This paper presents an energy-efficient and high-accuracy sampling synchronization approach for real-time synchronous data acquisition in wireless sensor networks (saWSNs). A proprietary protocol based on time-division multiple access (TDMA) and deep energy-efficient coding in sensor firmware is proposed. A real saWSN model based on 2.4 GHz nRF52832 system-on-chip (SoC) sensors was designed and experimentally tested. The obtained results confirmed significant improvements in data synchronization accuracy (even by several times) and power consumption (even by a hundred times) compared to other recently reported studies. The results demonstrated a sampling synchronization accuracy of 0.8 μs and ultra-low power consumption of 15 μW per 1 kb/s throughput for data. The protocol was well designed, stable, and importantly, lightweight. The complexity and computational performance of the proposed scheme were small. The CPU load for the proposed solution was <2% for a sampling event handler below 200 Hz. Furthermore, the transmission reliability was high with a packet error rate (PER) not exceeding 0.18% for TXPWR ≥ −4 dBm and 0.03% for TXPWR ≥ 3 dBm. The efficiency of the proposed protocol was compared with other solutions presented in the manuscript. While the number of new proposals is large, the technical advantage of our solution is significant.

The nature of wireless network transmission means that an attacker does not have to be in the place where such a network is deployed. It is possible to sense, capture and analyze network traffic from a distance without being detected. If the network is not well secured, discovering of the information is not a problem. Security is one of the major concerns regarding Wi-Fi other than performance or range. Security should be one of the primary factors to consider when planning a wireless network. However, a lot of people who use it or intend to use it are not aware of the problem. Dictionaries with passwords, fake access points (AP) or backdoors in the routers’ software are just some of the methods used by attackers. Recently, a lot of methods have been related to socio-technical activities. In such cases, even secure systems can be vulnerable, because the target of the attackers is not focused around a technical feature but on people’s behaviors. This is a case, because, “human factor” is very often the weakest element in the security chain. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to raise the security awareness of users and protect wireless networks against adversary attacks. Particular attention is paid to the severity, possible targets as well as defense strategies against intruder’s actions. In this context, new WPA3 protocol promises to make it harder to break the into a Wi-Fi network. The article also presents a discussion on new features of WPA3 and their impact on improving the security of Wi-Fi networks.

The paper presents a new mechanism of hidden and secure data transmission in wireless IEEE 802.11 networks in military applications. The mechanism allows us to switch WLANs from infrastructure to the ad-hoc mode simultaneously changing transmission channels and scrambling fragmented data in the MAC layer. Optionally, we can take advantage of extra data encrypting using the VMPC algorithm.

Wireless networks are very popular and have found wide spread usage amongst various segments, also in military environment. The deployment of wireless infrastructures allow to reduce the time it takes to install and dismantle communications networks. With wireless, users are more mobile and can easily get access to the network resources all the time. However, wireless technologies like WiFi or Bluetooth have security issues that hackers have extensively exploited over the years. In the paper several serious security flaws in wireless technologies are presented. Most of them enable to get access to the internal networks and easily carry out man-in-the-middle attacks. Very often, they are used to launch massive denial of service attacks that target the physical infrastructure as well as the RF spectrum. For instance, there are well known instances of Bluetooth connection spoofing in order to steal WiFi password stored in the mobile device. To raise the security awareness and protect wireless networks against an adversary attack, an analysis of attack methods and tools over time is presented in the article. The particular attention is paid to the severity, possible targets as well as the ability to persist in the context of protective measures. Results show that an adversary can take complete control of the victims’ mobile device features if the users forget to use simple safety principles. © (2017) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.

The increasing demand of multimedia applications requires a new behavior of routing protocols in wireless ad-hoc networks. It is necessary to support many requirements for quality of services (QoS) to meet user expectations. This paper is an analysis of the proposed quality-aware routing mechanism based on Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol, from a perspective of the network and the user. The experimental tests were performed to demonstrate the performance of our solutions considering different evaluation metrics.