To provide ubiquitous access, scalability and sharing possibilities, the Industrial Internet of T... more To provide ubiquitous access, scalability and sharing possibilities, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications utilize the cloud to store collected data streams. However, secure storing and sharing of the massive and continuously generated data poses significant privacy risks, including data breaches. This paper proposes SmartCrypt, a data storing and sharing system that supports analytics over the encrypted time series data. SmartCrypt enables users to secure and finegrain sharing of their encrypted data using a novel symmetric homomorphic encryption scheme. Simulation results show that SmartCrypt reduces query time by 17% and improves throughput by 9% over the benchmark scheme.
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
An Overview of Popular Digital Image Processing Filtering Operations
Digital image processing (DIP) is carried out to produce an altered image that is more suitable f... more Digital image processing (DIP) is carried out to produce an altered image that is more suitable for the intended application. Image filtering and image warping are considered to be the most common methods of image processing. Within image filtering, these operations are carried out to aid the altering or enhancing an image to either remove specific features or highlight features of interest within the image. These operations are generally carried out in the pre-processing stage and can have very positive results on the quality of feature extraction and the results of image analysis. This paper aims to give a brief overview of some popular image filtering operations, focusing on edge detection filters, smoothing filters and the advantages of greyscale over colour images.
A Hybrid Authenticated Group Key Agreement Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks
International Conference on Electric Technology and Civil Engineering, May 18, 2012
a new hybrid authenticated group key agreement protocol is designed for resource-constrained Wire... more a new hybrid authenticated group key agreement protocol is designed for resource-constrained Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in this paper. The hybrid protocol reduces the high cost public-key operations at the sensor side and replaces them with efficient symmetric-key based operations. In addition the protocol provides strong security services. To ensure the protocol is feasible in resource-constrained WSNs, it is implemented and evaluated in MICAz and TelosB sensor nodes.
An Experimental Study of the Effects of the Evaporation Duct on Microwave Propagation
This paper presents the results of a study on the effects of the evaporation duct on microwave pr... more This paper presents the results of a study on the effects of the evaporation duct on microwave propagation in the Irish Sea. The evaporation duct is a phenomenon that occurs almost permanently over the earth's oceans and can be exploited to enable over the horizon communications in the marine environment. The study consisted of an experimental test, where signal strength from a shore-based transmitter was recorded at a number of distances. The results of this experiment were compared to simulated values. Atmospheric data used to simulate the signal propagation was taken from weather buoys in the Irish Sea. It was found that the evaporation duct does have an effect on microwave signals and can be used to extend microwave communications beyond the horizon. This could be useful in enabling high bandwidth communications links to or between offshore assets and equipment including navigation buoys, ships, renewable energy infrastructure and lighthouses which are often situated beyond line of sight of land.
International Conference on Green Computing and Engineering Technology
Third International Conference on Green Computing and Engineering Technology 2017 (ICGCET'17)... more Third International Conference on Green Computing and Engineering Technology 2017 (ICGCET'17) was held on 08-10 August 2017 in The Killaloe Hotel, Kincora Harbour, Killaloe, County Clare, Ireland. The main objective of ICGCET'17 was to present the research from different areas of science and technology. This conference provided a platform for researchers and scientists across the world to exchange and share their experiences and research results about all aspects of electronics and information technology. This conference also provided an opportunity to interact and establish professional relations for future collaboration. The conference aims were to promote innovations and work of researchers, engineers, students, and scientists from across the world on Advancement in electronic and computer systems. The basic idea of the conference was what more can be done using the existing technology. In today’s world, electronic and computer systems play an important role for future’s innovation. These proceedings have details of the research paper presented at this conference by researchers from more than 32 countries. This ICGCET conference is a sister conference of RTCSE conference.
Within the manufacturing industry, predictive maintenance is a well-established concept, dating b... more Within the manufacturing industry, predictive maintenance is a well-established concept, dating back to the 1990's [1]. Practice has shown it to have a proven track record of minimising unnecessary machine downtime. The methods of predictive maintenance have varied widely, including visual inspection (i.e. human monitoring), thermal imaging, ultrasonic analysis, vibration analysis, power consumption, acoustic emission, to name a few. As manufacturing technologies have developed, maintenance in general has become a more complex task, presenting many challenges for researchers, engineers and scientists. These challenges have been met through research and development of new technologies and methods of maintenance. Some of these methods currently involve installing intricate sensor systems which are placed on, or in close proximity to the system under test (SUT). Although some of these monitoring methods have been slow to catch on within industry, much of the reason for this can be accredited to the high cost of these sensors along with the high probability of damage to and the replacement of them. Practice is now moving towards using remote monitoring systems (RMS) as a possible method to reduce some of these issues. This is due to the ability to carry out monitoring without having to install the monitoring system on the structure of the SUT, hence minimising the potential for damage to the sensor systems. This paper aims to describe the importance of predictive maintenance (PdM) over other maintenance methods (e.g. reactive, corrective etc.), the importance of PdM for the metal cutting industry (focusing on cutting tool wear), while also discussing some common methods of predictive maintenance monitoring system methods already being utilised within industry. The final method discussed is remote monitoring systems used to monitor transmitted sound, while also identifying how this monitoring system could be integrated within the smart manufacturing environment that is being driven by Industry 4.0.
Cloud Computing models, architectures and service adaption have been growing on a larger scale ba... more Cloud Computing models, architectures and service adaption have been growing on a larger scale based on convenience, on-demand resource provisioning, customized services and economic benefits. The Cloud assists enterprises in reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) but the anticipated Return on Investment (ROI) is not guaranteed in time due to quality pitfalls leading to vendor lock-in situations. Sensing technologies, which utilize the cloud environment as a prime infrastructure supporting IoT applications and data processing often fail to identify and understand Cloud Quality of Service (QoS) issues. This paper discusses factors related to assessing the Cloud vendors QoS, minimizing quality control and cost issues and increasing feasibility for IoT applications on the cloud ecosystem.
Welcome to this special issue of Wireless Personal Communications. This special issue comprises a... more Welcome to this special issue of Wireless Personal Communications. This special issue comprises a selection of best papers from the Global Conference on Wireless and Optical Communications (GCWOC'16). This 3-day event provided a platform for researchers from Europe, Asia and other parts of the world to exchange ideas, innovations and challenges encountered throughout the research process in these areas. This issue has been organized in two main blocks, placing papers related to wireless communications in the first block; the second block contains those papers whose scope is optical communications. Within each block, papers have been arranged taking into account the layer they are more related to, from bottom to top. A few of papers outside these scopes are included at the end.
LabVIEW-FPGA based implementation of an Authenticated Encryption core
The IoT makes communication possible between anything and adds the dimension “Any THING communica... more The IoT makes communication possible between anything and adds the dimension “Any THING communication” to the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), which has already provided the “Any TIME” and the “Any PLACE” communication. With the impressive growth forecasts, the IoT is raising many challenges including information security and privacy issues, these need to be resolved to get maximum potential benefits from it. Observers see the IoT as a revolutionary fully interconnected ‘smart’ world of progress, but other thinking about the IoT is that it represents a darker world of surveillance, privacy and security violations, because in the IoT environment ‘Everything’ will be accessible through the Internet. This work presents a LabVIEW-FPGA based implementation of authenticated encryption, which can be used in an IoT environment using BITW technique.
Future Proofing IoT Embedded Platforms for Cryptographic Primitives Support
Information security is an important property in areas with distributed and decentralized communi... more Information security is an important property in areas with distributed and decentralized communication like the Internet of Things (IoT) or Wireless Sensor Nodes (WSNs). Secure communication realises the protection goals of confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity, which are implemented by cryptographic functions. These functions need to evolve steadily in order to catch up with new attack vectors employed by cyber-criminals. This cryptographic evolution brings an increase of resource demand and consumption with it as cryptographic functions rise in complexity. The demand is difficult to satisfy by embedded platforms since they are often limited in their resources due to design efficiency. Therefore, adequate resource buffering is a crucial task in designing embedded systems that are future proof from a security point of view. In this work, we introduce a methodology for comparable resource benchmarking of cryptographic functions on embedded systems. Our approach enables designers and developers of embedded systems to achieve comparable results over an extended range of algorithms and implementations. This aids in the estimation of the cryptographic resource footprint. Further, we develop a measurement architecture for experimentation on different embedded platforms. We conduct a sample of reference measurements confirming well-known patterns in cryptography showing the validity of our framework. Finally, we argue for an open collaboration platform for sharing of benchmark results conducted with the framework.
AES implementation on Xilinx FPGAs suitable for FPGA based WBSNs
The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a symmetric key Block cipher that is used to provide da... more The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is a symmetric key Block cipher that is used to provide data confidentiality in many embedded systems. Data confidentiality of each information is very important, either the information is related with bank account statements, credit card numbers, trade secrets, government documents or personal information. The confidentiality of a patient's physiological data is an important issue in traditional wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) due to the limited hardware resources, which makes traditional WBSNs not suitable for the implementation of security mechanisms. The Xilinx FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) is a suitable option for FPGA based WBSNs, because of the availability of more logic resources and better performance of FPGA. In this paper an FPGA based WBSN approach is discussed and an efficient implementation of AES is provided on latest Xilinx FPGAs (Artix-7, Virtex-7, Virtex-6, Virtex-4 and Spartan-6) that can be used to provide data confidentiality in FPGA based WBSNs. The presented efficient implementation technique of AES uses Block RAM resources of FPGA to get an optimized architecture with respect to power, speed and area. The results are provided in terms of throughput, slices, TPA and power. The XPA (Xilinx Power Analyzer) tool of Xilinx is used for power analysis.
IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, Jun 1, 2022
This paper presents an analysis of the effects of the evaporation duct on microwave propagation i... more This paper presents an analysis of the effects of the evaporation duct on microwave propagation in the Irish Sea. The evaporation duct is a phenomenon that occurs almost permanently over all the world's oceans and allows electromagnetic waves to travel beyond the horizon. Weather data logged over several years from four buoys off the east coast of Ireland has been analysed to find the probability and strength of the evaporation duct. Signal propagation in the evaporation duct has been simulated using the parabolic equation model and compared to results obtained from an experimental setup in the Irish Sea. The best antenna heights and frequencies to maximise signal propagation at this location are also found. Results show that the evaporation duct can be used to provide high bandwidth communications beyond the horizon with an uptime of approximately 40%, and that weather data from buoys can be used to predict the performance of the communications link. While this method of communication is not one that can be relied on all the time, it could be useful to reduce dependency on expensive satellite links or provide non-time critical communications.
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Papers by Thomas Newe