Dr. Amitabh Mishra

Traffic control systems were developed with operational performance, reliability, and safety in mind. Traffic control systems were designed well before the heavy integration of advanced communications including radio frequency (RF), the Internet and cellular transmissions. These technologies were integrated to provide more control and enable the traffic systems to become adaptive to real-time traffic flow and environmental conditions. These advances increase the opportunity for attackers to affect traffic system operations, sometimes creating a congestion which essentially halts traffic. The Secure SCADA Framework presents eight objectives which would increase the cyber resilience of an existing vulnerable cyber physical system, such as a traffic control system [1]. This approach retains the current operational performance, reliability, and safety. The concept of using a Trusted Computing Base (TCB) in a cyber-physical system is one goal of the eight presented for the Secure SCADA Framework. The SCADA TCB (STCB) project designs, develops, and verifies a core set of hardware, software, and firmware which operate in conjunction to establish a high level of security protecting a traffic control system. This research defines the requirements of a traffic control system, establishes a security policy, develops a trusted computing base, identifies and designs attacks on the system, and meets the development life-cycle requirements to proceed with implementation, verification, and testing.

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems and Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are critical for infrastructure operations, production processes, automation systems, and other automated control systems. SCADA systems are vulnerable to cyber physical attacks from many vectors. The attack surface varies widely. The problem is complicated by the inherent focus on performance, reliability, and safety rather than cybersecurity. The Secure SCADA Framework establishes a security engineered approach evolving SCADA and ICS systems towards a more cybersecure posture. The encapsulating and integrating concepts of the Secure SCADA Framework require development and analysis of implementations achieving the eight framework goals. This work provides a solution for research, design, development, and evaluation of components of a Secure SCADA System. A Security Engineered SCADA Laboratory requires a test bed with which engineering and science designs can be developed. This paper presents a test bed which can model and collect data on simulated attacks, analyze data to evaluate performance, and provide the foundations for a Security Engineered SCADA Laboratory.

This paper presents the design of a case study that examines the trade-offs between security, scalability and efficiency for sensor networks in IoT environments. Among the trade-offs we will investigate throughput and real-time response for sensor data collected by wireless sensors and transmitted into a scalable Cloud environment for storage and processing. The case study will be performed on a Smart Home prototype system developed at the University of West Florida that functions as a testbed system of a comparable IoT environment. The Smart Home prototype system provides sensor network and sensor data collection and processing services designed to infer activities in a home but it lacks security and scalability of its services. We anticipate that results of the case study will provide generalizable insight into the design of secure and scalable IoT applications.

We introduce and propose a new architecture tested solely for a prompt sensing and anytime-connected wireless body area network for the transmission of important physiological signals over cellular networks. Our work considers four important physiological signals related to cardiac diagnostics for transmission and energy based evaluations in such a network. These signals are Arterial Pressure (ART), Central Venous Pressure (CVP), Electrocardiogram lead II (ECG/EKG) and Pulmonary Artery Pressure (PAP). These signals are vital for the diagnosis and monitoring of patients with Cardio-Vascular Diseases (CVDs), which are a major cause of death today. The physiological data in the above mentioned parameters is sensed from the subject’s body and is transmitted over a Wireless Body Area Sensor Network to a WBAN coordinator acting as a sink (CSS). The CSS compresses the data received from the body sensor nodes, processes it and sends it through GSM communication for transmission over the existing cellular network to a remote base station or a repository. The GSM receiving unit at the other end receives the data and directs it to a dedicated remote server for demodulation. The missing samples in the signals containing original physiological data are then reconstructed. We have discussed the methods used for the compression of data in this scheme. We have also tried to evaluate the means for efficient transmission of data while keeping the allowable range of error in the physiological content such as to assure that the original signal characteristics are maintained. We envision and propose to have a dedicated channel in upcoming generations of mobile communication technology for the transmission of vital physiological data. If implemented, this would have the potential of making 24x7 health-monitoring a reality in in forthcoming years. More bandwidth for everybody is that anticipated for services like data on demand makes our proposal a tangible possibility. In addition, we have tried to evaluate the network lifetime by focusing on the power consumption in WBAN sensor nodes. Our evaluation is based on the battery models involving common and newly developed high capacity batteries for powering up the sensor nodes. Our methodology would facilitate online, round-the-clock health monitoring for the subscribers of a cellular communication system by working in partnership with the underlying body sensor networks consuming very little power.

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) have the potential for extensive use in health care monitoring. To provide optimum network utilization, it is important to efficiently schedule multiple co-existing WBANs which could possibly suffer from high degree of interference. A graceful coexistence can be feasible by appropriately scheduling transmissions from different WBANs. In this paper, we use a recent standard of IEEE 802.15.6 (TG6), which has been finalized in May 2012, to address the problems of intra and inter-WBAN interference. This standard offers several advantages for medical applications as compared to IEEE 802.15.4 which has been previously adopted for numerous healthcare applications. In this paper, we propose a QoS based MAC scheduling approach to avoid inter-WBAN interference and introduce a fuzzy inference engine for intra-WBAN scheduling so as to avoid interference within WBANs.

Wireless Body area Sensor Network (WBSN) is a recent concept that can dramatically benefit healthcare applications through advances in wireless technology. Physiological and biokinetic parameters that require continuous monitoring are sensed by small and lightweight body sensors that transmit the values of these parameters over wireless links for monitoring at the other end. The sensors employed in WBSNs are limited in resources, with battery power being at the premium. Conservation of energy used by the network has a direct bearing on the longevity of the network. Therefore, there is no need to send data periodically and need to transmit selectively when needed. This paper presents a dual framework for predicting when to transfer physiological parameters in such a network that could save energy consumption while maintaining error to minimum level. The framework utilizes an artificial neural network (ANN) for prediction that not only saves energy, but also does it with lesser error than popular prediction algorithms. A comparison of performance of five data prediction algorithms in predicting physiological data is presented. The amount of network energy saved as a result of prediction is also considered in detail.

In this paper we present a design of a medium access control protocol that allows the utilization of unused licensed spectrum of deployed wireless cellular systems (Primary System) by an overlaid multi-hop ad hoe network (Secondary System). The basic design principle is that the secondary operates in a non-intrusive manner and does not interact with the primary. We address a number of architectural challenges pertinent to this networking environment, and evaluate the performance of the MAC. Our performance evaluation results show that, in a single-hop ad hoc network, the proposed MAC transparently utilizes 75% of the bandwidth left unused by the primary, while, in the multi-hop cases, due to spatial reuse, the bandwidth utilization can be significantly higher.