Internet of Things for the Future of Smart Agriculture: A Comprehensive Survey of Emerging Technologies

This paper presents a comprehensive review of emerging technologies for the internet of things (IoT)-based smart agriculture. We begin by summarizing the existing surveys and describing emergent technologies for the agricultural IoT, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, wireless technologies, open-source IoT platforms, software defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization (NFV) technologies, cloud/fog computing, and middleware platforms. We also provide a classification of IoT applications for smart agriculture into seven categories: including smart monitoring, smart water management, agrochemicals applications, disease management, smart harvesting, supply chain management, and smart agricultural practices. Moreover, we provide a taxonomy and a side-by-side comparison of the state-of-the-art methods toward supply chain management based on the blockchain technology for agricultural IoTs. Furthermore, we present real projects that use most of the aforementioned technologies, which demonstrate their great performance in the field of smart agriculture. Finally, we highlight open research challenges and discuss possible future research directions for agricultural IoTs.      

High performance,low complexity cooperative caching for wireless sensor networks

During the last decade, Wireless Sensor Networks have emerged and matured at such point that they currently support several applications such as environment control, intelligent buildings, target tracking in battlefields. The vast majority of these applications require an optimization to the communication among the sensors so as to serve data in short latency and with minimal energy consumption. Cooperative data caching has been proposed as an effective and efficient technique to achieve these goals concurrently. The essence of these protocols is the selection of the sensor nodes which will take special roles in running the caching and request forwarding decisions. This article introduces two new metrics to aid in the selection of such nodes. Based on these metrics, we propose two new cooperative caching protocols, PCICC and scaPCICC, which are compared against the state-of-the-art competing protocol, namely NICoCa. The proposed solutions are evaluated extensively in an advanced simulation environment and the results confirm that the proposed caching mechanisms prevail over its competitor. The evaluation attests also that the best policy is always scaPCICC, achieving the shortest latency and the least number of transmitted messages.     

Throughput Scalability of Wireless Hybrid Networks over a Random Geometric Graph

In this paper, we consider the transport capacity of ad hoc networks with a random flat topology under the present support of an infinite capacity infrastructure network. Such a network architecture allows ad hoc nodes to communicate with each other by purely using the remaining ad hoc nodes as their relays. In addition, ad hoc nodes can also utilize the existing infrastructure fully or partially by reaching any access point (or gateway) of the infrastructure network in a single or multi-hop fashion. Using the same tools as in [9], we show that the per source node capacity of Θ(W/log(N)) can be achieved in a random network scenario with the following assumptions: (i) The number of ad hoc nodes per access point is bounded above, (ii) each wireless node, including the access points, is able to transmit at W bits/sec using a fixed transmission range, and (iii) N ad hoc nodes, excluding the access points, constitute a connected topology graph. This is a significant improvement over the capacity of random ad hoc networks with no infrastructure support which is found as in [9]. We also show that even when less stringent requirements are imposed on topology connectivity, a per source node capacity figure that is arbitrarily close to Θ(1) cannot be obtained. Nevertheless, under these weak conditions, we can further improve per node throughput significantly. We also provide a limited extension on our results when the number of ad hoc nodes per access point is not bounded.Ulaş C. Kozat was born in 1975, in Adana, Turkey. He received his B.Sc. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey and his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from The George Washington University, Washington D.C. in 1997 and 1999 respectively. He has received his Ph.D. degree in May 2004 from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Maryland, College Park. He has conducted research under the Institute for Systems Research (ISR) and Center for Hybrid and Satellite Networks (CSHCN) at the same university. He worked at HRL Laboratories and Telcordia Technologies Applied Research as a research intern. His current research interests primarily focus on wireless and hybrid networks that span multiple communication layers and networking technologies. Mathematical modelling, resource discovery and allocation, vertical integration of wireless systems and communication layers, performance analysis, architecture and protocol development are the main emphasis of his work. E-mail: kozat@isr.umd.eduLeandros Tassiulas (S′89, M′91) was born in 1965, in Katerini, Greece. He obtained the Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece in 1987, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1989 and 1991 respectively.He is Professor in the Dept. of Computer and Telecommunications Engineering, University of Thessaly, Greece and Research Professor in the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Eng and the Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland College Park since 2001. He has held positions as Assistant Professor at Polytechnic University New York (1991–95), Assistant and Associate Professor University of Maryland College Park (1995–2001) and Professor University of Ioannina Greece (1999–2001).His research interests are in the field of computer and communication networks with emphasis on fundamental mathematical models, architectures and protocols of wireless systems, sensor networks, high-speed internet and satellite communications.Dr. Tassiulas received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Initiation Award in 1992, an NSF CAREER Award in 1995 an Office of Naval Research, Young Investigator Award in 1997 and a Bodosaki Foundation award in 1999 and the INFOCOM′94 best paper award. E-mail: leandros@isr.umd.edu     

Survival of Escherichia coli O157:H7 in Galotyri cheese stored at 4 and 12 degrees C

Post-process contamination of fresh acid-curd cheeses with Escherichia coli O157:H7 may pose a risk considering the low infectious dose and the ability of the pathogen to survive in acidic foods. To evaluate its survival in Galotyri, a traditional Greek acid-curd cheese, portions (0.5 kg) of two commercial fresh products, one artisan (pH 3.9+/-0.1) and the other industrial (pH 3.7+/-0.1), were inoculated with approximately 3.0 or 6.5 log cfu g(-1) of a five-strain cocktail of E. coli O157:H7, including rifampicin-resistant derivatives of the strains ATCC 43895 and ATCC 51657, and stored aerobically at 4 and 12 degrees C. Survival was monitored for 28 days by plating cheese samples on tryptic soy agar with 100 mg l(-1) rifampicin (TSA+Rif), SMAC and Fluorocult E. coli O157:H7 agar media. The pathogen declined much faster (P<0.05) in the industrial as compared to the artisan cheeses at both temperatures. Thus, while E. coli O157:H7 became undetectable by culture enrichment after 14 days at 4 degrees C in industrial samples, irrespective of the inoculation level, populations of 1.4-1.9 and 4.2-5.1 log cfu g(-1) survived after 28 days in the corresponding artisan cheeses with the low and high inocula, respectively. Survival was longer and greater (P<0.05) on TSA+Rif than on SMAC and Fluorocult, indicating the presence of acid-injured cells. Interestingly, survival of E. coli O157:H7 after 14-28 days in cheeses was better at 12 degrees C than at 4 degrees C, probably due to yeasts which grew on the surface of temperature-abused cheeses. The large difference in the pathogen's inactivation between the industrial and artisan cheeses at 4 degrees C could not be associated with major differences in pH or type/concentration of organic acids, suggesting another anti-E. coli O157:H7 activity by the industrial starter. The high survival of the pathogen in artisan Galotyri under conditions simulating commercial storage should be of concern.     

Authentication schemes for smart mobile devices: threat models,countermeasures, and open research issues

Telecommunication Systems - This paper presents a comprehensive investigation of authentication schemes for smart mobile devices. We start by providing an overview of existing survey articles...     

A software framework for alleviating the effects of MAC-aware jamming attacks in wireless access networks

The IEEE 802.11 protocol inherently provides the same long-term throughput to all the clients associated with a given access point (AP). In this paper, we first identify a clever, low-power jamming attack that can take advantage of this behavioral trait: the placement of a low-power jammer in a way that it affects a single legitimate client can cause starvation to all the other clients. In other words, the total throughput provided by the corresponding AP is drastically degraded. To fight against this attack, we design FIJI, a cross-layer anti-jamming system that detects such intelligent jammers and mitigates their impact on network performance. FIJI looks for anomalies in the AP load distribution to efficiently perform jammer detection. It then makes decisions with regards to optimally shaping the traffic such that: (a) the clients that are not explicitly jammed are shielded from experiencing starvation and, (b) the jammed clients receive the maximum possible throughput under the given conditions. We implement FIJI in real hardware; we evaluate its efficacy through experiments on two wireless testbeds, under different traffic scenarios, network densities and jammer locations. We perform experiments both indoors and outdoors, and we consider both WLAN and mesh deployments. Our measurements suggest that FIJI detects such jammers in real-time and alleviates their impact by allocating the available bandwidth in a fair and efficient way.     

VIPSec defined

Secure end-to-end information exchange is a constant challenge in electronic communications. Novel security architectures and approaches are proposed constantly, to be followed by announcements of sophisticated attack methods that compromise them, while other more sophisticated attack methods never see the daylight.The traditional approach for securing the communication between two peers is through the use of secret key encryption combined with a public key approach for exchanging the common secret key to be used by the end-peers. The public key part of the communication is based on a trusted authority for providing the public keys, a service provided through a public key infrastructure (PKI). Public key infrastructures are vulnerable to man in the middle attacks, among other approaches that compromise their integrity. A fake certification authority (CA) or a malicious/compromised network between the user and the CA are typical weaknesses. There has been a lot of work for providing robust PKI; the proposed solutions are fairly demanding on network resources, hence public key solutions are not the security approach of choice in several applications that require light weight solutions.In this article we present voice interactive personalized Security (VIPSec) protocol, which is a protocol for media path key exchange to securely establish a session symmetric key for ensuring end-to-end secure communication, where it is possible to have biometric based authentication, exploiting the nature of the application; voice communication is the typical example that we use as our paradigm for describing the method.     

A Cross-Layer Framework for Association Control in Wireless Mesh Networks

The user association mechanism specified by the IEEE 802.11 standard does not consider the channel conditions and the AP load in the association process. Employing the mechanism in its plain form in wireless mesh networks we may only achieve low throughput and low user transmission rates. In this paper we design a new association framework in order to provide optimal association and network performance. In this framework we propose a new channel-quality based user association mechanism inspired by the operation of the infrastructure-based WLANs. Besides, we enforce our framework by proposing an airtime-metric based association mechanism that is aware of the uplink and downlink channel conditions as well as the communication load. We then extend the functionality of this mechanism in a cross-layer manner taking into account information from the routing layer, in order to fit it in the operation of wireless mesh networks. Lastly, we design a hybrid association scheme that can be efficiently applied in real deployments to improve the network performance. We evaluate the performance of our system through simulations and we show that wireless mesh networks that use the proposed association mechanisms are more capable in meeting the needs of QoS-sensitive applications.     

Service discovery in mobile ad hoc networks: an overall perspective on architectural choices and network layer support issues

Service discovery is indispensable to ad hoc networking where establishing a stand-alone and self-configurable communication environment is the main objective. In this paper, we first discuss possible service discovery architectures along with the required network support for their implementation in mobile ad hoc networks. We then propose a distributed service discovery architecture that relies on a virtual backbone for locating and registering available services within a dynamic network topology. Our proposal consists of two independent components: (i) formation of a virtual backbone and (ii) distribution of service registrations, requests, and replies. The first component creates a mesh structure from a subset of a given network graph that includes the nodes acting as service brokers and also a subset of paths (which we refer to as virtual links) connecting them. Service broker nodes (SBNs) constitute a dominating set, i.e. all the nodes in the network are either in this set or only one-hop away from at least one member of the set. The second component establishes sub-trees rooted at service requesting nodes and registering servers for efficient dissemination of the service discovery control messages. Extensive simulation results are provided for comparison of performance measures, i.e. latency, success rate, and control message overhead, when different architectures and network support mechanisms are utilized in service discovery.     

Information delivery through broadcasting in satellite communication networks

Satellite broadcast is an important candidate for large-scale multimedia information distribution due to the inherent wide-range multicasting capability of satellites and the asymmetry of satellite communications (high bandwidth downlink, limited bandwidth uplink) that matches nicely the information flow asymmetry in multimedia applications. We consider a data broadcasting model that is encountered in most asymmetric satellite communication environments. The problem of scheduling the data broadcast such that average response time experienced by the users is low is considered. In a push-based system, where the users cannot place requests directly to the server and the broadcast schedule should be determined based solely on the access probabilities, we formulate a deterministic dynamic optimization problem, the solution of which provides the optimal broadcast schedule. Properties of the optimal solution are obtained and then we propose a suboptimal dynamic policy which achieves average response time close to the lower bound. In a pull-based system where the users may place requests about information items directly to the server, the scheduling can be based on the number of pending requests for each item. Suboptimal policies with good performance are obtained in this case as well. If a user has local memory, it can alleviate its access latency by selectively prefetching the items from the broadcast and storing them in the memory. A good memory management strategy can substantially reduce the user's access latency. An optimal memory management policy is identified, that minimizes the expected aggregate latency. Memory update strategies with limited look-ahead are presented as implementable approximations of the optimal policy as well. We also consider the problem of joint broadcast scheduling and user's cache management and propos a joint optimization scheme which can achieve the performance up to 40% better than the existing non-joint approach.