Summary Nowadays data center networks (DCNs) should handle the ever‐growing load generated by diverse applications. It particularly occurs under concurrent flow requests and so‐called mice flows (MFs): elephant flows (EFs) ratio. Concentrating on a binary vision over flow size classification (EF or MF) results in subsequent unpredicted load imbalance due to neglecting EF's distinctions including a wide range of sizes. As a result, some EFs might utilize a path owing qualities beyond the given EF's demands, while another EF with higher requirements is attending to use an over‐utilized path. This article proposes FMap, a fuzzy map for scheduling EFs through our proposed variant of traveling salesperson problem (TSP) toward DCNs. FMap represents a novel EF scheduling scheme that integrates flow prioritization and routing decisions under the event pf parallel incoming flows besides the cooperation of the controller and OpenFlow switches in software‐defined networking (SDN) paradigm. FMap adopts fuzzy inference process to overcome the vagueness over EF's resource allocation. Mainly, FMap proposes a new variant of TSP (optimized by genetic algorithm) which enables EF's group forwarding with a minimum cost. FMap reduces the total hop count of EFs through considering a single optimal path for delivering groups of EFs that contain a same tag (priority). The outstanding results represent a major improvement as compared with equal cost multiple path, Hedera, Sonoum, and Size‐KP‐PSO. Particularly, the results illustrate an outperforming by 3.76×, 0.21×, 0.15×, 0.03×, and 0.03× in terms of total hop count, EFs FCT, packet loss, goodput, and received packets as compared with Size‐KP‐PSO, respectively.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become increasingly important in recent years due to their ability to monitor and collect data in various environments. However, WSNs are often limited by their energy resources, making energy efficiency a critical concern in designing WSNs. Clustering and multi-hop routing are effective methods for maximizing the lifetime of WSNs. The energy efficient clustering and routing problem in WSNs can be formulated as a multi-dimensional knapsack problem (d-kp). This formulation can generalize all clustering and routing protocols in regard to energy efficiency. In this paper, we investigate the hardness of the energy-efficient clustering and routing problem in WSNs based on the d-kp formulation and introduce a modified Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA) as a method to solve this problem. SSA is a metaheuristic algorithm inspired by the behavior of salps in the ocean. Moreover, we prove that it is impossible to design a polynomial time fitness function to maximize a long-term metric such as FND (time of first node death), which is a commonly used metric for network lifetime. Our results have implications for the design of energy-efficient WSNs and call for the development of more efficient algorithms that can handle the complexity of this problem. furthermore, we evaluate our proposed algorithm using simulation and compare it to existing algorithms. Our results show that using SSA with a carefully designed fitness function based on the theoretical findings and a unique one-to-one routing protocol to mitigate the energy hole problem, outperforms many of the existing algorithms in terms of energy efficiency and network lifetime.

Providing security and privacy in today's digital era is very crucial. In order to ensure that the sensitive user data can only be accessed by a valid server, the user and server should agree on a common key in advance. To do so, in the last decade, a number of dynamic ID-based authenticated key agreement (DIDAKA) protocols have been proposed, which can guarantee subsequent secure communications of users and servers. Nevertheless, investigating the related works indicates that the existing DIDAKA schemes suffer from one or more security challenges. Quite recently, Xie et al. have presented an interesting anonymous DIDAKA protocol to cover the security weaknesses of previous schemes; nonetheless, we found that their scheme is susceptible to three attacks. Therefore, to remedy the security limitations, in this paper, we propose a security-enhanced anonymous DIDAKA protocol, which not only keeps the merits of Xie et al.'s scheme, but also offers better execution time compared to their proposed one. To demonstrate the security of the proposed scheme, we present both formal security proof and automatic formal verification of security and to show its efficiency, we present an extensive comparative performance analysis. In conclusion, the results are indicative of the priority of the proposed scheme.

With the rapid growth of different massive applications and parallel flow requests in Data Center Networks (DCNs), today’s providers are confronting challenges in flow forwarding decisions. Since Software Defined Networking (SDN) provides fine granular control, it can be intelligently programmed to distinguish between flow requirements. The present article proposes a knapsack model in which the link bandwidth and incoming flows are modeled as a knapsack capacity and items, respectively. Furthermore, each flow consists of two size and value aspects, acquired through flow size extraction and the type of service value assigned by the SDN controller decision. Indeed, the current work splits the incoming flow size range into Type of Service (ToS) decimal value numbers. The lower the flow size category, the higher the value dedicated to the flow. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) optimizes the knapsack problem and first forwards the selected-flows by KP-PSO, and the non-selected-flows second. To address the shortcomings of these methods in the event of dense parallel flow detection, the present study puts the link under the threshold of a 70% load by simultaneous requests. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method outperforms Sonum, Hedera, and ECMP in terms of flow completion time, packet loss rate, and goodput regarding flow size requirements.

Security is an indispensable part of smart grid (SG). Key establishment protocols play a vital role in fulfilling the security requirements in SG. In recent years, many key establishment schemes have been proposed for SG. However, only three of them offer the strong smart meter anonymity. In 2015, Tsai and Lo presented an anonymous key establishment scheme to be employed in SG. Recently, Odelu et al. have demonstrated that Tsai and Lo's scheme suffers from the ephemeral secret leakage attack. Furthermore, another scheme has been proposed recently by He et al. that has improved the efficiency of Tsai and Lo's scheme. However, besides its merits, we indicate that He et al.'s scheme suffers from both known session-specific temporary information attack and private key leakage. Additionally, these three anonymous schemes have the key escrow problem since the trusted anchor is aware of entities' private key. Hence, to cover the existing issues, in this paper we propose a key establishment scheme that not only is free from the security challenges of the previous anonymous schemes and key escrow problem, but also is efficient in terms of both computational and communication costs. Finally, yet importantly, we present the performance analysis of our proposed scheme on a state-of-the-art advanced RISC machine (ARM) chip, namely NXP LPC1788, as a suitable hardware for the smart meters.

Security and privacy concerns necessitate the careful management of shared keys in the vehicle to grid (V2G) networks. To do so, in recent years, several interesting key agreement protocols have been proposed to be employed in the context of V2G networks. As the efficiency is of prime significance in V2G networks, many of these protocols have been designed to be as light as possible. Nevertheless, review of the previous works indicates that the existing lightweight schemes cannot provide the desired security properties. Furthermore, the existing secure protocols are not so proper to be used by computationally limited devices in the V2G networks. Therefore, in this article, by utilizing the efficient Chebyshev chaotic map-based public key cryptosystem, we propose an anonymous key agreement scheme, which can not only provide the expected security requirements, but also has a proper level of performance. To demonstrate the security of the proposed scheme, we present a rigorous formal security proof using the random oracle model. In addition, to show its outperformance, we both compare it with several recently published well-known schemes and perform the experimental study. In general, the results indicate the efficiency of the proposed protocol in comparison to the related ones.