Recent advances in wireless sensor network (WSN) technology are enabling the deployment of large-scale and collaborative sensor networks. WSNs face several challenges such as security, localisation, and energy consumption. To resolve these issues, evolutionary algorithms can be helpful. The core of every evolutionary algorithm is its fitness function. The drawbacks of fitness functions used in the literature will be investigated and some solutions will be suggested. The simulation results clearly show the improvement due to suggested solutions.

Different node types in smart grid (SG) system have different communication necessities. Different type of information such as power grid status and demand requests and responses are established between control station (CS) and different SG node types. Assigning the certain percentage of the nodes traffic to the radio access technologies (RATs) with respect to their cost functions (CFs) value can help to achieve this goal by defining the highest fitness degree between SG node type communication requirements and RATs communication characteristics to have an efficient load balance. In this study, the key performance indicators (KPIs) for CFs are the SG node communication requirements which are defined as data rate, delay, reliability, and security. The value of the work can be seen in node assigning method based on the CFs as a function of different RAT communication characteristics and node type communication requirements. The highest fitness degree between node communication needs and RAT characteristics are achieved in an efficient way which causes to make an efficient heterogeneous network. The work impact of using a certain RAT which has the best efficiency in sense of communication aspects by using a well-defined CF is the innovation of this study as well.

Novel networking paradigms, such as software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV), introduce new opportunities in the design of next-generation mobile networks. The present work investigates the benefits of the emerging SDN and NFV technologies on the radio resource management (RRM) in mobile cellular networks. In particular, the aim of the proposed RRM scheme is to enable an efficient and flexible radio resource allocation in order to assure quality of experience of mobile users. The authors consider the orthogonal frequency division multiple access scheme and the complete radio resource sharing policy. To enable time- and space-efficient resource allocation, the authors investigate the applicability of the well-known Kaufman–Roberts recursion in the context of new architectural and functional changes of SDN/NFV based mobile environments. Finally, they discuss the applicability of the proposed approach for more complicated resource sharing policies.

Here, the authors study a buffer-aided relay system, in which the source node and the relay node are energy harvesting nodes, and the source node transmits the information to the destination node via the relay node. Both the source node and relay node are assumed to equipped with an energy buffer and can temporarily store the harvested energy; in addition, the relay node possesses a data buffer to store the received information temporarily. Particularly, the authors propose two buffer-aided energy harvesting relay protocols, namely the harvest-then-transmit (HtT) protocol and the joint link selection and power allocation (JLSPA) protocol. For the HtT protocol, the expressions of the average achievable throughput and the optimal power splitting factor are obtained in close form. For the JLSPA protocol, based on the channel state information and buffer state information, a JLSPA protocol which maximises the average achievable throughput is presented. Furthermore, for the JLSPA protocol, the bounds on average achievable rate, average data buffer size, and average delay are analysed and the throughput-delay trade-off is revealed. The simulation results show that the proposed buffer-aided relaying scheme could improve the throughput performance of energy harvesting relay system significantly.

Mobility management has always been a challenging and important issue for the next-generation all-IP mobile networks. Seamless mobility is one of the requirements to provide real-time services in such networks. Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) has been developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as a network-based mobility management protocol to support the mobility of IP devices. Although several designs have been presented in the literature to reduce the amount of PMIPv6 signalling and latency handover, they do not satisfy the real-time application requirements. In this study, the authors first propose a novel vertical handover algorithm that helps to anticipate the handover process in an efficient manner. The suggested approach is based on PMIPv6 and IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Handover (MIH) standard. The authors also added a new MIH primitive in order to indicate that a handover is needed to be done very soon. The triggering of such process is done thanks to two proposed dynamic thresholds. According to the analytical evaluation and simulation results, the proposed method guarantees a significant reduction of the handover delay and the signalling overhead, handover blocking probability and packet loss.

When wireless sensor network (WSN) is running, it needs data acquisition, fusion, and transmission, which makes the attacker distribute the malware code to the network to destroy the normal operation of the network. In this study, an improved two-dimensional (2D) cellular automata model and a multi-player evolutionary game model are proposed to describe the propagation process of malware propagation, aiming at the shortcomings of research on malware propagation in WSN. First, the authors introduce the node diversity model according to the difference between the cluster-head node and the terminal node in WSN. Then, based on the existing 2D cellular automata malware model, an improved mechanism of epidemiological transmission is improved. To make the model more complete, a multi-player evolutionary game model is established according to the different attack methods and the different coping strategies adopted by the cluster-head node and the terminal node in WSN. The replication dynamic equation of the strategy evolution is also given. Simulation results show that the proposed model can accurately describe the propagation behaviour of malware in WSN and provide a basis for security defence research of WSN.

Content centric networking (CCN) where content/named data as the first entity has become one of the most promising architectures for the future Internet. To achieve better security, the Interest NACK mechanism is introduced into CCN; however, it has not attracted enough attention and most of the CCN architectures do not embed Interest NACK until now. This study focuses on analysing the urgency of implementing Interest NACK into CCN, by designing a novel network threat named advanced interest flooding attack (AIFA) to attack CCN, which can not only exhaust the pending interest table (PIT) resource of each involved router just as normal interest flooding attack (IFA), but also keep each PIT entry unexpired until it finishes, making it harder to detect and more harmful when compared with the normal IFA. Specifically, the damage of AIFA on CCN architecture with and without Interest NACK is evaluated and analysed, compared with normal IFA, and then the urgency of implementing Interest NACK is highlighted.

Although cybercrime and cyber threats are increasing significantly, yet prevention and security of the critical infrastructure are still far from perfect. The internet has no protection against malicious packet modifications. Attackers exploit such vulnerabilities to forge the source IP addresses while instigating an attack. Consequently, investigating cybercrime is becoming extremely difficult. The best antidote would be to weed out the problem at its root by identifying the source of the attack. The objective of this study is to propose an IP traceback scheme that can identify the origin of an attack with a single packet with minimum computational and storage overhead while ensuring a high degree of accuracy. Compared to the state-of-the-art single packet IP traceback technique, the proposed scheme entails lesser computation overhead. According to CAIDA topology dataset, it requires only 320 kB of storage on each router. Storage requirement is several thousand times lesser than the pioneer single packet traceback scheme and 6.25 times lesser than the state-of-the-art traceback scheme. It has the better endurance to the change in topology compared with the state-of-the-art schemes. It identifies the attack node with high accuracy and minimal false positive. The obtained result has been validated to demonstrate its statistical significance.

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are a key technology for intelligent transportation system providing different services in safety and entertainment applications. Routing in VANET encounters high mobility of nodes, heterogeneous node distribution and dynamic network topology. These characteristics of the VANET demand a routing protocol capable of inhibiting intermittent connectivity due to network fragmentation. The proposed work is a connectivity-aware intersection-based shortest path routing protocol (CISRP) for VANETs in an urban environment. The CISRP has been designed to look into the prevailing road conditions and route the packets in a less congestion and less link breakage path to avoid intermittent connectivity. The results evaluated show the enhanced performance of the CISRP protocol.