Chameleon hashing for secure and privacy-preserving vehicular communications

Many services and applications in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) require preserving and secure data communications. To improve driving safety and comfort, the traffic-related status information will be broadcasted regularly and shared among drivers. Without the security and privacy guarantees, attackers could track their interested vehicles by collecting and analyzing their traffic messages. Hence, anonymous message authentication is an essential requirement of VANETs. On the other hand, when a vehicle is involved in a dispute event of warning message, the certificate authority should be able to recover the real identity of this vehicle. To deal with this issue, we propose a new privacy-preserving authentication protocol with authority traceability using elliptic curve based chameleon hashing. Compared with existing schemes, our approach possesses the following features: 1) mutual and anonymous authentication for both vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside communications, 2) vehicle unlinkability, 3) authority tracking capability, and 4) high computational efficiency. We also demonstrate the merits of our proposed scheme through security analysis and extensive performance evaluation.

Robust multi-factor authentication for fragile communications

In large-scale systems, user authentication usually needs the assistance from a remote central authentication server via networks. The authentication service however could be slow or unavailable due to natural disasters or various cyber attacks on communication channels. This has raised serious concerns in systems which need robust authentication in emergency situations. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. In a slow connection situation, we present a secure generic multi-factor authentication protocol to speed up the whole authentication process. Compared with another generic protocol in the literature, the new proposal provides the same function with significant improvements in computation and communication. Another authentication mechanism, which we name stand-alone authentication, can authenticate users when the connection to the central server is down. We investigate several issues in stand-alone authentication and show how to add it on multi-factor authentication protocols in an efficient and generic way.

SME stakeholder relationship descriptions in website CSR communications

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to report on an exploratory, qualitative study of how small and medium enterprises (SMEs) describe their firm’s relationships with or impact on stakeholders when communicating corporate social responsibility (CSR) on their websites. Design/methodology/approach – Qualitative content analysis was conducted on 22 Australian SME websites from the information media and telecommunications sector. Stakeholder theory was used as the basis for analysis. Findings – An important aspect of CSR communication is reporting the firm’s relationships with stakeholders such as society/communities, ecological environment, employees, customers and suppliers. This paper provides insights into how these relationships are manifested in SME website communications. For example, three-way relationships between the firm and stakeholders were described on some websites, but few explained the impact of their CSR on stakeholders. Research limitations/implications – This study concentrated on identifying the CSR communication on websites from one industry sector in Australia. These limitations provide the basis for future research to explore and compare CSR communication on websites by SMEs from other industry sectors and countries. Practical implications – The findings offer SME owner-managers ideas on different ways they can incorporate details of stakeholder relationships in CSR website communications. Originality/value – There has been little research on how SMEs use channels such as websites to communicate CSR. This paper addresses this gap in knowledge by providing insights into how SMEs describe stakeholder relationships in CSR website communications.

Integrating online communities within business-to-business marketing communications: an exploratory study

© 2015 Taylor & Francis The article provides a conceptual contribution by developing a framework for business-to-business (B2B) marketers seeking to implement online communities (OLCs). Furthermore, the conceptual contribution is augmented by a small-scale exploratory study comprising in-depth interviews with B2B chief marketing officers (CMOs). The findings challenge existing thinking that B2B marketers can follow generic marketing communication frameworks. This is due to the differences in B2B OLCs in terms of multiple stakeholders and two-way information flows and differences in buyer behaviour. For researchers, the contribution is an embryonic model that will facilitate future conceptual development as well as empirical testing through a series of research propositions. A sequential decision-making framework, which identifies key implementation challenges, is provided for B2B managers.

A truthful double auction for device-to-device communications in cellular networks

Data traffic in cellular networks has dramatically increased in recent years as the emergence of various new wireless applications, which imposes an immediate requirement for large network capacity. Although many efforts have been made to enhance wireless channel capacity, they are far from solving the network capacity enhancement problem. Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is recently proposed as a promising technique to increase network capacity. However, most existing work on D2D communications focuses on optimizing throughput or energy efficiency, without considering economic issues. In this paper, we propose a truthful double auction for D2D communications (TAD) in multi-cell cellular networks for trading resources in frequencytime domain, where cellular users with D2D communication capability act as sellers, and other users waiting to access the network act as buyers. Both intra-cell and inter-cell D2D sellers are accommodated in TAD while the competitive space in each cell is extensively exploited to achieve a high auction efficiency. With a sophisticated seller-buyer matching, winner determination and pricing, TAD guarantees individual rationality, budget balance, and truthfulness. Furthermore, we extend our TAD design to handle a more general case that each seller and buyer ask/bid multiple resource units. Extensive simulation results show that TAD can achieve truthfulness as well as high performance in terms of seller/buyer sanctification ratio, auctioneer profit and network throughput.

An investigation into the perceived quality of communications in dispersed construction project teams

Construction project teams are increasingly operating in dispersed arrangements in which communications predominantly take place via information communication technology (ICT) with a dose of face-to-face interactions. However, a review of literature reflects a scarcity of research on how shifting to dispersed teams affects the perceived quality of communications in construction project teams. The present study attempts to address such a gap in the body of knowledge. To this end, 12 major indicators of quality of communications were identified through a review of literature. This was followed by conducting 17 semi-structured interviews with experts in the industry to customize the indicators for the construction context. Based on the identified indicators, a questionnaire survey was designed for elucidating the perceptions of construction practitioners about changes in quality of communications in dispersed teams in comparison to fully collocated ones. Drawing upon the data collated from 285 duly completed questionnaires, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was deployed to define the major areas of change in quality of communications in dispersed teams as perceived by the respondents. The findings showed that shifting towards dispersed working results in a change in perceived quality of communications in ten areas mainly reduction in completeness and reliability of communications. The present study contributes to the field by providing a list of indicators for assessing the quality of communications for construction project teams. Additionally, the findings provide an illuminating insight into the primary changes in perceived quality of communications in disperse team arrangements.

Machine-to-machine communications with in-network data aggregation, processing, and actuation for large-scale cyber-physical systems

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) paradigm enables machines (sensors, actuators, robots, and smart meter readers) to communicate with each other with little or no human intervention. M2M is a key enabling technology for the cyber-physical systems (CPSs). This paper explores CPS beyond M2M concept and looks at futuristic applications. Our vision is CPS with distributed actuation and in-network processing. We describe few particular use cases that motivate the development of the M2M communication primitives tailored to large-scale CPS. M2M communications in literature were considered in limited extent so far. The existing work is based on small-scale M2M models and centralized solutions. Different sources discuss different primitives. Few existing decentralized solutions do not scale well. There is a need to design M2M communication primitives that will scale to thousands and trillions of M2M devices, without sacrificing solution quality. The main paradigm shift is to design localized algorithms, where CPS nodes make decisions based on local knowledge. Localized coordination and communication in networked robotics, for matching events and robots, were studied to illustrate new directions.

Inquiry into broadcasting, online content and live production to rural and regional Australia : submission 19. Deakin University submission to Standing Committee on Communications and the Arts

Deakin University's submission to the inquiry into 'Bringing the arts, news and other services to rural and regional Australia' by the Standing Committee on Communications and the Arts of the Parliament of Australia. The submission was one of fifty-five submissions and twelve supplementary submissions presented to the committee. The article contributed to the final report 'Arts and the news to rural and regional Australia: inquiry into broadcasting, online content and live production to rural and regional Australia’ published by The Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia.

Movement-based incentive for cellular traffic offloading through D2D communications

Due to the various applications for smartphones, mobile data traffic is growing at an unprecedented rate. The cellular network is suffering from traffic overloaded currently. Offloading part of the cellular traffic through opportunistic contact between mobile devices is a promising solution to solve the overload problem. However, due to the uneven distribution of devices and regular mobility of smartphone users, the contacts between mobile devices are opportunistic, the cellular traffic offloading approach results in poor performance, i.e., the relay user contacts with other mobile users with small probability. In this paper, we are the first to propose a movement-based incentive mechanism for cellular traffic offloading, where we control the mobility of relay users to improve the performance of traffic offloading. The movement-based incentive mechanism contains a relay user selection algorithm and a payment determination algorithm. Comparing with existing solutions, our proposed movement-based incentive mechanism has better performance.

A game-theoretic resource allocation approach for intercell device-to-device communications in cellular networks

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is a recently emerged disruptive technology for enhancing the performance of current cellular systems. To successfully implement D2D communications underlaying cellular networks, resource allocation to D2D links is a critical issue, which is far from trivial due to the mutual interference between D2D users and cellular users. Most of the existing resource allocation research for D2D communications has primarily focused on the intracell scenario while leaving the intercell settings not considered. In this paper, we investigate the resource allocation issue for intercell scenarios where a D2D link is located in the overlapping area of two neighboring cells. Specifically, We present three intercell D2D scenarios regarding the resource allocation problem. To address the problem, we develop a repeated game model under these scenarios. Distinct from existing works, we characterize the communication infrastructure, namely Base Stations (BSs), as players competing resource allocation quota from D2D demand, and we define the utility of each player as the payoff from both cellular and D2D communications using radio resources. We also propose a resource allocation algorithm and protocol based on the Nash equilibrium derivations. Numerical results indicate that the developed model not only significantly enhances the system performance including sum rate and sum rate gain, but also sheds lights on resource configurations for intercell D2D scenarios.