International Journal of Sensors Wireless Communications and Control - Volume 11, Issue 6, 2021

In this paper, we explore some of the notable research works that will open a new dimension in the field of antenna research applicable to body area networks. Different types of antennas for body area networks include implantable antenna, ingestible pill antenna, and wearable antennas. The antennas for body area networks gained the attention of the researchers after the demands of the compact as well as efficient wearable devices increased. The design of antennas for body area network applications is very interesting and challenging, as a researcher has to ensure that the antenna should have a small footprint, and be flexible. Simultaneously, the radiation must be in a particular direction with a workable gain, and low Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) to avoid damage. These antennas require performing well in proximity to the living bodies that tend to degrade the performance. The antennas that are in demand include implantable antennas, ingestible antennas, on-body antennas, and antennas for off-body communications. In this paper, the earlier works have been analyzed well and verified with a compact CPW-fed circular patch antenna design, backed by a metal conductor. This antenna exhibits the perfect matching at two frequency bands. These are S11 (below -10 dB) bandwidth of 3.4 GHz ranging from 2.45 – 5.89 GHz and an S11 bandwidth of 0.99 GHz ranging from 9.10 – 10.09 GHz. While in contact with the human body, the antenna exhibits a bandwidth of 2.54 GHz between 3.02-5.56 GHz and a bandwidth of 3.01 GHz between 9.8-12.81 GHz. The SAR values are 0.82 W/kg and 0.56 W/kg. The antenna is a suitable candidate for off-body communication in wearable applications.

IoT is the networking of daily use objects. These objects are commonly known as constrained devices. Constrained devices work with low memory, low storage, and low computation power. Implementing security algorithms in these devices is challenging. The researchers take these challenges as an opportunity. The diverse and heterogeneous structure of the IoT phenomenon introduces a variety of new security risks and challenges. Many threats such as botnets, home intrusion, remote control of the IoT devices, and man-in-the-middle attacks are threatening the IoT environment. Hence, it needs stronger security implementation to protect IoT devices from being compromised. The authors survey different kinds of networking technologies under an IoT environment, security challenges on them, and possible countermeasures for these challenges to form a more secure IoT environment for trustful adaptation of services through industrial or personal use. In this paper, the authors presented the study of numerous networking technologies, along with possible threats and their countermeasures.

Internet of Things is considered a promising and challenging system that needs modern types of protocols and architectures different from conventional networks. This paper aims to provide an inclusive, concise, plain, and precise insight of IoT foundations for the novice and to introduce guidelines for application developers and researchers to be capable of choosing quickly the right protocol at different structural IoT layers and correct hardware/software platform for various applications. The contributions of this review provide the classification for the most widespread suggested IoT architectures. Besides, it summarizes the basic IoT components with their roll into multi-layered architecture. Furthermore, it presents the classification of layers basis for prevalent protocols with the comparison among different protocols at each layer in the IoT domain. Subsequently, IoT applications taxonomy is introduced and the most relevant use-cases are compared. Likewise, at the respective 4- Layer architecture of IoT, the security issues and policies are discussed concisely. Besides, the potential attacks and their countermeasures are tabularized and some of the research challenges with their solutions are identified. Lastly, to ensure that the conducted review is different, the comparison with other relevant reviews and surveys which came out from the last three years is made.

Modern life aims at making the world less vulnerable to risk, shortening our workload, saving time, assuring security, and overall making our life more comfortable. These goals may be achieved through the implementation of smart environments that are formed with different sensors employed in the collection of various environmental data. The collaboration of these type of sensors is known as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) that enhances the power generation system and serves smartly. A wide range of studies suggests that WSN is an auspicious nomenclature that possesses the capability of turning the traditional method of electric power generation, distribution, utilization monitoring and measurement, fault tolerance, etc. into a smart one. However, the application of WSN in the smart grid is not a feasible task. Several challenges have to be overcome to introduce WSN effectively in the smart grid. This review begins with an in-depth discussion on the migration from the conventional power grid to a Smart Grid (SG). Then, the introduction of WSN in SG benefits the conventional- SG is discussed followed by the comparative analysis of the security demands, MAC layer protocols, and routing protocols of WSN-based-SG. Finally, the communication technologies, future motives, and intact fields of WSN-based-SG have been discussed in this review.

Background: A Cognitive Radio Sensor Network (CRSN)-based Smart Grid (SG) is a new paradigm for a modern SG. It is totally different from the traditional power grid and conventional SG. Currently, an SG uses a static resource allocation technique to allocate resources to sensor nodes in the SG network. Static resource allocation is not efficient due to the heterogeneous nature of CRSNbased SGs. Hence, an appropriate mechanism such as dynamic Radio Resource Allocation (RRA) is required for efficient resource allocation in CRSNs for SGs. Objective: The objective of this paper is to investigate and propose suitable dynamic RRA for efficient resource allocation in CRSNs-based SGs. This involves a proposal for an appropriate strategy that will address poor throughput and excessive errors in resource allocation. Methods: In this paper, the dynamic RRA approach is used to allocate resources such as frequency, energy, channels and spectrum to the sensor nodes. This is because of the heterogeneity in a CRSN, which differs for SG applications. The dynamic RRA approach is based on optimization of resource allocation criteria such as energy efficiency, throughput maximization, QoS guarantee, etc. The methods include an introduced model called “guaranteed network connectivity channel allocation for throughput maximization” (GNC-TM). Also used is an optimal spectrum-band determination in RRA for improved throughput. Results: The results show that the model outperforms the existing protocol of channel allocation in terms of throughput and error probability. Conclusion: This study explores RRA schemes for CRSNs for SGs. The paper proposed a GNC-TM model, including demonstration of suitable spectrum band operation in CRSNs for SGs.

Background: Domain Name System (DNS) is considered the phone book of the Internet. Its main goal is to translate a domain name to an IP address that the computer can understand. However, DNS can be vulnerable to various kinds of attacks, such as DNS poisoning attacks and DNS tunneling attacks. Objective: The main objective of this paper was to allow researchers to identify DNS tunnel traffic using machine-learning algorithms. Training machine-learning algorithms to detect DNS tunnel traffic and determine which protocol was used will help the community to speed up the process of detecting such attacks. Methods: In this paper, we considered the DNS tunneling attack. In addition, we discussed how attackers can exploit this protocol to infiltrate data breaches from the network. The attack starts by encoding data inside the DNS queries to the outside of the network. The malicious DNS server will receive a small chunk of data decoding the payload and put it together at the server. The main concern is that the DNS is a fundamental service that is not usually blocked by a firewall and receives less attention from systems administrators due to a vast amount of traffic. Results: This paper investigates how this type of attack happens using the DNS tunneling tool by setting up an environment consisting of compromised DNS servers and compromised hosts with the Iodine tool installed in both machines. The generated dataset contains the traffic of HTTP, HTTPS, SSH, SFTP, and POP3 protocols over the DNS. No features were removed from the dataset so that researchers could utilize all features in the dataset. Conclusion: DNS tunneling remains a critical attack that needs more attention to address. DNS tunneled environment allows us to understand how such an attack happens. We built the appropriate dataset by simulating various attack scenarios using different protocols. The created dataset contains PCAP, JSON, and CSV files to allow researchers to use different methods to detect tunnel traffic.

Background: A comprehensive approach to Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) technique that explicitly enhances data interpretation by encountering semantic barriers in communication is proposed. Object: To the extent that there exist potential inconsistencies due to redundancy and misinterpretation of data attributes, compatibility with respect to data interpretation may defer. For a consolidated and technology dependent network infrastructure, the concept of inclusive CCA (such as linear CCA, sparse CCA and kernel CCA) further asserts the inclusion of statistical correlational analysis in semantic communication. Methods: A Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) based Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) method is substantiated upon a linear dataset and simulation results are canonically analyzed for the same. Results: Favorably, the p-value analysis from the t-test validates the significance of the application of extensions of CCA in the field of semantic communication. Conclusion: Hence, CCA as a statistical technique incorporates both symmetric as well as asymmetric multivariate data analysis to help delineate the incompatibility caused due to subtle semantic- defects.

Background: Spectrum efficiency is labelled to be the most discussed area of wireless communication. Today, wireless communication is one of the fastest developing fields due to which there is a tremendous increase in subscribers that leads to the demand for more spectrum. Though the growth in the spectrum is not possible but optimizing it is a good alternative. Methods: This paper provides a detailed study of different methods used for the optimization of spectrum efficiency in massive multiple inputs and outputs. The main goal of this paper is to findout how the spectrum could be used efficiently to meet user demands. It includes the technique of fixing specific parameters like coherent block length, number of reception antennas, pilots reuse factor, signal to noise ratio, and number of users to make more efficient use of the spectrum. This paper also explains the achievement of spectral efficiency under different deployment scenarios i.e., urban, suburban, and rural in ITU-R M.2135 standard. Results: As seen from the results, steep SEs are accomplished by making a schedule of many UE for mutual broadcast, while the SE per UE maybe 1-4 bit/s/Hz. These high-class demonstrations show that massive MIMO e.g an SNR of 0-5 dB with a limited pilot reuse factor of β= 3, and the fast techniques are applied for lessening the distortion noise and instrument damage. According to the simulations, it is found that massive MIMO with M = 100 can produce a 10×gain in SE in the IMT-Advanced requirements of 3 bit/s/Hz/cell. For the bigger sizes of antennas, M = 500 massive MIMO can even give 40×gain over IMT-Advanced. Conclusion: With the advancement of technology, the number of users is increasing tremendously, leading to a shortage of spectrum. Hence, the need of the hour is to make efficient use of the available spectrum while maintaining the Quality of service. Therefore, researchers have proposed specific methods that fulfill this need. The paper realizes the SE approach on different deployment scenarios like urban, suburban and rural in the ITU-R M.2135 standard and proves that under all the three scenarios, P-ZF remained unchanged. As seen from the results, steep SEs are accomplished by making a schedule of many UE for mutual broadcast, while the SE per UE maybe 1-4 bit/s/Hz. These high-class demonstrations show that massive MIMO likes an SNR of 0–5 dB with a limited pilot reuse factor of β= 3, and the fast techniques are applied for lessening the distortion noise from instrument damage. According to the simulations, it is seen that massive MIMO with M = 100 can produce a 10×gain in SE in the IMT-Advanced requirements of 3 bit/s/Hz/cell. For the bigger sizes of antennas, M = 500 massive MIMO can even give 40×gain over IMT-Advanced. The outcomes in this paper suggest the uncorrelated fading, although for decreasing inter-user interference, correlated fading is required, to raise large SE with less β. This study makes SE independent of topography. Furthermore, optimization of energy under different deployment scenarios, along with these simulations, can optimize the spectrum to a greater extent.