With the emergence of the Internet of Things, traditional Vehicular ad hoc Networks have evolved into the more sophisticated Internet of Vehicles (IoV). IoV is expected to play a key role in the development of future smart cities and intelligent transportation systems. However, like most information technology systems, IoV is vulnerable to cyberattack. A hacker may gain control over a vehicle, thereby posing serious danger to the vehicle occupants, surrounding vehicles and pedestrians. Consequently, improving the security of IoV is essential in ensuring its future success. Among the various security concerns surrounding IoV, secure communications and authentication are two of the most critical. Currently, most proposed works suffers the single-point-of-failure (SPOF) problem and the Trusted Third Party (TTP) compromise issue. To address these issues, the present study proposes a secure key generation mechanism which leverages the advantages of blockchain technology and certificateless public-key cryptography. In the proposed method, the distributed architecture of blockchain is exploited to realize a decentralized TTP service to prevent the SPOF problem and the TTP compromise issue. In addition, an Authenticated Key Agreement protocol based on legal key pairs is proposed to facilitate efficient mutual authentication and session key agreement between the vehicles. The security analysis results show that the proposed schemes have excellent resistance to typical TTP issues. Moreover, the feasibility of the proposed AKA protocol is demonstrated through the eCK model. Finally, the performance analysis results show that the proposed scheme yields a significant reduction in the computational cost compared to existing AKA protocols.

Abstract For disaster rescue and crisis support services, secure and trusted communication among emergency vehicles and mobile devices is important. VANET has been incrementally experimented for rescue scenario. Therefore, one of the popular ad hoc protocols, ad hoc on‐demand distance vector (AODV), is applied to adjust VANET environment. In AODV, its critical routing fields (CRF) are security leakages allowing malicious nodes to launch routing attacks by illegally modifying field content. To prevent CRF from being modified by forwarders, we propose Mobile Two‐hop Integrity Validation for Emergency vehicle routing (MoTIVE) to enhance routing security of AODV. To design a secure VANET without introducing extra traffic, MoTIVE uses two‐hop integrity stamping (THIS) and validation rules, accompanying routing information exchanges without modifying protocol design. With THIS, MoTIVE verifies the integrity of forwarded AODV routing messages within each two‐hop area; consequently, it guarantees the routing correctness of whole network with induction concept. The main contribution of MoTIVE is that security‐reinforced information is piggybacked in normal routing messages within two‐hop locally instead of being flooded to the entire network globally. Compared with the original AODV, experiment results show that MoTIVE is scalable and causes no performance degradation while supplementary security protection is applied. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The integration of EPON and WiMAX access networks has demonstrated considerable promise as an access solution applicable to the architecture of Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC). The complementary features of these two systems provide high bandwidth and mobility, while reducing network deployment costs. Despite the fact that many network hardware architectures have been proposed for integrated EPON/WiMAX networks, the issue of bandwidth allocation for heterogeneous traffic (WiMAX and Ethernet) remains unresolved. This study proposes a novel Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation (DBA) scheme, under which the discrete network protocols of WiMAX and EPON access networks can run concurrently and efficiently. The proposed DBA mechanism adopts a framed approach, in which the time domains in both the optical and wireless access networks are partitioned into successive fixed-length frames. Within each frame, heterogeneous traffic is synchronously transmitted in the optical and wireless domains, and sufficient network resources are provided to ensure the respective Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of WiMAX and Ethernet traffic. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed DBA mechanism.

Broadband wireless access (BWA) networks, such as LTE and WiMAX, are inherently lossy due to wireless medium unreliability. Although the Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (HARQ) error-control method recovers from packet loss, it has low transmission efficiency and is unsuitable for delay-sensitive applications. Alternatively, network coding techniques improve the throughput of wireless networks, but incur significant overhead and ignore network constraints such as Medium Access Control (MAC) layer transmission opportunities and physical (PHY) layer channel conditions. The present study provides analysis of Random Network Coding (RNC) and Systematic Network Coding (SNC) decoding probabilities. Based on the analytical results, SNC is selected for developing an adaptive network coding scheme designated as Frame-by-frame Adaptive Systematic Network Coding (FASNC). According to network constraints per frame, FASNC dynamically utilizes either Modified Systematic Network Coding (M-SNC) or Mixed Generation Coding (MGC). An analytical model is developed for evaluating the mean decoding delay and mean goodput of the proposed FASNC scheme. The results derived using this model agree with those obtained from computer simulations. Simulations show that FASNC results in both lower decoding delay and reduced buffer requirements compared to MRNC and N-in-1 ReTX, while also yielding higher goodput than HARQ, MRNC, and N-in-1 ReTX.

Energy conservation is the key factor driving the trend toward green next-generation wireless networks. Existing studies have shown that cooperative communications can significantly reduce energy consumption. Most of these studies simplistically assume that all of the nodes in the network will cooperatively transmit. However, in practice, nodes may not always be altruistic and reject collaboration. Accordingly, this study proposes a reputation auction framework to provide indirect reciprocity for stimulating node cooperation in green wireless networks which also adapts to various network dynamics. Two sealed-bid auction schemes are presented to efficiently and fairly allocate node reputation for single and multiple relay scenarios resulting in energy savings arising from application of the considered indirect reciprocity model. The simulation results show that the proposed reputation auction framework can achieve higher energy efficiency compared to non-cooperative schemes and only slightly increases signaling overhead.

Ethernet Passive Optical Networks (EPONs) are not only cost-effective, but also provide high throughput, high bandwidth utilization, and low transmission latency. As a result, EPONs are a viable solution for overcoming the bandwidth bottleneck problem in local access networks. This study develops a novel Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation (DBA) scheme, designated as Frame-oriented Interleaved Polling with Adaptive Cycle Time (FIPACT), to provide a differentiated Quality-of-Service (QoS) capability in EPONs. FIPACT adopts a framed approach, in which the upstream network bandwidth is partitioned into successive frames. Within each frame, each Optical Network Unit (ONU) is guaranteed the network resources necessary to transmit a specific quota of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), video, and Internet access traffic, respectively. Since FIPACT permits these three types of traffic stream to share the available bandwidth efficiently whilst still satisfying their respective QoS requirements, it provides an effective means of achieving differentiated triple-play services in EPONs. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.

Many researchers monitor malicious software (malware) behavior using Virtual Machines (VM) to protect the underlying operating system. For virtual machines, the malware monitor process exists at the same layer as the real system so the monitor can get detailed behavior information without being discovered. There are some Anti-VM techniques employed by malware authors to ward off collection, analysis and reverse engineering of their malicious programs. Therefore, malware researchers may obtain inaccurate analysis from VM aware programs. This paper presents a solution to detect Anti-VM techniques. We collect behavioral information from malware and use an enhanced behavior distance algorithm to calculate the difference between real and virtual environments to distinguish if the malware has Anti-VM capability. Our experiments show this algorithm works well. This idea can improve malware analysis results and reduce malware misdetection.

IP trace back technique is an effective method to find either the attack origin or command-and-control (C&C) server on the Internet. The traditional ACO (ant colony optimization) constantly converged to a local minimum solution easily such that the global most portable of the final solution might be missed. Accordingly, the present study proposes a modified ACS (ant colony system) scheme designated as ACS-IPTBK to solve the IP trace back problem, predict both the most probable attack path and the computational resources needed in botnets. The ability of the ants to search all feasible attack paths is enhanced by means of a global heuristics. A series of ns2 simulations are performed to investigate the minimum resources required to successfully reconstruct the attack path. The convergence time for attack paths of different routing distances were investigated using a random graph generator based on Waxman's scheme. Overall, the results confirm that the proposed method provides an effective means of reconstructing the path between the attacker and the victim based on the incomplete routing information from the related ISPs.

WiMAX and WiFi have emerged as promising broadband access solutions for the latest generation of wireless MANs and LANs, respectively. Their complementary features enable the use of WiMAX as a backhaul service to connect multiple dispersed WiFi hotspots to the Internet. This study proposes an integrated architecture utilizing a novel WiMAX/WiFi Access Point (W2-AP) device to effectively combine the WiMAX and WiFi technologies. In the proposed architecture, the protocol operation of the WiFi hotspots is the same as that of the WiMAX system. As a result, the WiFi network can support connection-oriented transmissions and QoS in a similar fashion to the WiMAX system, and thus a considerable improvement in the delay performance is obtained. The numerical results obtained using a Qualnet simulator confirm both the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed architecture.

An integrated EPON/WiMAX network has been an attractive attention due to its features of achieving stable backhaul transmissions to WiMAX users and reducing the expenditure of network deployment. In implementing such a network, realizing a scheduling mechanism capable of sharing the available bandwidth between the heterogeneous Ethernet and WiMAX traffic in an effective manner is problematic. In the present study, this problem is addressed by using a game-theoretic-based scheme comprising a bankruptcy game and a bargaining game to perform an intra-ONU scheduling function at each ONU within the network. In the proposed approach, each ONU distributes the total amount of bandwidth allocated by the OLT between the Ethernet and WiMAX traffic buffers in accordance with the results of the bankruptcy game. By applying bargaining games, the allocated bandwidth is then further distributed to the different traffic classes within the Ethernet or WiMAX traffic in accordance with their QoS requirements. The simulation results confirm the validity and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

This paper develops a movement-analysis ambulatory monitor, designated as ActionView, which can be used in an elderly homecare system to analyze the body movements of elderly individuals whilst in their homes. ActionView monitor is equipped with a kinematic sensor to effectively detect the changes in the upper-body orientation and vertical acceleration of the individual. Furthermore, a remote backend server receives the detected signal from the kinematic sensor via a wireless sensor network (WSN) and then identifies the corresponding body motion. The experimental results show that ActionView has a classification accuracy of approximately 90% when applied to the recognition of everyday elderly actions such as standing up, sitting down, walking, and so forth.

Wireless sensor networks make possible many new applications in a wide range of application domains. One of the primary applications of such networks is the detection and tracking of continuously moving objects, such as wild fires, biochemical materials, and so forth. This study supports such applications by developing a continuous object detection and tracking algorithm, designated as CODA, based on a hybrid static/dynamic clustering technique. The CODA mechanism enables each sensor node to detect and track the moving boundaries of objects in the sensing field. The numerical results obtained using a Qualnet simulator confirm the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach.

Nowadays, vehicles have become an indispensable part of modern life. To ensure road safety and to make possible dynamic route scheduling, emergency message dissemination, traffic monitoring, and so forth, it is desirable to develop a common protocol for inter-vehicle communications (IVC) in order to realize intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Accordingly, this study proposes a protocol, designated as TrafficGather, based on a cluster networking technique. The protocol subdivides a road section into a series of "road blocks", each covered by a network cluster, and permits a vehicle within a road block to transmit its traffic information only in a specific time slot. Simulations performed using the Qualnet simulator confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed protocol.

This study proposes a novel WDM EPON system based upon an AWG, in which multiple wavelengths are established in both the upstream and the downstream fibers. The use of the AWG enables the WDM EPON architecture to achieve wavelength spatial-reuse and to provide an intercommunication capability between ONUs. As a result, the architecture not only allows upstream access to the central office but also facilitates a truly-shared LAN capability amongst the end users. The proposed WDM EPON scheme is integrated with a DBA algorithm to arbitrate the access of each individual ONU over the WDM layer and is fully consistent with the requirement for backward compatibility with the 802.3ah MPCP standard.

Optical burst switching (OBS) is not only cost-effective, but also provides high throughput, high bandwidth utilization, and low transmission latency. These benefits render OBS a viable solution for next-generation metro area networks (MANs). This study develops a novel distributed medium access control (MAC) protocol to support differentiated services in the collision-free optic-burst ring network (CORNet) proposed by the current authors in a previous study. The proposed quality of service (QoS) provisioning mechanism adopts a bandwidth-reservation approach which combines real-time transmission establishment and termination routines to support the efficient integration of real-time and best-effort (data) services. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed protocol

This paper proposes an improvement to the TCP ramp up behavior in slow-start. Current implementations of the TCP start-up procedure may result in an exponential growth of the congestion window, which results in the transmission of an excessive number of packets. Consequently, the network becomes congested and the self-clocking mechanism of the TCP fails. By estimating the number of packets that which can be in flight in the network from the viewpoint of the TCP source, this study develops an algorithm to suppress congestion before it becomes significant. The simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm enhances the TCP performance by establishing a smoother transmission rate at the end of the slow-start phase and reducing the number of dropped packets significantly as a result.

Preserving ATM cell sequencing is an important issue in the future wireless ATM network. Out-of-sequence ATM cells will cause entire data frame to be discarded and causes either data retransmission or quality of service degradation. Currently there is no connection handoff scheme providing a schematic method to preserve ATM cell sequencing. In this paper, we investigate the issue of preserving ATM cell sequencing during connection handoff sessions. A proposed VP-based hierarchical network infrastructure and a handoff mechanism are used to support connection handoffs and preserve cell sequencing for both uplink and downlink handoffs in the wireless ATM network.