, including cache poisoning attacks, cache pollution attacks, cache side-channel attacks, and cache deception attacks, which result in huge concerns about privacy, security, and trust in content placement, content delivery, and content usage for mobile users, respectively. After that, we propose a service-oriented and location-based efficient key distribution protocol (SOLEK) as an example in response to efficient and secure content delivery in mobile edge caching. Finally, we discuss the potential techniques for privacy-preserving content placement, efficient and secure content delivery, and trustful content usage, which are expected to draw more attention and efforts into secure edge caching.
The advances in wireless communication techniques, mobile cloud computing, automotive and intelligent terminal technology are driving the evolution of vehicle ad hoc networks into the Internet of ...Vehicles (IoV) paradigm. This leads to a change in the vehicle routing problem from a calculation based on static data towards real-time traffic prediction. In this paper, we first address the taxonomy of cloud-assisted IoV from the viewpoint of the service relationship between cloud computing and IoV. Then, we review the traditional traffic prediction approached used by both Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) and Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communications. On this basis, we propose a mobile crowd sensing technology to support the creation of dynamic route choices for drivers wishing to avoid congestion. Experiments were carried out to verify the proposed approaches. Finally, we discuss the outlook of reliable traffic prediction.
•Based on the transaction flow of the Fabric blockchain, we decompose the transaction latency into three phases and each with several substeps for fine-grained analysis, and we indicate the ...configuration parameters that may affect the latency of each phase.•We present an analytical model to calculate the average transaction latency in single and multiple channels Fabric blockchains. Besides, we give a quantitative latency analysis of two typical consensus mechanisms in Fabric blockchain, i.e. Solo and PBFT consensus.•We conduct a series of experiments to evaluate the validity of our proposed analytical model, and the results show that our model predicts the experimental results with an accuracy error of less than 6.1%.•We discuss the general implications of our results for latency performance in a configurable Fabric blockchain system. Additionally, based on the analytical model, we identify performance bottlenecks and provide feasible insights.
Blockchain has been one of the most attractive technologies for many modern and even future applications. Fabric, an open-source framework to implement the permissioned enterprise-grade blockchain, is getting increasing attention from innovators. The latency performance is crucial to the Fabric blockchain in assessing its effectiveness. Many empirical studies were conducted to analyze this performance based on different hardware platforms. These experimental results are not comparable as they are highly dependent on the underlying networks. Moreover, theoretical analysis on the latency of Fabric blockchain still receives much less attention. This paper provides a novel theoretical model to calculate the transaction latency under various network configurations such as block size, block interval, etc. Subsequently, we validate the proposed latency model with experiments, and the results show that the difference between analytical and experimental results is as low as 6.1%. We also identify some performance bottlenecks and give insights from the developer’s perspective.
Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is a new paradigm in information technology aimed at empowering people's capabilities by means of digital environments that are sensitive, adaptive, and responsive to human ...needs, habits, gestures, and emotions. This futuristic vision of daily environment will enable innovative human-machine interactions characterized by pervasive, unobtrusive, and anticipatory communications. Such innovative interaction paradigms make AmI technology a suitable candidate for developing various real life solutions, including in the healthcare domain. This survey will discuss the emergence of AmI techniques in the healthcare domain, in order to provide the research community with the necessary background. We will examine the infrastructure and technology required for achieving the vision of AmI, such as smart environments and wearable medical devices. We will summarize the state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) methodologies used for developing AmI system in the healthcare domain, including various learning techniques (for learning from user interaction), reasoning techniques (for reasoning about users' goals and intensions), and planning techniques (for planning activities and interactions). We will also discuss how AmI technology might support people affected by various physical or mental disabilities or chronic disease. Finally, we will point to some of the successful case studies in the area and we will look at the current and future challenges to draw upon the possible future research paths.
There have been many recent advances in wireless communication technologies, particularly in the area of wireless sensor networks, which have undergone rapid development and been successfully applied ...in the consumer electronics market. Therefore, wireless networks (WNs) have been attracting more attention from academic communities and other domains. From an industrial perspective, WNs present many advantages including flexibility, low cost, easy deployment and so on. Therefore, WNs can play a vital role in the Industry 4.0 framework, and can be used for smart factories and intelligent manufacturing systems. In this paper, we present an overview of industrial WNs (IWNs), discuss IWN features and related techniques, and then provide a new architecture based on quality of service and quality of data for IWNs. We also propose some applications for IWNs and IWN standards. Then, we will use a case from our previous achievements to explain how to design an IWN under Industry 4.0. Finally, we highlight some of the design challenges and open issues that still need to be addressed to make IWNs truly ubiquitous for a wide range of applications.
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