Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to develop a flexible framework through which business processes can be modelled, simulated and reengineered in a cost-effective way. Design/methodology/approach -This paper is mainly based on a review of the literature and the methodology is discussed in the context of a typical call centre business. Findings -Reengineering business processes involve changes in people, processes and technology over time. In this paper, a flexible business process modelling, simulation and reengineering (BPMSR) approach is presented. Modelling starts with precisely defining model objectives and boundaries, and carrying extensive data analysis. Simulation modelling allows testing and analysis of different scenarios to understand their impact on a broader "system" and evaluate feedback before moving forward with reengineering implementation plans. The need for a flexible and adaptive methodology is stressed to augment efficiency and effectiveness of reengineering cycle. Originality/value -Flexibility and adaptability in the reengineering cycle are effective to identify early modelling incompatibility and simulation defects. It adds intelligence to BPMSR and accommodates for any technical or process changes that may subsequently arise. This approach is reliable for future process improvement or reengineering endeavours due to its flexible configuration, which can be adapted to both radical or incremental change.

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), sensor devices have limited supply of energy. The sensor death due to dissipating battery energy is one of the fundamental design issues in WSNs. Hence, energy efficiency is argued to be the most important requirement for any protocol designed for WSNs. With sensors acting as routers to transport the packets from a source to a destination sensor, multipath protocols are used to discover multiple paths with the objective to improve the reliability, efficiency, and security in WSNs. Selecting the path that minimizes the rate of sensors death and extends the lifetime of the network is the main challenge for multipath protocols. In this paper, we propose a new energy and security aware route selection (ESARS) protocol for WSNs. The first part of ESARS selects a route that maximizes the network lifetime based on a novel metric. The second part of ESARS finds the optimal security level for the selected path based on the estimated security risk of the path. Traditionally, these two parts are addressed separately in the literature, and this paper combines the two parts in one protocol. The proposed protocol is evaluated and compared with other protocols using both analytical analysis and extensive simulations. The results show that the proposed protocol not only achieves its main objective to extend the network lifetime by significantly reducing the sensors death rate but also uses the most optimal security level for the selected route. Moreover, in ESARS protocol, several threshold parameters were employed to provide flexibility per the needs of the application in which the sensors are used. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract-The privacy of communicating entities in wireless ad hoc networks is extremely important due to the potential of their being identified and subsequently subjected to attacks (e.g., in military networks). Previously, the random walk and fractal propagation schemes have been proposed to address privacy of source and destination nodes in ad hoc or sensor networks. Entropy of packet transmissions has been used as the metric for comparison. In this paper, we show that under a global attacker that can eavesdrop on the overall data transmissions and count them, neither of these approaches provide sufficient privacy when the attacker can visualize the transmissions and infer contextual information. Moreover, we show that the entropy is not a useful metric in such a case. We propose SECLOUD: Source and Destination Seclusion using Clouds to obfuscate the true source/destination nodes and make them indistinguishable among a group of neighbor nodes which works well even under network-wide traffic visualization by a global attacker.

Abstract

The identity and/or location of communicating entities in wireless ad hoc networks is extremely important due to the potential of their being identified and subsequently subjected to cyber or physical attacks. In this paper, we show that a global attacker who can eavesdrop on the overall data transmissions and count them can simply visualize the transmissions and infer contextual information. Current approaches to obfuscate the locations of source and destinations do not provide protection against such attacks. We propose two novel techniques (1) SECLOUD: Source and Destination Seclusion using Clouds to obfuscate the true source/destination nodes and make them indistinguishable among a group of neighbor nodes, and (2) ANONYRING: Anonymous Ring which hides the source/destination nodes within a group of nodes that form a ring. Both proposed techniques work well even under network-wide traffic visualization by a global attacker. Furthermore the proposed techniques are shown via simulation to be superior to existing schemes in the literature.