Mobile Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (MWSANs) can simply be defined as an extension of Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs) in which the actor nodes are mobile. As such, in addition to challenges existing in WSAN, the mobility also imposes new challenges such as localization of actors, cooperative tracking of both actor-actor and actor-sensor collaboration, and communication infrastructure between distant actors. New communication protocols, specific to MWSANs, are needed. In this paper, we propose a self-organization and data collection protocol in order to provide energy efficiency, low latency, high success rate and suitably interactions between sensors and actors and take benefit from the mobility and resources existing on the network's actor nodes. The actor nodes move according to RWP mobility model. Each actor, during its pause time creates a temporary cluster, and is the head of it, collects and processes sensor data and performs actions on the environment based on the information gathered from sensor nodes in its cluster. Once an actor detects a base station it delivers the collected data to it. The simulations carried out (with TOSSIM tool), comfort us with good performances results.

In this paper, we propose a novel self-organization protocol for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) assisted by Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV or Drone) called SSP (Self-organization Smart Protocol). In order to provide energy efficiency, low latency, high success rate and suitably interactions between sensors and UAVs while taking advantage of the air mobility (fly) and resource available on the UAVs in the network. The UAVs move according to RWP (Random Waypoint) mobility model. Each UAV, during its pause time at a known height, creates a temporary cluster, and acts as its head, collects and processes sensor data and performs actions on the environment based on the information gathered from sensor nodes in its cluster. Once an UAV detects a base station (BS) it forwards the collected data to it. The results of the simulations show the high performance of the proposed algorithm.

Due to the intrinsically geo-distributed subcontracting maintenance activity practice, the maintenance scheduling has for a long time been a major challenge in the industry. This research work presents a methodology to schedule the maintenance activities of geo-distributed assets. A multi-agent system based approach is proposed to enable the decision-making for the subcontractors in a distributed industrial environment under uncertainty. An auction based negotiation mechanism is designed to promote competition and cooperation among the different agents, and to obtain global good schedule.Compared to the Weighted Shortest Processing Time first–Heuristic–Earliest Due Date (WSPT-H-EDD) method, the experimental results show that the proposed approach is able to provide scheduling scheme with good performances in terms of Global Cost, Total Weighted Tardiness Cost and makespan.

Due to the intrinsically geo-distributed subcontracting maintenance activity practice, the maintenance scheduling has for a long time been a major challenge in the industry. This research work presents a methodology to schedule the maintenance activities of geo-distributed assets. A multi-agent system based approach is proposed to enable the decision-making for the subcontractors in a distributed industrial environment under uncertainty. An auction based negotiation mechanism is designed to promote competition and cooperation among the different agents, and to obtain global good schedule.Compared to the Weighted Shortest Processing Time first–Heuristic–Earliest Due Date (WSPT-H-EDD) method, the experimental results show that the proposed approach is able to provide scheduling scheme with good performances in terms of Global Cost, Total Weighted Tardiness Cost and makespan.

Securing the network communication represents one of the most important challenges in wireless sensor networks. The key distribution problem has been widely discussed in classical wireless sensor networks contrarily to heterogeneous ones. HWSNs (Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks) have optimized the network capability and opened new security opportunities by introducing high resource capacity sensor nodes in the network. In this paper, an efficient dynamic authentication and key Management scheme is proposed for heterogeneous WSN. The main idea is to provide a single lightweight protocol for both authentication and key establishment while optimizing the security level. The key distribution algorithm is based on preexisting information to generate dynamic keys and does not require any secure channel and sharing phase which improves the security, energy efficiency and reduces the memory consumption. Experimental results have confirmed the performances of our mechanism compared to some of the existing security protocols.

Identification schemes based on multivariate polynomials have been receiving attraction in different areas due to the quantum secure property. Identification is one of the most important elements for the IoT to achieve communication between objects, gather and share information with each other. Thus, identification schemes which are post-quantum secure are significant for Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. Various polar forms of multivariate quadratic and cubic polynomial systems have been proposed for these identification schemes. There is a need to define polar form for multivariate dth degree polynomials, where d ≥ 4 . In this paper, we propose a solution to this need by defining constructions for multivariate polynomials of degree d ≥ 4 . We give a generic framework to construct the identification scheme for IoT and RFID applications. In addition, we compare identification schemes and curve-based cryptoGPS which is currently used in RFID applications.

Recently, mobile crowd sensing (MCS) is captivating growing attention because of their suitability for enormous range of new types of context-aware applications and services. This is attributed to the fact that modern smartphones are equipped with unprecedented sensing, computing, and communication capabilities that allow them to perform more complex tasks besides their inherent calling features. Despite a number of merits, MCS confronts new challenges due to network dynamics, the huge volume of data, sensing task coordination, and the user privacy problems. In this paper, a comprehensive review of MCS is presented. First, we highlight the distinguishing features and potential advantages of MCS compared to conventional sensor networks. Then, a taxonomy of MCS is devised based on sensing scale, level of user involvement and responsiveness, sampling rate, and underlying network infrastructure. Afterward, we categorize and classify prominent applications of MCS in environmental, infrastructure, social, and behavioral domains. The core architecture of MCS is also described. Finally, we describe the potential advantages, determine and reiterate the open research challenges of MCS and illustrate possible solutions.

The interest shown by some community of researchers to autonomous drones or UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) has increased with the advent of wireless communication networks. These networks allow UAVs to cooperate more efficiently in an ad hoc manner in order to achieve specific tasks in specific environments. To do so, each drone navigates autonomously while staying connected with other nodes in its group via radio links. This connectivity can deliberately be maintained for a while constraining the mobility of the drones. This will be suitable for the drones involved in a given path of a given transmission between a source and a destination. This constraint could be removed at the end of the transmission process and the mobility of each concerned drone becomes again independent from the others. In this work, we proposed a flocking-based routing protocol for UAVs called BR-AODV. The protocol takes advantage of a well known ad hoc routing protocol for on-demand route computation, and the Boids of Reynolds mechanism for connectivity and route maintaining while data is being transmitted. Moreover, an automatic ground base stations discovery mechanism has been introduced for a proactive drones and ground networks association needed for the context of real-time applications. The performance of BR-AODV was evaluated and compared with that of classical AODV routing protocol and the results show that BR-AODV outperforms AODV in terms of delay, throughput and packet loss.

The emergence of new data handling technologies and analytics enabled the organization of big data in processes as an innovative aspect in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Big data paradigm, combined with WSN technology, involves new challenges that are necessary to resolve in parallel. Data aggregation is a rapidly emerging research area. It represents one of the processing challenges of big sensor networks. This paper introduces the big data paradigm, its main dimensions that represent one of the most challenging concepts, and its principle analytic tools which are more and more introduced in the WSNs technology. The paper also presents the big data challenges that must be overcome to efficiently manipulate the voluminous data, and proposes a new classification of these challenges based on the necessities and the challenges of WSNs. As the big data aggregation challenge represents the center of our interest, this paper surveys its proposed strategies in WSNs.

The interest shown by some community of researchers to autonomous drones or UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) has increased with the advent of wireless communication networks. These networks allow UAVs to cooperate more efficiently in an ad hoc manner in order to achieve specific tasks in specific environments. To do so, each drone navigates autonomously while staying connected with other nodes in its group via radio links. This connectivity can deliberately be maintained for a while constraining the mobility of the drones. This will be suitable for the drones involved in a given path of a given transmission between a source and a destination. This constraint could be removed at the end of the transmission process and the mobility of each concerned drone becomes again independent from the others. In this work, we have proposed a bio-inspired routing protocol for UAVs called BR- AODV. The protocol takes advantage of a well known ad hoc routing protocol for on-demand route computation, and the Boids of Reynolds mechanism for connectivity and route maintaining while data is being transmitted. The performances of BR-AODV were evaluated and compared to those of classical AODV routing protocol and the results show that BR-AODV outperforms AODV in terms of delay, throughput and packet loss.

In wireless sensor networks, one of the most important constraints is the low power consumption requirement. For that reason, several hierarchical or cluster-based routing methods have been proposed to provide an efficient way to save energy during communication. However, their main challenge is to have efficient mechanisms to achieve the trade-off between increasing the network lifetime and accomplishing acceptable transmission latency. In this paper, we propose a novel protocol for cluster-based wireless sensor networks called PEAL (Power Efficient and Adaptive Latency). Our simulation results show that PEAL can extend the network lifetime about 47% compared to the classic protocol LEACH (Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy) and introduces an acceptable transmission latency compared to the energy conservation gain.

WSNs consist of large number of small sensors densely deployed to monitor a phenomenon. Most of the data generated from the WSNs represent events happening at time intervals. Sometimes and according to the nature of the applications, this data stream is continuous and can reach high speeds. Therefore, adopting new techniques, platforms and tools to deal with this large amount of sensory data became necessary. Therefore, the Big Data paradigm can represent a good solution for the extraction, analysis, viewing, sharing, storage and transfer of such volume of data. This paper presents a survey on integrating Big Data tools for gathering, storing and analyzing the data generated by WSNs.

Data aggregation has emerged as a basic concept in wireless sensor networks. By combining data and eliminating redundancy, this concept showed its effectiveness in terms of reducing resources consumption. The data aggregation problem is not new and has been widely studied in wireless sensor networks. However, most of the proposed solutions are based on a static data aggregation scheme and do not consider the network constraints evolution such as energy bandwidth, overhead and transmission delay. To dynamically optimize the tradeoff between the data aggregation process and the network constraints, a new paradigm has been introduced recently named the feedback control system. The main idea is to adapt the data aggregation degree to the environment changes and the sensor network applications. The feedback control for data aggregation remains relatively a new research area and only few works have introduced this concept. Therefore this work points out this research field by surveying the different existing protocols.

Redundant data retransmission problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be eliminated using the data aggregation process which combines similar data to reduce the resource-consumption and consequently, saves energy during data transmission. In the recent days, many researchers have focused on securing this paradigm despite the constraints it imposes such as the limited resources. Most of the solutions proposed to secure the data aggregation process in WSNs are essentially based on the use of encryption keys to protect data during their transmission in the network. Indeed, the key generation and distribution mechanisms involve additional computation costs and consume more of energy. Considering this, in this paper, we propose a new security mechanism to secure data aggregation in WSNs called SDAW (secure data aggregation watermarking-based scheme in homogeneous WSNs). Our mechanism aims to secure the data aggregation process while saving energy. For this, the mechanism uses a lightweight fragile watermarking technique without encryption to insure the authentication and the integrity of the sensed data while saving the energy. The links between the sensor nodes and the aggregation nodes, and also the links between the aggregation nodes and the base station are secured by using the watermarking mechanism.

Data aggregation processes aim to reduce the amount of exchanged data in wireless sensor networks and consequently minimize the packet overhead and optimize energy efficiency. Securing the data aggregation process is a real challenge since the aggregation nodes must access the relayed data to apply the aggregation functions. The data aggregation security problem has been widely addressed in classical homogeneous wireless sensor networks, however, most of the proposed security protocols cannot guarantee a high level of security since the sensor node resources are limited. Heterogeneous wireless sensor networks have recently emerged as a new wireless sensor network category which expands the sensor nodes’ resources and capabilities. These new kinds of WSNs have opened new research opportunities where security represents a most attractive area. Indeed, robust and high security level algorithms can be used to secure the data aggregation at the heterogeneous aggregation nodes which is impossible in classical homogeneous WSNs. Contrary to the homogeneous sensor networks, the data aggregation security problem is still not sufficiently covered and the proposed data aggregation security protocols are numberless. To address this recent research area, this paper describes the data aggregation security problem in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks and surveys a few proposed security protocols. A classification and evaluation of the existing protocols is also introduced based on the adopted data aggregation security approach.