Securing Age-of-Information (AoI)-Enabled 5G Smart Warehouse Using Access Control Scheme

Low-power wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and Internet of Things (IoT) have great impact for the real-time applications in future 5th generation (5G) mobile networks due to the wireless-powered communication technologies. The Age of Information (AoI) plays a crucial performance metric in an IoT-enabled real-time smart warehouse application, where the freshness of the aggregated data is very important. However, wireless medium communication among the beacon nodes and the user equipments (tracking nodes) gives an opportunity to an adversary not only to eavesdrop the data but also to corrupt the data by means of deleting, modifying or inserting malicious information during communication among the entities involved in the smart warehouse environment. To mitigate these issues, we design a security scheme for AoI-enabled 5G smart warehouse through an access control mechanism, where the secure communication among the beacon nodes and the tracking nodes will take place by mutual device authentication and key agreement process. The fresh data collected at the enterprise cloud is then used for big data analytics for better predictions and analysis, such as optimal device scheduling so that the data becomes very fresh. The rigorous security analysis and comparative study show that the proposed mechanism has significantly better security and comparable communication and computational costs as compared to the relevant schemes. In addition, through the real-time testbed experiments, we show that the proposed scheme is practical in 5G smart warehouse context.