Keynote speakers

Wireless sensor networks have the potential to significantly improve the quality and amount of data collected in numerous physical environments including battlefield monitoring, structure health monitoring and hazardous material tracking. However, securing the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is challenge that must be met before they can be widely adopted for practical applications. This talk will discuss security issues at different layers for WSN and will specifically discuss security solutions at physical layer. In order to provide security solutions at physical layer wide bandwidth radios have to be adapted for wireless sensor networks which use a narrow bandwidth to provide the same level of security. Frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) is one technique that is commonly used to provide security for wide bandwidth radios. The most popular scheme for implementing FHSS is Bluetooth. Unfortunately, Bluetooth frequency hopping is designed to reduce interference, not provide security. Therefore, this talk presents a new frequency selection kernel named Signal Strength Seeded FH (SSSFH) that uses signal strength measurements gathered from the network to “seed” the frequency selection kernel to introduce randomness and unpredictability to dynamic frequency selection. The research shows that SSSFH provides acceptable performance compared to the Bluetooth selection kernel in addition to flexibility for changing the size of the channel pool as an application or environment might require.