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Recent Trends in Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks

A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Sensor Networks".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 September 2022) | Viewed by 32076

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Computer Networks and Communications, King Faisal University, Al-Ahsa 31982, Saudi Arabia
Interests: mobile and wireless networks; cybersecurity and network security
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
Department of Computer Network and Information Systems, The World Islamic Sciences and Education University, 11947 Amman, Jordan
Interests: computer networks; network security; mobile learning
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
Cybersecurity and IT Governance, Sultan Moulay Slimane University, Beni Mellal 23000, Morroco
Interests: information security and privacy; Internet of Things; network security
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
Department of Computer Information System, Hashemite University, Zarqa 13133, Jordan
Interests: data science; e-business, e-commerce, e-governments and service learning; IS and software development process; networking management and grid computing; resource utilization and performance management; decision support systems; AI

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

WSANs are considered one of the main building blocks of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 to create smart environments, cities, healthcare, etc. However, there are several challenges that need to be tackled to effectively deploy WSANs and provide reliable services such as dynamic and intelligent management of sensors and actuators, resource constraint nature of the network nodes, and seamless, robust, and secure communication between devices. This Special Issue aims to bring together scholars to discuss and present their latest research and findings on all aspects of WSANs. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) comprise a wireless network of tiny devices that are equipped with sensors to monitor physical and environmental conditions. Such devices could interact with different actuators such as servos, motors, and drones and form a wireless sensor and actuator network (WSAN). WSANs could be used to collect information from the region of interest (e.g., environment, building structures, farms, the human body) and autonomously control the required aspects of the target.

Dr. Mohammed Amin Almaiah
Dr. Omar Almomani
Prof. Dr. Yassine Maleh
Prof. Dr. Ahmad Al-Khasawneh
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sensors is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Wireless sensor networks
  • Cybersecurity
  • Internet of Things (IOT)
  • Sensors and actuators
  • Smart wireless networks
  • Industry 4.0

Published Papers (8 papers)

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Research

14 pages, 924 KiB  
Article
K-Means Clustering-Based Safety System in Large-Scale Industrial Site Using Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks
by Dongyeong Seo, Sangdae Kim, Seungmin Oh and Sang-Ha Kim
Sensors 2022, 22(8), 2897; https://doi.org/10.3390/s22082897 - 9 Apr 2022
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1732
Abstract
A large number of workers and heavy equipment are used in most industrial sizes, and the prevention of safety accidents is one of the most important issues. Therefore, although a number of systems have been proposed to prevent accidents, existing studies assume that [...] Read more.
A large number of workers and heavy equipment are used in most industrial sizes, and the prevention of safety accidents is one of the most important issues. Therefore, although a number of systems have been proposed to prevent accidents, existing studies assume that workers are gathered in some areas. These assumptions are not suitable for large-scale industrial sites in which workers form as a group and work in a large area. In other words, in a large-scale industrial site, existing schemes are unsuitable for the timely notifying of warnings of threats, and excessive energy is consumed. Therefore, we propose a k-means clustering-based safety system for a large-scale industrial site. In the proposed scheme, workers deployed over a large area are divided into an appropriate number of groups, and threat notification is delivered by a multicasting tree toward each cluster. The notification to workers is delivered through local flooding in each cluster. The simulation results show that the system is able to deliver the notification within a valid time, and it is energy efficient compared to the existing scheme. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Trends in Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks)
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20 pages, 6263 KiB  
Article
An Adaptive Topology Management Scheme to Maintain Network Connectivity in Wireless Sensor Networks
by Muhammad Zia Ul Haq, Muhammad Zahid Khan, Haseeb Ur Rehman, Gulzar Mehmood, Ahmed Binmahfoudh, Moez Krichen and Roobaea Alroobaea
Sensors 2022, 22(8), 2855; https://doi.org/10.3390/s22082855 - 8 Apr 2022
Cited by 14 | Viewed by 3156
Abstract
The roots of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are tracked back to US military developments, and, currently, WSNs have paved their way into a vast domain of civil applications, especially environmental, critical infrastructure, habitat monitoring, etc. In the majority of these applications, WSNs have [...] Read more.
The roots of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are tracked back to US military developments, and, currently, WSNs have paved their way into a vast domain of civil applications, especially environmental, critical infrastructure, habitat monitoring, etc. In the majority of these applications, WSNs have been deployed to monitor critical and inaccessible terrains; however, due to their unique and resource-constrained nature, WSNs face many design and deployment challenges in these difficult-to-access working environments, including connectivity maintenance, topology management, reliability, etc. However, for WSNs, topology management and connectivity still remain a major concern in WSNs that hampers their operations, with a direct impact on the overall application performance of WSNs. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a new topology management and connectivity maintenance scheme called a Tolerating Fault and Maintaining Network Connectivity using Array Antenna (ToMaCAA) for WSNs. ToMaCAA is a system designed to adapt to dynamic structures and maintain network connectivity while consuming fewer network resources. Thereafter, we incorporated a Phase Array Antenna into the existing topology management technologies, proving ToMaCAA to be a novel contribution. This new approach allows a node to connect to the farthest node in the network while conserving resources and energy. Moreover, data transmission is restricted to one route, reducing overheads and conserving energy in various other nodes’ idle listening state. For the implementation of ToMaCAA, the MATLAB network simulation platform has been used to test and analyse its performance. The output results were compared with the benchmark schemes, i.e., Disjoint Path Vector (DPV), Adaptive Disjoint Path Vector (ADPV), and Pickup Non-Critical Node Based k-Connectivity (PINC). The performance of ToMaCAA was evaluated based on different performance metrics, i.e., the network lifetime, total number of transmitted messages, and node failure in WSNs. The output results revealed that the ToMaCAA outperformed the DPV, ADPV, and PINC schemes in terms of maintaining network connectivity during link failures and made the network more fault-tolerant and reliable. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Trends in Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks)
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15 pages, 11920 KiB  
Article
Improved MQTT Secure Transmission Flags in Smart Homes
by Asmaa Munshi
Sensors 2022, 22(6), 2174; https://doi.org/10.3390/s22062174 - 10 Mar 2022
Cited by 13 | Viewed by 3682
Abstract
In the current era of smart homes and smart grids, complex technical systems that allow for the automation of domestic functions are rapidly growing and becoming more widely available. A wide range of technologies and software applications are now available for use in [...] Read more.
In the current era of smart homes and smart grids, complex technical systems that allow for the automation of domestic functions are rapidly growing and becoming more widely available. A wide range of technologies and software applications are now available for use in smart homes, and many of them are free to use. They allow for communication between home appliances and their users, as well as the automation, monitoring, and remote-control capabilities of home appliances themselves. Unfortunately, a lot of previous research ignored security issues involving the great attention to detail of the data in a transmission session within the devices in smart home architectures, which is why this study proposed smart grid secured transmission flags suitable for preventing every bit of data transmission in a smart home. Secure Message Queueing Transport Protocol (MQTT) in Internet of Things (IoT) Smart Homes protocols was utilized; an experimental testbed was designed with a prototype involving the process of a smart home system and the sequences of the data transmission. The evaluation of the proposed strategies has shown an improved bi-directional secure resource constraint strategy for the smart home within data packet transmission at 70 to 80 mbps over secure MQTT. A number of concerns, including technological barriers, difficulties, challenges, and future trends, as well as the role of users, have been presented in this study, among others. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Trends in Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks)
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19 pages, 3862 KiB  
Article
A Lightweight Hybrid Deep Learning Privacy Preserving Model for FC-Based Industrial Internet of Medical Things
by Mohammed Amin Almaiah, Aitizaz Ali, Fahima Hajjej, Muhammad Fermi Pasha and Manal Abdullah Alohali
Sensors 2022, 22(6), 2112; https://doi.org/10.3390/s22062112 - 9 Mar 2022
Cited by 60 | Viewed by 3959
Abstract
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is gaining importance as most technologies and applications are integrated with the IIoT. Moreover, it consists of several tiny sensors to sense the environment and gather the information. These devices continuously monitor, collect, exchange, analyze, and transfer [...] Read more.
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is gaining importance as most technologies and applications are integrated with the IIoT. Moreover, it consists of several tiny sensors to sense the environment and gather the information. These devices continuously monitor, collect, exchange, analyze, and transfer the captured data to nearby devices or servers using an open channel, i.e., internet. However, such centralized system based on IIoT provides more vulnerabilities to security and privacy in IIoT networks. In order to resolve these issues, we present a blockchain-based deep-learning framework that provides two levels of security and privacy. First a blockchain scheme is designed where each participating entities are registered, verified, and thereafter validated using smart contract based enhanced Proof of Work, to achieve the target of security and privacy. Second, a deep-learning scheme with a Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) technique for privacy and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) for intrusion detection is designed. The experimental results are based on the IoT-Botnet and ToN-IoT datasets that are publicly available. The proposed simulations results are compared with the benchmark models and it is validated that the proposed framework outperforms the existing system. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Trends in Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks)
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25 pages, 6198 KiB  
Article
A Novel Hybrid Trustworthy Decentralized Authentication and Data Preservation Model for Digital Healthcare IoT Based CPS
by Mohammed Amin Almaiah, Fahima Hajjej, Aitizaz Ali, Muhammad Fermi Pasha and Omar Almomani
Sensors 2022, 22(4), 1448; https://doi.org/10.3390/s22041448 - 13 Feb 2022
Cited by 85 | Viewed by 4913
Abstract
Digital healthcare is a composite infrastructure of networking entities that includes the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)-based Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), base stations, services provider, and other concerned components. In the recent decade, it has been noted that the demand for this emerging technology [...] Read more.
Digital healthcare is a composite infrastructure of networking entities that includes the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT)-based Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), base stations, services provider, and other concerned components. In the recent decade, it has been noted that the demand for this emerging technology is gradually increased with cost-effective results. Although this technology offers extraordinary results, but at the same time, it also offers multifarious security perils that need to be handled effectively to preserve the trust among all engaged stakeholders. For this, the literature proposes several authentications and data preservation schemes, but somehow they fail to tackle this issue with effectual results. Keeping in view, these constraints, in this paper, we proposed a lightweight authentication and data preservation scheme for IoT based-CPS utilizing deep learning (DL) to facilitate decentralized authentication among legal devices. With decentralized authentication, we have depreciated the validation latency among pairing devices followed by improved communication statistics. Moreover, the experimental results were compared with the benchmark models to acknowledge the significance of our model. During the evaluation phase, the proposed model reveals incredible advancement in terms of comparative parameters in comparison with benchmark models. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Trends in Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks)
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20 pages, 995 KiB  
Article
An Industrial IoT-Based Blockchain-Enabled Secure Searchable Encryption Approach for Healthcare Systems Using Neural Network
by Aitizaz Ali, Mohammed Amin Almaiah, Fahima Hajjej, Muhammad Fermi Pasha, Ong Huey Fang, Rahim Khan, Jason Teo and Muhammad Zakarya
Sensors 2022, 22(2), 572; https://doi.org/10.3390/s22020572 - 12 Jan 2022
Cited by 108 | Viewed by 7256
Abstract
The IoT refers to the interconnection of things to the physical network that is embedded with software, sensors, and other devices to exchange information from one device to the other. The interconnection of devices means there is the possibility of challenges such as [...] Read more.
The IoT refers to the interconnection of things to the physical network that is embedded with software, sensors, and other devices to exchange information from one device to the other. The interconnection of devices means there is the possibility of challenges such as security, trustworthiness, reliability, confidentiality, and so on. To address these issues, we have proposed a novel group theory (GT)-based binary spring search (BSS) algorithm which consists of a hybrid deep neural network approach. The proposed approach effectively detects the intrusion within the IoT network. Initially, the privacy-preserving technology was implemented using a blockchain-based methodology. Security of patient health records (PHR) is the most critical aspect of cryptography over the Internet due to its value and importance, preferably in the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). Search keywords access mechanism is one of the typical approaches used to access PHR from a database, but it is susceptible to various security vulnerabilities. Although blockchain-enabled healthcare systems provide security, it may lead to some loopholes in the existing state of the art. In literature, blockchain-enabled frameworks have been presented to resolve those issues. However, these methods have primarily focused on data storage and blockchain is used as a database. In this paper, blockchain as a distributed database is proposed with a homomorphic encryption technique to ensure a secure search and keywords-based access to the database. Additionally, the proposed approach provides a secure key revocation mechanism and updates various policies accordingly. As a result, a secure patient healthcare data access scheme is devised, which integrates blockchain and trust chain to fulfill the efficiency and security issues in the current schemes for sharing both types of digital healthcare data. Hence, our proposed approach provides more security, efficiency, and transparency with cost-effectiveness. We performed our simulations based on the blockchain-based tool Hyperledger Fabric and OrigionLab for analysis and evaluation. We compared our proposed results with the benchmark models, respectively. Our comparative analysis justifies that our proposed framework provides better security and searchable mechanism for the healthcare system. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Trends in Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks)
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17 pages, 18103 KiB  
Article
Multimedia Cryptosystem for IoT Applications Based on a Novel Chaotic System around a Predefined Manifold
by Li Li, Ahmed A. Abd El-Latif, Sajad Jafari, Karthikeyan Rajagopal, Fahimeh Nazarimehr and Bassem Abd-El-Atty
Sensors 2022, 22(1), 334; https://doi.org/10.3390/s22010334 - 3 Jan 2022
Cited by 9 | Viewed by 1942
Abstract
Multimedia data play an important role in our daily lives. The evolution of internet technologies means that multimedia data can easily participate amongst various users for specific purposes, in which multimedia data confidentiality and integrity have serious security issues. Chaos models play an [...] Read more.
Multimedia data play an important role in our daily lives. The evolution of internet technologies means that multimedia data can easily participate amongst various users for specific purposes, in which multimedia data confidentiality and integrity have serious security issues. Chaos models play an important role in designing robust multimedia data cryptosystems. In this paper, a novel chaotic oscillator is presented. The oscillator has a particular property in which the chaotic dynamics are around pre-located manifolds. Various dynamics of the oscillator are studied. After analyzing the complex dynamics of the oscillator, it is applied to designing a new image cryptosystem, in which the results of the presented cryptosystem are tested from various viewpoints such as randomness, time encryption, correlation, plain image sensitivity, key-space, key sensitivity, histogram, entropy, resistance to classical types of attacks, and data loss analyses. The goal of the paper is proposing an applicable encryption method based on a novel chaotic oscillator with an attractor around a pre-located manifold. All the investigations confirm the reliability of using the presented cryptosystem for various IoT applications from image capture to use it. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Trends in Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks)
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22 pages, 873 KiB  
Article
SE-CPPA: A Secure and Efficient Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks
by Mahmood A. Al-Shareeda, Mohammed Anbar, Selvakumar Manickam and Iznan H. Hasbullah
Sensors 2021, 21(24), 8206; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21248206 - 8 Dec 2021
Cited by 28 | Viewed by 2774
Abstract
Communications between nodes in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) are inherently vulnerable to security attacks, which may mean disruption to the system. Therefore, the security and privacy issues in VANETs are entitled to be the most important. To address these issues, the existing Conditional [...] Read more.
Communications between nodes in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) are inherently vulnerable to security attacks, which may mean disruption to the system. Therefore, the security and privacy issues in VANETs are entitled to be the most important. To address these issues, the existing Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication (CPPA) schemes based on either public key infrastructure, group signature, or identity have been proposed. However, an attacker could impersonate an authenticated node in these schemes for broadcasting fake messages. Besides, none of these schemes have satisfactorily addressed the performance efficiency related to signing and verifying safety traffic-related messages. For resisting impersonation attacks and achieving better performance efficiency, a Secure and Efficient Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication (SE-CPPA) scheme is proposed in this paper. The proposed SE-CPPA scheme is based on the cryptographic hash function and bilinear pair cryptography for the signing and verifying of messages. Through security analysis and comparison, the proposed SE-CPPA scheme can accomplish security goals in terms of formal and informal analysis. More precisely, to resist impersonation attacks, the true identity of the vehicle stored in the tamper-proof device (TPD) is frequently updated, having a short period of validity. Since the MapToPoint hash function and a large number of cryptography operations are not employed, simulation results show that the proposed SE-CPPA scheme outperforms the existing schemes in terms of computation and communication costs. Finally, the proposed SE-CPPA scheme reduces the computation costs of signing the message and verifying the message by 99.95% and 35.93%, respectively. Meanwhile, the proposed SE-CPPA scheme reduces the communication costs of the message size by 27.3%. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Trends in Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks)
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