A Systematic Literature Review of Blockchain Technology for Internet of Drones Security.

Internet of Drones (IoD) plays a crucial role in the future Internet of Things due to its important features such as low cost, high flexibility, and mobility. The number of IoD applications is drastically increasing from military to civilian fields. Nevertheless, drones are resource-constrained and highly vulnerable to several security threats and attacks. The use of blockchain technology for securing IoD networks has gained growing attention. To this end, this paper presents a systematic literature review to analyze the current research area regarding the security of IoD environments using the emerging blockchain technology. Forty relevant studies were selected from 129 published articles to answer the identified research questions. The selected studies were classified into three main classes based on blockchain type. Furthermore, a comparison of the reviewed articles in terms of different factors is provided. The research findings show that the blockchain can guarantee fundamental security requirements such as authentication, privacy-preserving, confidentiality, integrity, and access control. Finally, open issues and challenges related to the combination of blockchain and IoD technologies are discussed.

A Distributed Multi-Hop Intra-Clustering Approach Based on Neighbors Two-Hop Connectivity for IoT Networks.

Under a dense and large IoT network, a star topology where each device is directly connected to the Internet gateway may cause serious waste of energy and congestion issues. Grouping network devices into clusters provides a suitable architecture to reduce the energy consumption and allows an effective management of communication channels. Although several clustering approaches were proposed in the literature, most of them use the single-hop intra-clustering model. In a large network, the number of clusters increases and the energy draining remains almost the same as in un-clustered architecture. To solve the problem, several approaches use the k-hop intra-clustering to generate a reduced number of large clusters. However, k-hop proposed schemes are, generally, centralized and only assume the node direct neighbors information which lack of robustness. In this regard, the present work proposes a distributed approach for the k-hop intra-clustering called Distributed Clustering based 2-Hop Connectivity (DC2HC). The algorithm uses the two-hop neighbors connectivity to elect the appropriate set of cluster heads and strengthen the clusters connectivity. The objective is to optimize the set of representative cluster heads to minimize the number of long range communication channels and expand the network lifetime. The paper provides the convergence proof of the proposed solution. Simulation results show that our proposed protocol outperforms similar approaches available in the literature by reducing the number of generated cluster heads and achieving longer network lifetime.

Big Data Collection in Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks.

Data collection is one of the main operations performed in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Even if several interesting approaches on data collection have been proposed during the last decade, it remains a research focus in full swing with a number of important challenges. Indeed, the continuous reduction in sensor size and cost, the variety of sensors available on the market, and the tremendous advances in wireless communication technology have potentially broadened the impact of WSNs. The range of application of WSNs now extends from health to the military field through home automation, environmental monitoring and tracking, as well as other areas of human activity. Moreover, the expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) has resulted in an important amount of heterogeneous data that are produced at an exponential rate. Furthermore, these data are of interest to both industry and in research. This fact makes their collection and analysis imperative for many purposes. In view of the characteristics of these data, we believe that very large-scale and heterogeneous WSNs can be very useful for collecting and processing these Big Data. However, the scaling up of WSNs presents several challenges that are of interest in both network architecture to be proposed, and the design of data-routing protocols. This paper reviews the background and state of the art of Big Data collection in Large-Scale WSNs (LS-WSNs), compares and discusses on challenges of Big Data collection in LS-WSNs, and proposes possible directions for the future.