Quality-driven Cross Layer Design for Multimedia Security over Resource Constrained Wireless Sensor Networks

The strong need for security guarantee, e.g., integrity and authenticity, as well as privacy and confidentiality in wireless multimedia services has driven the development of an emerging research area in low cost Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs). Unfortunately, those conventional encryption and authentication techniques cannot be applied directly to WMSNs due to inborn challenges such as extremely limited energy, computing and bandwidth resources. This dissertation provides a quality-driven security design and resource allocation framework for WMSNs. The contribution of this dissertation bridges the inter-disciplinary research gap between high layer multimedia signal processing and low layer computer networking. It formulates the generic problem of quality-driven multimedia resource allocation in WMSNs and proposes a cross layer solution. The fundamental methodologies of multimedia selective encryption and stream authentication, and their application to digital image or video compression standards are presented. New multimedia selective encryption and stream authentication schemes are proposed at application layer, which significantly reduces encryption/authentication complexity. In addition, network resource allocation methodologies at low layers are extensively studied. An unequal error protection-based network resource allocation scheme is proposed to achieve the best effort media quality with integrity and energy efficiency guarantee. Performance evaluation results show that this cross layer framework achieves considerable energy-quality-security gain by jointly designing multimedia selective encryption/multimedia stream authentication and communication resource allocation. i DEDICATION I dedicate this dissertation to my parents Qunxiang Wang, Yuhui Wang, and my PhD advisory committee. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT First of all, I would like to show my sincerely appreciation to my PhD advisor, Prof. Hamid Sharif, for his guidance and contribution along my academic path toward the PhD degree. My dissertation work would not have been possible without his enlightenment in the research of wireless networks, insight in achieving scholastic success, leadership of pioneering educational activities, advice of academic righteousness and strong and generous support in various situations. Prof. Sharif gave me the key to the treasury of knowledge and showed me the route to overcome the academic challenges. I can still remember the numerous field tests with him in both summer hot sun shine and winter cold winds, where his professional ethic set up an ideal example for my future academic career to follow. I would also like to thank Prof. Sharif for his strong support in my faculty job search. He took his time out of his busy schedule and helped me prepare reference letters as well as responded to time-consuming …