Description:
Summary Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Virtualization (NV) are emerged paradigms that simplified the control and management of the next generation networks, most importantly, Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud Computing, and Cyber‐Physical Systems. The Internet of Things (IoT) includes a diverse range of a vast collection of heterogeneous devices that require interoperable communication, scalable platforms, and security provisioning. Security provisioning to an SDN‐based IoT network poses a real security challenge leading to various serious security threats due to the connection of various heterogeneous devices having a wide range of access protocols. Furthermore, the logical centralized controlled intelligence of the SDN architecture represents a plethora of security challenges due to its single point of failure. It may throw the entire network into chaos and thus expose it to various known and unknown security threats and attacks. Security of SDN controlled IoT environment is still in infancy and thus remains the prime research agenda for both the industry and academia. This paper comprehensively reviews the current state‐of‐the‐art security threats, vulnerabilities, and issues at the control plane. Moreover, this paper contributes by presenting a detailed classification of various security attacks on the control layer. A comprehensive state‐of‐the‐art review of the latest mitigation techniques for various security breaches is also presented. Finally, this paper presents future research directions and challenges for further investigation down the line.
Description:
With the emergence of Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs), the distribution of multimedia contents have now become a reality. Without proper management, the transmission of multimedia data over WMSNs affects the performance of networks due to excessive packet-drop. The existing studies on Quality of Service (QoS) mostly deal with simple Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and as such do not account for an increasing number of sensor nodes and an increasing volume of data. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to support QoS in WMSNs along with a light-weight Error Concealment (EC) scheme. The EC schemes play a vital role to enhance Quality of Experience (QoE) by maintaining an acceptable quality at the receiving ends. The main objectives of the proposed framework are to maximize the network throughput and to cover-up the effects produced by dropped video packets. To control the data-rate, Scalable High efficiency Video Coding (SHVC) is applied at multimedia sensor nodes with variable Quantization Parameters (QPs). Multi-path routing is exploited to support real-time video transmission. Experimental results show that the proposed framework can efficiently adjust large volumes of video data under certain network distortions and can effectively conceal lost video frames by producing better objective measurements.
Description:
Integration of embedded multimedia devices with powerful computing platforms, e.g., machine learning platforms, helps to build smart cities and transforms the concept of Internet of Things into Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT). To provide different services to the residents of smart cities, the IoMT technology generates big multimedia data. The management of big multimedia data is a challenging task for IoMT technology. Without proper management, it is hard to maintain consistency, reusability, and reconcilability of generated big multimedia data in smart cities. Various machine learning techniques can be used for automatic classification of raw multimedia data and to allow machines to learn features and perform specific tasks. In this survey, we focus on various machine learning platforms that can be used to process and manage big multimedia data generated by different applications in smart cities. We also highlight various limitations and research challenges that need to be considered when processing big multimedia data in real-time.
Description:
In this technology-based era, network-based systems are facing new cyber-attacks on daily bases. Traditional cybersecurity approaches are based on old threat-knowledge databases and need to be updated on a daily basis to stand against new generation of cyber-threats and protect underlying network-based systems. Along with updating threat-knowledge databases, there is a need for proper management and processing of data generated by sensitive real-time applications. In recent years, various computing platforms based on representation learning algorithms have emerged as a useful resource to manage and exploit the generated data to extract meaningful information. If these platforms are properly utilized, then strong cybersecurity systems can be developed to protect the underlying network-based systems and support sensitive real-time applications. In this survey, we highlight various cyber-threats, real-life examples, and initiatives taken by various international organizations. We discuss various computing platforms based on representation learning algorithms to process and analyze the generated data. We highlight various popular datasets introduced by well-known global organizations that can be used to train the representation learning algorithms to predict and detect threats. We also provide an in-depth analysis of research efforts based on representation learning algorithms made in recent years to protect the underlying network-based systems against current cyber-threats. Finally, we highlight various limitations and challenges in these efforts and available datasets that need to be considered when using them to build cybersecurity systems.
Description:
Mobile devices are widely used for uploading/downloading media files such as audio, video and images to/from the remote servers. These devices have limited resources and are required to offload resource-consuming media processing tasks to the clouds for further processing. Migration of these tasks means that the media services provided by the clouds need to be authentic and trusted by the mobile users. The existing schemes for secure exchange of media files between the mobile devices and the clouds have limitations in terms of memory support, processing load, battery power, and data size. These schemes lack the support for large-sized video files and are not suitable for resource-constrained mobile devices. This paper proposes a secure, lightweight, robust, and efficient scheme for data exchange between the mobile users and the media clouds. The proposed scheme considers High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Intra-encoded video streams in unsliced mode as a source for data hiding. Our proposed scheme aims to support real-time processing with power-saving constraint in mind. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is used as a base encryption technique by our proposed scheme. The simulation results clearly show that the proposed scheme outperforms AES-256 by decreasing the processing time up to 4.76% and increasing the data size up to 0.72% approximately. The proposed scheme can readily be applied to real-time cloud media streaming.
Description:
The use of Multimedia Wireless Sensor Networks (MWSNs) is becoming common nowadays with a rapid growth in communication facilities. Similar to any other WSNs, these networks face various challenges while providing security, trust and privacy for user data. Provisioning of the aforementioned services become an uphill task especially while dealing with real-time streaming data. These networks operates with resource-constrained sensor nodes for days, months and even years depending on the nature of an application. The resource-constrained nature of these networks makes it difficult for the nodes to tackle real-time data in mission-critical applications such as military surveillance, forest fire monitoring, health-care and industrial automation. For a secured MWSN, the transmission and processing of streaming data needs to be explored deeply. The conventional data authentication schemes are not suitable for MWSNs due to the limitations imposed on sensor nodes in terms of battery power, computation, available bandwidth and storage. In this paper, we propose a novel quality-driven clustering-based technique for authenticating streaming data in MWSNs. Nodes with maximum energy are selected as Cluster Heads (CHs). The CHs collect data from member nodes and forward it to the Base Station (BS), thus preventing member nodes with low energy from dying soon and increasing life span of the underlying network. The proposed approach not only authenticates the streaming data but also maintains the quality of transmitted data. The proposed data authentication scheme coupled with an Error Concealment technique provides an energy-efficient and distortion-free real-time data streaming. The proposed scheme is compared with an unsupervised resources scenario. The simulation results demonstrate better network lifetime along with 21.34 dB gain in Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of received video data streams.
Description:
6G is more likely prone to a range of known and unknown cyber-attacks because of its highly distributive nature. Current literature and research prove that a trust boundary can be used as a security door (e.g., gateway/firewall) to validate entities and applications attempting to access 6G networks. Trust boundaries allow these entities to connect or work with entities of other trust boundaries via 6G by dynamically monitoring their interactions, behaviors, and data transmissions. The importance of trust boundaries in security protection mechanisms demands a dynamic multi-trust boundary identification. There exists an automatic trust boundary identification for IoT data. However, it is a binary trust boundary classification and the dataset used in the approach is not suitable for dynamic trust boundary identification. Motivated by these facts, to provide automatic security protection for entities in 6G, in this paper, we propose a mechanism to identify dynamic and multiple trust boundaries based on trust values and geographical location coordinates of 6G communication entities. Our proposed mechanism uses unsupervised clustering and splitting and merging techniques. The experimental results show that entities can dynamically change their boundary location if their trust values and locations change over time. We also analyze the trust boundary identification accuracy in terms of our defined two performance metrics, i.e., trust consistency and the degree of gateway coverage. The proposed scheme allows us to distinguish between entities and control their access to the 6G network based on their trust levels to ensure secure and resilient communication.
Description:
6G is more likely prone to a range of known and unknown cyber-attacks because of its highly distributive nature. Current literature and research prove that a trust boundary can be used as a security door (e.g., gateway/firewall) to validate entities and applications attempting to access 6G networks. Trust boundaries allow these entities to connect or work with entities of other trust boundaries via 6G by dynamically monitoring their interactions, behaviors, and data transmissions. The importance of trust boundaries in security protection mechanisms demands a dynamic multi-trust boundary identification. There exists an automatic trust boundary identification for IoT data. However, it is a binary trust boundary classification and the dataset used in the approach is not suitable for dynamic trust boundary identification. Motivated by these facts, to provide automatic security protection for entities in 6G, in this paper, we propose a mechanism to identify dynamic and multiple trust boundaries based on trust values and geographical location coordinates of 6G communication entities. Our proposed mechanism uses unsupervised clustering and splitting and merging techniques. The experimental results show that entities can dynamically change their boundary location if their trust values and locations change over time. We also analyze the trust boundary identification accuracy in terms of our defined two performance metrics, i.e., trust consistency and the degree of gateway coverage. The proposed scheme allows us to distinguish between entities and control their access to the 6G network based on their trust levels to ensure secure and resilient communication.
Description:
The encoding of HD videos faces two challenges: requirements for a strong processing power and a large storage space. One time-efficient solution addressing these challenges is to use a cloud platform and to use a scalable video coding technique to generate multiple video streams with varying bit-rates. Packet-loss is very common during the transmission of these video streams over the Internet and becomes another challenge. One solution to address this challenge is to retransmit lost video packets, but this will create end-to-end delay. Therefore, it would be good if the problem of packet-loss can be dealt with at the user's side. In this paper, we present a novel system that encodes and stores the videos using the Amazon cloud computing platform, and recover lost video frames on user side using a new Error Concealment (EC) technique. To efficiently utilize the computation power of a user's mobile device, the EC is performed based on a multiple-thread and parallel process. The simulation results clearly show that, on average, our proposed EC technique outperforms the traditional Block Matching Algorithm (BMA) and the Frame Copy (FC) techniques.
Description:
Cloud-based High Definition (HD) video streaming is becoming popular day by day. On one hand, it is important for both end users and large storage servers to store their huge amount of data at different locations and servers. On the other hand, it is becoming a big challenge for network service providers to provide reliable connectivity to the network users. There have been many studies over cloud-based video streaming for Quality of Experience (QoE) for services like YouTube. Packet losses and bit errors are very common in transmission networks, which affect the user feedback over cloud-based media services. To cover up packet losses and bit errors, Error Concealment (EC) techniques are usually applied at the decoder/receiver side to estimate the lost information. This paper proposes a time-efficient and quality-oriented EC method. The proposed method considers H.265/HEVC based intra-encoded videos for the estimation of whole intra-frame loss. The main emphasis in the proposed approach is the recovery of Motion Vectors (MVs) of a lost frame in real-time. To boost-up the search process for the lost MVs, a bigger block size and searching in parallel are both considered. The simulation results clearly show that our proposed method outperforms the traditional Block Matching Algorithm (BMA) by approximately 2.5 dB and Frame Copy (FC) by up to 12 dB at a packet loss rate of 1%, 3%, and 5% with different Quantization Parameters (QPs). The computational time of the proposed approach outperforms the BMA by approximately 1788 seconds.
Description:
The concept of Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT) is becoming popular nowadays and can be used in various smart city applications, e.g., traffic management, healthcare, and surveillance. In the IoMT, the devices, e.g., Multimedia Sensor Nodes (MSNs), are capable of generating both multimedia and non-multimedia data. The generated data are forwarded to a cloud server via a Base Station (BS). However, it is possible that the Internet connection between the BS and the cloud server may be temporarily down. The limited computational resources restrict the MSNs from holding the captured data for a longer time. In this situation, mobile sinks can be utilized to collect data from MSNs and upload to the cloud server. However, this data collection may create privacy issues, such as revealing identities and location information of MSNs. Therefore, there is a need to preserve the privacy of MSNs during mobile data collection. In this paper, we propose an efficient privacy-preserving-based data collection and analysis (P2DCA) framework for IoMT applications. The proposed framework partitions an underlying wireless multimedia sensor network into multiple clusters. Each cluster is represented by a Cluster Head (CH). The CHs are responsible to protect the privacy of member MSNs through data and location coordinates aggregation. Later, the aggregated multimedia data are analyzed on the cloud server using a counter-propagation artificial neural network to extract meaningful information through segmentation. Experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms the existing privacy-preserving schemes, and can be used to collect multimedia data in various IoMT applications.
Description:
Summary Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of resource‐starving miniature sensor nodes deployed in a remote and hostile environment. These networks operate on small batteries for days, months, and even years depending on the requirements of monitored applications. The battery‐powered operation and inaccessible human terrains make it practically infeasible to recharge the nodes unless some energy‐scavenging techniques are used. These networks experience threats at various layers and, as such, are vulnerable to a wide range of attacks. The resource‐constrained nature of sensor nodes, inaccessible human terrains, and error‐prone communication links make it obligatory to design lightweight but robust and secured schemes for these networks. In view of these limitations, we aim to design an extremely lightweight payload‐based mutual authentication scheme for a cluster‐based hierarchical WSN. The proposed scheme, also known as payload‐based mutual authentication for WSNs, operates in 2 steps. First, an optimal percentage of cluster heads is elected, authenticated, and allowed to communicate with neighboring nodes. Second, each cluster head, in a role of server, authenticates the nearby nodes for cluster formation. We validate our proposed scheme using various simulation metrics that outperform the existing schemes.
Description:
A unique combinational approach of QoS and QoE for multimedia traffic in MANETs is proposed in this paper.•A feedback-based multi-path transmission strategy is adopted to minimize the data loss during HD video streaming.•An EC technique based on multi-threading-based parallel processing is used to recover the lost video frames.•We use multiple objective evaluation metrics to test the performance of the EC technique on recovered video frames.•Subjective analysis is combined with objective evaluation using subjective scores and statistical analysis to maintain QoE. Video Service Providers (VSPs) can collect and analyze an enormous amount of multimedia data from various cloud storage centers using real-time big data systems for supporting various online customers. The infrastructure-less nature of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) makes the video streaming a challenging task for VSPs. High packet-loss probability in MANETs can create a notable distortion in the received video quality. In this paper, High Definition (HD) videos are streamed over MANETs. First, a transmission model is designed followed by a distortion model to estimate network distortions, such as packet-loss rate and end-to-end delay. Based on the proposed models, a video streaming framework is designed to efficiently utilize the available bandwidth in MANETs, minimize the network distortions, and improve Quality of Service (QoS). Later, an Error Concealment (EC) technique is used to conceal the lost/dropped video frames to improve the Quality of Experience (QoE). Experimental results show that our proposed video streaming framework outperforms the state-of-the-art routing protocols designed for MANETs, such as Destination-Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV) and Optimized Link Sate Routing (OLSR) protocols. In the end, both subjective and objective evaluations are performed to evaluate the perceptual quality of the concealed video data.
Description:
Heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of resource-starving nodes that face a challenging task of handling various issues such as data redundancy, data fusion, congestion control, and energy efficiency. In these networks, data fusion algorithms process the raw data generated by a sensor node in an energy-efficient manner to reduce redundancy, improve accuracy, and enhance the network lifetime. In literature, these issues are addressed individually, and most of the proposed solutions are either application-specific or too complex that make their implementation unrealistic, specifically, in a resource-constrained environment. In this paper, we propose a novel node-level data fusion algorithm for heterogeneous WSNs to detect noisy data and replace them with highly refined data. To minimize the amount of transmitted data, a hybrid data aggregation algorithm is proposed that performs in-network processing while preserving the reliability of gathered data. This combination of data fusion and data aggregation algorithms effectively handle the aforementioned issues by ensuring an efficient utilization of the available resources. Apart from fusion and aggregation, a biased traffic distribution algorithm is introduced that considerably increases the overall lifetime of heterogeneous WSNs. The proposed algorithm performs the tedious task of traffic distribution according to the network's statistics, ie, the residual energy of neighboring nodes and their importance from a network's connectivity perspective. All our proposed algorithms were tested on a real-time dataset obtained through our deployed heterogeneous WSN in an orange orchard and also on publicly available benchmark datasets. Experimental results verify that our proposed algorithms outperform the existing approaches in terms of various performance metrics such as throughput, lifetime, data accuracy, computational time, and delay.
Description:
Heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of resource-starving nodes that face a challenging task of handling various issues such as data redundancy, data fusion, congestion control, and energy efficiency. In these networks, data fusion algorithms process the raw data generated by a sensor node in an energy-efficient manner to reduce redundancy, improve accuracy, and enhance the network lifetime. In literature, these issues are addressed individually, and most of the proposed solutions are either application-specific or too complex that make their implementation unrealistic, specifically, in a resource-constrained environment. In this paper, we propose a novel node-level data fusion algorithm for heterogeneous WSNs to detect noisy data and replace them with highly refined data. To minimize the amount of transmitted data, a hybrid data aggregation algorithm is proposed that performs in-network processing while preserving the reliability of gathered data. This combination of data fusion and data aggregation algorithms effectively handle the aforementioned issues by ensuring an efficient utilization of the available resources. Apart from fusion and aggregation, a biased traffic distribution algorithm is introduced that considerably increases the overall lifetime of heterogeneous WSNs. The proposed algorithm performs the tedious task of traffic distribution according to the network's statistics, ie, the residual energy of neighboring nodes and their importance from a network's connectivity perspective. All our proposed algorithms were tested on a real-time dataset obtained through our deployed heterogeneous WSN in an orange orchard and also on publicly available benchmark datasets. Experimental results verify that our proposed algorithms outperform the existing approaches in terms of various performance metrics such as throughput, lifetime, data accuracy, computational time, and delay.
Description:
An Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT) architecture aims to provide a support for real-time multimedia applications by using wireless multimedia sensor nodes that are deployed for a long-term usage. These nodes are capable of capturing both multimedia and nonmultimedia data, and form a network known as Wireless Multimedia Sensor Network (WMSN). In a WMSN, underlying routing protocols need to provide an acceptable level of Quality of Service (QoS) support for multimedia traffic. In this paper, we propose a Seamless and Authorized Streaming (SAMS) framework for a cluster-based hierarchical WMSN. The SAMS uses authentication at different levels to form secured clusters. The formation of these clusters allows only legitimate nodes to transmit captured data to their Cluster Heads (CHs). Each node senses the environment, stores captured data in its buffer, and waits for its turn to transmit to its CH. This waiting may result in an excessive packet-loss and end-to-end delay for multimedia traffic. To address these issues, a channel allocation approach is proposed for an intercluster communication. In the case of a buffer overflow, a member node in one cluster switches to a neighboring CH provided that the latter has an available channel for allocation. The experimental results show that the SAMS provides an acceptable level of QoS and enhances security of an underlying network.