Wireless Sensor Networks for the Internet of Things

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been increasingly popular which attract attention worldwide. WSN is now one of the key enablers for the Internet of Things (iThings) where WSNs will play an important role in future internet by collecting surrounding context and environment information. The innovations of integration of WSNs into iThings offer many interesting avenues of research for scientific communities. The research into WSNs for iThings is extremely important which could possibly change our day-to-day lives.

The purpose of the special issue is to collate efforts and achievements on the research of WSNs for iThings. This special issue will focus on fundamental issues in research and development of WSNs for iThings as well as new challenges in modelling and simulation of novel WSNs for iThings. This special issue contains thirteen papers which were selected from twenty-seven submissions after a peer review process.

Security is one of the most important research issues on WSNs for iThings. In an effort to address this challenge, S. Jiang et al. design a lightweight mobile reauthentication protocol for individual mobile network nodes which consumes less communication and computation recourse and, in the meantime, protects the privacy of mobile sensor nodes. The security and performance evaluation results show that the reauthentication scheme satisfies the security requirements for mobile WSNs, which is also suitable for the WSN environment with limited resources. L. Chen et al. focus on security solutions for the vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) in the emergency communication cases, in which the communication infrastructures are not always available. The security, feasibility, and efficiency of the proposed EPEC approach have been verified by the theoretical and experimental analyses.

Y. Guo et al. develop a selection mechanism for threshold key management in MANETs with selfish nodes. This mechanism can dynamically select a coalition of nodes to carry out the threshold key management service in runtime. The evaluation results show that proposed mechanism not only improves both the success ratio of key management service and lifetime of the network and but also reduces both the cost of participating nodes and compromising probability of MANETs, when compared with existing work in the presence of selfish nodes. X.-y. Chen et al. address the issues of node replication attacks on the area of wireless sensor networks. A location-binding symmetric key scheme and a detecting scheme have been proposed in the paper to address this issue. Extensive simulations have been conducted, and the simulation results indicate that the detection overheads are low and evenly distributed among all the sensor nodes.

Data integrity is one of major concerns in security. L. Zhu et al. focus on the issue of data integrity in WSNs and propose an efficient integrity-preserving data aggregation protocol (EIPDAP) to guarantee the integrity of aggregation results. EIPDAP can promptly verify the integrity of aggregation results once receiving the corresponding authentication information, thus significantly reducing energy consumption and communication delay.

Routing plays an important role in wireless sensor network communication. W. Xin-sheng et al. propose a load-balanced secure routing protocol for wireless sensor networks. The simulation results show that LSRP has achieved better routing performance and security. Z. Li et al. propose a traffic prediction-based fast rerouting algorithm (TPFR) to enable effective communication between the cluster heads and a sink node in WMSNs (TPFR) by using autoregressive moving average (ARMA) model. According to their evaluation results, TPFR can achieve the traffic load balancing and reduce energy consumption among network nodes by using fast rerouting scheme based on traffic prediction.

J. Gao et al. present a novel anticollision algorithm named query splitting-based anticollision (QSA) for mobile RFID-based Internet of Things. QSA reduces the number of collisions efficiently and makes it possible to identify multiple mobile tags without rollback. According to the performance evaluation results published in this paper, the proposed QSA algorithm takes fewer timeslots and achieves better performance in identifying mobile tags. Pei et al. propose a combing cogitative radio method in WSNs, named CWSNs, which integrates the idea of “the last diminisher” in the field of fairness allocation, the demand of secondary users (SUs), and channel characteristics. The research shows that CWSNs can achieve a higher transmission range, better use of the spectrum, lower energy consumption, and better communication quality.

The underwater acoustic sensor network is a special type of wireless sensor networks. Unlike the terrestrial wireless sensor networks that mainly rely on radio waves for communications, underwater sensor networks utilise acoustic waves. S. Xiong et al. present the so-called (response to the earliest transmitter of RTS MAC) RET-MAC protocol for underwater acoustic sensor networks. The simulation results reveal that RET-MAC can not only achieve higher fairness and balanced throughput but also reduce energy consumption and delay.

New research results on service provision on wireless sensor networks for Internet of Things have also been included in this special issue. N. Xi et al. identify the security constraints for each service participant to secure the information flow in a service chain based on the lattice model. A distributed verification framework is then presented in the paper which enables different service participants to verify their information flow policies. The evaluation results show a significant decrease in verification cost and a better load balance between sensor nodes. J. Zhu et al. propose a novel adaptive multihypothesis (MH) prediction algorithm for distributed compressive video sensing. The simulation results show that the proposed framework can provide better reconstruction quality than the framework using original MH prediction algorithm.

Mobile social network is an important application in future Internet of Things. Zhu et al. explore the delay tolerance in the message delivery from the source to the destination in mobile social networks. The simulation results indicate that the proposed theoretical models match very well with the simulation trace statistics.