INTERNET OF THINGS (IoT) and BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY

This work focuses on the Internet-of-Things (IoT) architectures and the utilization of Blockchain technology in communication networks.

Internet of Things in the Maritime Domain

We present a novel wireless communications assisted unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) system for maritime machine-type communication (MTC). In our approach, UAVs are deployed to provide wide-area coverage, while a network of connected buoys handles data transmission between the UAVs and the on-shore data fusion and control center (DFCC). We propose a handover decision method that eliminates unnecessary handover triggers; thus, reducing the overall energy consumption and ensuring seamless connectivity. We formulate the handover decision method as a constrained optimization problem of maximizing handover efficiency in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), available data rate, residual energy, and buffered data, by identifying the buoy offering optimal connectivity. The optimization problem is solved by a probabilistic based genetic algorithm (GA). Furthermore, we present an authentication mechanism based on Blockchain to provide a secure communication for wireless communications assisted UAV sensing system for maritime IoT critical applications, by deploying a private Blockchain network that is connected to a fusion center (FC) in the terrestrial area. The received packets would be validated by the FC, based on the stored IDs on the Blockchain, to avoid intrusion into the network. We further analyze the effect of Blockchain on the network performance in terms of delay and throughput to demonstrate the suitability and effectiveness of the proposed authentication mechanism.

Internet of Things in the HealthCare Domain

The IoT is under massive experimentation to operate in a distributed manner that makes it favourable to be utilized in the healthcare ecosystem. However, under the IoT healthcare ecosystem (IoTHS), the nodes of the IoT networks are unveiled to an aberrant level of security threats. Regulating an effective volume of sensitive and personal data, IoTHS undergoes various security challenges for which a distributed mechanism to address such concerns plays a vital role. Although Blockchain, having a distributed ledger, is vital to solve security concerns in IoT-HSs, it undergoes major problems including high requirements of storage and computation. Also, Holochain that has low computational and memory requirements, lacks authentication distribution availability. Therefore, we present a hybrid Holochain and Blockchain based privacy perseverance and security framework for IoT-HSs that combines the benefits Holochain and Blockchain provide, overcoming the computational and memory challenges, along with authentication mechanism challenges. This framework is more suited for IoT scenarios where resource needs to be optimally utilized. Thorough security and performance analysis conducted demonstrates the suitability and effectiveness of the proposed hybrid security approach for IoT-HSs in contrast to the Blockchain-only, or Holochain-only based approaches.