A Blockchain-Based Authentication Protocol for Cooperative Vehicular Ad Hoc Network.

The efficiency of cooperative communication protocols to increase the reliability and range of transmission for Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is proven, but identity verification and communication security are required to be ensured. Though it is difficult to maintain strong network connections between vehicles because of there high mobility, with the help of cooperative communication, it is possible to increase the communication efficiency, minimise delay, packet loss, and Packet Dropping Rate (PDR). However, cooperating with unknown or unauthorized vehicles could result in information theft, privacy leakage, vulnerable to different security attacks, etc. In this paper, a blockchain based secure and privacy preserving authentication protocol is proposed for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). Blockchain is utilized to store and manage the authentication information in a distributed and decentralized environment and developed on the Ethereum platform that uses a digital signature algorithm to ensure confidentiality, non-repudiation, integrity, and preserving the privacy of the IoVs. For optimized communication, transmitted services are categorized into emergency and optional services. Similarly, to optimize the performance of the authentication process, IoVs are categorized as emergency and general IoVs. The proposed cooperative protocol is validated by numerical analyses which show that the protocol successfully increases the system throughput and decreases PDR and delay. On the other hand, the authentication protocol requires minimum storage as well as generates low computational overhead that is suitable for the IoVs with limited computer resources.

Psychological and Livelihood Impacts of COVID-19 on Bangladeshi Lower Income People.

The objective of this research is to understand the psychological and livelihood-related impacts of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on Bangladeshi lower income group people who depend on daily earnings for their living. Following the convenience sampling method, 576 respondents were interviewed for quantitative data and 30 in-depth interviews for qualitative information in several districts of Bangladesh. To 94.1% respondents, livelihood has been affected by the COVID-19 outbreak with an overall score of 3.20 ± 0.77 on a 4-point Likert-type scale. In comparison to unemployed respondents, daily workers have been hardly affected by the COVID-19 outbreak (odds ratio [OR] = 7.957; P < .01), and so they are going outside more frequently in search of jobs (OR = 9.984, P < .01). Due to fear of COVID-19 infection and lack of livelihood means, respondents (76.6%) have been stressed out (overall score 3.19 ± 0.81 on a 4-point Likert-type scale), and those working in industries (OR = 5.818, P < .01), farmers (OR = 3.029, P < .05), and day laborers (OR = 2.651, P < .05) have been highly stressed.

Control Plane Optimisation for an SDN-Based WBAN Framework to Support Healthcare Applications.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) offers an abstract view of the network and assists network operators to control the network traffic and the associated network resources more effectively. For the past few years, SDN has shown a lot of merits in diverse fields of applications, an important one being the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) for healthcare services. With the amalgamation of SDN with WBAN (SDWBAN), the patient monitoring and management system has gained much more flexibility and scalability compared to the conventional WBAN. However, the performance of the SDWBAN framework largely depends on the controller which is a core element of the control plane. The reason is that an optimal number of controllers assures the satisfactory level of performance and control of the network traffic originating from the underlying data plane devices. This paper proposes a mathematical model to determine the optimal number of controllers for the SDWBAN framework in healthcare applications. To achieve this goal, the proposed mathematical model adopts the convex optimization method and incorporates three critical SDWBAN factors in the design process: number of controllers, latency and number of SDN-enabled switches (SDESW). The proposed analytical model is validated by means of simulations in Castalia 3.2 and the outcomes indicate that the network achieves high level of Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and low latency for optimal number of controllers as derived in the mathematical model.

A Survey of Context-Aware Access Control Mechanisms for Cloud and Fog Networks: Taxonomy and Open Research Issues.

Over the last few decades, the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) has produced an overwhelming flow of data and services, which has shifted the access control paradigm from a fixed desktop environment to dynamic cloud environments. Fog computing is associated with a new access control paradigm to reduce the overhead costs by moving the execution of application logic from the centre of the cloud data sources to the periphery of the IoT-oriented sensor networks. Indeed, accessing information and data resources from a variety of IoT sources has been plagued with inherent problems such as data heterogeneity, privacy, security and computational overheads. This paper presents an extensive survey of security, privacy and access control research, while highlighting several specific concerns in a wide range of contextual conditions (e.g., spatial, temporal and environmental contexts) which are gaining a lot of momentum in the area of industrial sensor and cloud networks. We present different taxonomies, such as contextual conditions and authorization models, based on the key issues in this area and discuss the existing context-sensitive access control approaches to tackle the aforementioned issues. With the aim of reducing administrative and computational overheads in the IoT sensor networks, we propose a new generation of Fog-Based Context-Aware Access Control (FB-CAAC) framework, combining the benefits of the cloud, IoT and context-aware computing; and ensuring proper access control and security at the edge of the end-devices. Our goal is not only to control context-sensitive access to data resources in the cloud, but also to move the execution of an application logic from the cloud-level to an intermediary-level where necessary, through adding computational nodes at the edge of the IoT sensor network. A discussion of some open research issues pertaining to context-sensitive access control to data resources is provided, including several real-world case studies. We conclude the paper with an in-depth analysis of the research challenges that have not been adequately addressed in the literature and highlight directions for future work that has not been well aligned with currently available research.