• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.125-137
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• 2007

This paper proposes a new scheme to provide the location privacy of sources in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Because the geographical location of a source sensor reveals contextual information on an 'event' in WSN, anonymizing the source location is an important issue. Despite abundant research efforts, however, about data confidentiality and authentication in WSN, privacy issues have not been researched well so far. Moreover, many schemes providing the anonymity of communication parties in Internet and Ad-hoc networks are not appropriate for WSN environments where sensors are very resource limited and messages are forwarded in a hop-by-hop manner through wireless channel. In this paper, we first categorize the type of eavesdroppers for WSN as Global Eavesdropper and Compromising Eavesdropper. Then we propose a novel scheme which provides the anonymity of a source according to the types of eavesdroppers. Furthermore, we analyze the degree of anonymity of WSN using the entropy-based modeling method. As a result, we show that the proposed scheme improves the degree of anonymity compared to a method without any provision of anonymity and also show that the transmission range plays a key role to hide the location of source sensors.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.4 no.5
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• pp.354-365
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• 2015

This work presents an Internet of Things (IoT) system for home energy management based on a custom-designed Impulse Radio Ultra-Wideband (IR-UWB) transceiver that targets a generic and multi-standard control system. This control system enables the interoperability of heterogeneous devices: it integrates various sensor nodes based on ZigBee, EnOcean and UWB in the same middleware by utilizing an ad-hoc layer as an interface between the hardware and software. The paper presents as a first the design of the IR-UWB transceiver for a portable sensor node integrated with the middleware layer, and also describes the receiver connected to the control system. The custom-designed low-power transmitter on the sensor node is fabricated with 130 nm CMOS technology. It generates a signal with a 1.1 ns pulse width while consuming $39{\mu}W$ at 1 Mbps. The UWB sensor node with a temperature measurement capability consumes 5.31 mW, which is lower than the power level of state-of-the-art solutions for smart-home applications. The UWB hardware and software layers necessary to interface with the control system are verified in over-the-air measurements in an actual office environment. With the implementation of the presented sensor node and its integration in the energy management system, we demonstrate achievement of the broad flexibility demanded for IoT.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.10 no.5
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• pp.41-47
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• 2009

Routing through a backbone, which is responsible for performing and managing multipoint communication, reduces the communication overhead and overall energy consumption in wireless sensor networks. However, the backbone nodes will need extra functionality and therefore consume more energy compared to the other nodes. The power consumption imbalance among sensor nodes may cause a network partition and failures where the transmission from some sensors to the sink node could be blocked. Hence optimal construction of the backbone is one of the pivotal problems in sensor network applications and can drastically affect the network's communication energy dissipation. In this paper a distributed algorithm is proposed to generate backbone trees through robust multi-hop clusters in wireless sensor networks. The main objective is to form a properly designed backbone through multi-hop clusters by considering energy level and degree of each node. Our improved cluster head selection method ensures that energy is consumed evenly among the nodes in the network, thereby increasing the network lifetime. Comprehensive computer simulations have indicated that the newly proposed scheme gives approximately 10.36% and 24.05% improvements in the performances related to the residual energy level and the degree of the cluster heads respectively and also prolongs the network lifetime.