Biblio

Over the past decade, distributed CSMA, which forms the basis for WiFi, has been deployed ubiquitously to provide seamless and high-speed mobile internet access. However, distributed CSMA might not be ideal for future IoT/M2M applications, where the density of connected devices/sensors/controllers is expected to be orders of magnitude higher than that in present wireless networks. In such high-density networks, the overhead associated with completely distributed MAC protocols will become a bottleneck. Moreover, IoT communications are likely to have strict QoS requirements, for which the `best-effort' scheduling by present WiFi networks may be unsuitable. This calls for a clean-slate redesign of the wireless MAC taking into account the requirements for future IoT/M2M networks. In this paper, we propose a reservation-based (for minimal overhead) wireless MAC designed specifically with IoT/M2M applications in mind.

With the current significant penetration of mobile devices (i.e. smartphones and tablets) and the tremendous increase in the number of the corresponding mobile applications, they have become an indispensable part of our lives. Nowadays, there is a significant growth in the number of sensitive applications such as personal health applications, personal financial applications, home monitoring applications, etc. In addition, with the significant growth of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, smartphones and the corresponding applications are widely considered as the Internet gateways for these devices. Mobile devices mostly use wireless LANs (WLANs) (i.e., WiFi networks) as the prominent network interface to the Internet. However, due to the broadcast nature of WiFi links, wireless traffics are exposed to any eavesdropping adversary within the WLAN. Despite WiFi encryption, studies show that application usage information could be inferred from the encrypted wireless traffic. The leakage of this sensitive information is very serious issue that will significantly impact users' privacy and security. In addressing this privacy concern, we design and develop a lightweight programmable privacy framework, called PrivacyGuard. PrivacyGuard is inspired by the vision of pushing the Software Defined Network (SDN)-like paradigm all the way to wireless network edge, is designed to support of adopting privacy preserving policies to protect the wireless communication of the sensitive applications. In this paper, we demonstrate and evaluate a prototype of PrivacyGuard framework on Android devices showing the flexibility and efficiency of the framework.