Dynamic key-based security and serial dictatorial rule-based resource utilization for efficient wireless camera networks

Abstract

Networks of wirelessly communicating, battery-powered, field-of-view-overlapping, stationary camera sensors, called wireless camera networks in the thesis, have been widely employed for surveillance due to their sensors’ cheapness and handy installation. Since these cameras of limited capabilities on bandwidth, lifespan, computation, and storage have to deal with high-dimension data sets generated from images, the networks more seriously suffer from such limited network resources.

Because sensing and processing scenes are the most costly ones of cameras’ jobs, we intuitively attempt to reduce the occurring rate of such jobs in a network by selecting only a portion of optimal cameras for currently given targets to activate. This selection problem is modeled in a cooperative bargaining game where cameras sequentially decide their mode between “sleep” and “active” in descending order of their bargaining power based on the serial dictatorial rule to raise the global target coverage collectively.

Such a great deal of image data to travel in a network also requires low resource overheads to secure network communication. We target one of the most harmful security attacks, impersonating, where an attacker physically capturing a node obtains every cryptographic information of the node and diffuses a lot of false data by impersonating the captured node with the obtained keys, to efficiently tackle with assuming a clustered network. Our proposed novel dynamic key management framework of different keying mechanisms respectively secure in-cluster, inter-cluster, and individual communication by refreshing keys on demand, while adaptively handling node addition and eviction.

Theoretic analyses and simulation results show that both of our proposed approaches provide high performance in terms of resource efficiency and related measurements, such as target coverage for resource utilization and impersonating-resiliency for security. Each of them also presents a better trade-o...