A Distance-Aware Replica Adaptive Data Gathering Protocol for Delay Tolerant Mobile Sensor Networks

In Delay Tolerant Mobile Sensor Networks (DTMSNs) that have the inherent features of intermitted connectivity and frequently changing network topology it is reasonable to utilize multi-replica schemes to improve the data gathering performance. However, most existing multi-replica approaches inject a large amount of message copies into the network to increase the probability of message delivery, which may drain each mobile node’s limited battery supply faster and result in too much contention for the restricted resources of the DTMSN, so a proper data gathering scheme needs a trade off between the number of replica messages and network performance. In this paper, we propose a new data gathering protocol called DRADG (for Distance-aware Replica Adaptive Data Gathering protocol), which economizes network resource consumption through making use of a self-adapting algorithm to cut down the number of redundant replicas of messages, and achieves a good network performance by leveraging the delivery probabilities of the mobile sensors as main routing metrics. Simulation results have shown that the proposed DRADG protocol achieves comparable or higher message delivery ratios at the cost of the much lower transmission overhead than several current DTMSN data gathering schemes

Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Communication Networks for the Maritime Internet of Things: Key Technologies, Opportunities, and Challenges

With the rapid development of marine activities, there has been an increasing number of maritime mobile terminals, as well as a growing demand for high-speed and ultra-reliable maritime communications to keep them connected. Traditionally, the maritime Internet of Things (IoT) is enabled by maritime satellites. However, satellites are seriously restricted by their high latency and relatively low data rate. As an alternative, shore & island-based base stations (BSs) can be built to extend the coverage of terrestrial networks using fourth-generation (4G), fifth-generation (5G), and beyond 5G services. Unmanned aerial vehicles can also be exploited to serve as aerial maritime BSs. Despite of all these approaches, there are still open issues for an efficient maritime communication network (MCN). For example, due to the complicated electromagnetic propagation environment, the limited geometrically available BS sites, and rigorous service demands from mission-critical applications, conventional communication and networking theories and methods should be tailored for maritime scenarios. Towards this end, we provide a survey on the demand for maritime communications, the state-of-the-art MCNs, and key technologies for enhancing transmission efficiency, extending network coverage, and provisioning maritime-specific services. Future challenges in developing an environment-aware, service-driven, and integrated satellite-air-ground MCN to be smart enough to utilize external auxiliary information, e.g., sea state and atmosphere conditions, are also discussed

Towards video streaming in IoT environments: vehicular communication perspective

Multimedia oriented Internet of Things (IoT) enables pervasive and real-time communication of video, audio and image data among devices in an immediate surroundings. Today's vehicles have the capability of supporting real time multimedia acquisition. Vehicles with high illuminating infrared cameras and customized sensors can communicate with other on-road devices using dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) and 5G enabled communication technologies. Real time incidence of both urban and highway vehicular traffic environment can be captured and transmitted using vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication modes. Video streaming in vehicular IoT (VSV-IoT) environments is in growing stage with several challenges that need to be addressed ranging from limited resources in IoT devices, intermittent connection in vehicular networks, heterogeneous devices, dynamism and scalability in video encoding, bandwidth underutilization in video delivery, and attaining application-precise quality of service in video streaming. In this context, this paper presents a comprehensive review on video streaming in IoT environments focusing on vehicular communication perspective. Specifically, significance of video streaming in vehicular IoT environments is highlighted focusing on integration of vehicular communication with 5G enabled IoT technologies, and smart city oriented application areas for VSV-IoT. A taxonomy is presented for the classification of related literature on video streaming in vehicular network environments. Following the taxonomy, critical review of literature is performed focusing on major functional model, strengths and weaknesses. Metrics for video streaming in vehicular IoT environments are derived and comparatively analyzed in terms of their usage and evaluation capabilities. Open research challenges in VSV-IoT are identified as future directions of research in the area. The survey would benefit both IoT and vehicle industry practitioners and researchers, in terms of augmenting understanding of vehicular video streaming and its IoT related trends and issues

Towards Trustworthy, Efficient and Scalable Distributed Wireless Systems

Advances in wireless technologies have enabled distributed mobile devices to connect with each other to form distributed wireless systems. Due to the absence of infrastructure, distributed wireless systems require node cooperation in multi-hop routing. However, the openness and decentralized nature of distributed wireless systems where each node labors under a resource constraint introduces three challenges: (1) cooperation incentives that effectively encourage nodes to offer services and thwart the intentions of selfish and malicious nodes, (2) cooperation incentives that are efficient to deploy, use and maintain, and (3) routing to efficiently deliver messages with less overhead and lower delay. While most previous cooperation incentive mechanisms rely on either a reputation system or a price system, neither provides sufficiently effective cooperation incentives nor efficient resource consumption. Also, previous routing algorithms are not sufficiently efficient in terms of routing overhead or delay. In this research, we propose mechanisms to improve the trustworthiness, scalability, and efficiency of the distributed wireless systems. Regarding trustworthiness, we study previous cooperation incentives based on game theory models. We then propose an integrated system that combines a reputation system and a price system to leverage the advantages of both methods to provide trustworthy services. Analytical and simulation results show higher performance for the integrated system compared to the other two systems in terms of the effectiveness of the cooperation incentives and detection of selfish nodes. Regarding scalability in a large-scale system, we propose a hierarchical Account-aided Reputation Management system (ARM) to efficiently and effectively provide cooperation incentives with small overhead. To globally collect all node reputation information to accurately calculate node reputation information and detect abnormal reputation information with low overhead, ARM builds a hierarchical locality-aware Distributed Hash Table (DHT) infrastructure for the efficient and integrated operation of both reputation systems and price systems. Based on the DHT infrastructure, ARM can reduce the reputation management overhead in reputation and price systems. We also design a distributed reputation manager auditing protocol to detect a malicious reputation manager. The experimental results show that ARM can detect the uncooperative nodes that gain fraudulent benefits while still being considered as trustworthy in previous reputation and price systems. Also, it can effectively identify misreported, falsified, and conspiratorial information, providing accurate node reputations that truly reflect node behaviors. Regarding an efficient distributed system, we propose a social network and duration utility-based distributed multi-copy routing protocol for delay tolerant networks based on the ARM system. The routing protocol fully exploits node movement patterns in the social network to increase delivery throughput and decrease delivery delay while generating low overhead. The simulation results show that the proposed routing protocol outperforms the epidemic routing and spray and wait routing in terms of higher message delivery throughput, lower message delivery delay, lower message delivery overhead, and higher packet delivery success rate. The three components proposed in this dissertation research improve the trustworthiness, scalability, and efficiency of distributed wireless systems to meet the requirements of diversified distributed wireless applications

Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks

In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge, and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control, learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity, localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature, and identify topics that require more research attention in the future

Controlling the mobility and enhancing the performance of multiple message ferries in delay tolerant networks

In einem drahtlosen Netzwerk mit isolierten und stationären Knoten können Adhoc und verzögerungstolerante Netzwerk Routing-Protokolle nicht verwendet werden. Message Ferry Netzwerke sind die Lösung für diese Fälle, in denen ein (oder mehrere) Message Ferry Knoten den store-carry-forward Mechanismus verwendet und zwischen den Knoten reist, um Nachrichten auszutauschen. In diesem Fall erfahren die Nachrichten für gewöhnlich eine lange Verzögerung. Um die Performance der Message Ferry Netzwerke zu verbessern, kann die Mobilität der Message Ferry Knoten gesteuert werden. In dieser Doktorarbeit werden zwei Strategien zur Steuerung der Mobilität der Message Ferry Knoten studiert. Die Strategien sind das on-the-fly Entscheidungsverfahren in Ferry Knoten und die offline Wegplanung für Ferry Knoten. Für die on-the-fly Strategie untersucht diese Arbeit Decision-maker in Ferry Knoten, der die Entscheidung auf Grundlage der lokalen Observation eines Ferry Knoten trifft. Zur Koordinierung mehrerer Ferry Knoten, die keine globale Kenntnis über das Netzwerk haben, wird eine indirekte Signalisierung zwischen Ferry Knoten vorgeschlagen. Zur Kooperation der Ferry Knoten für die Zustellung der Nachrichten werden einige Ansätze zum Nachrichtenaustausch zwischen Ferry Knoten vorgeschlagen, in denen der Decision-maker eines Ferry Knotens seine Information mit dem verzögerungstoleranten Router des Ferry Knoten teilt, um die Effizienz des Nachrichtenaustauschs zwischen Ferry Knoten zu verbessern. Umfangreiche Simulationsstudien werden zur Untersuchung der vorgeschlagenen Ansätze und des Einflusses verschiedener Nachrichtenverkehrsszenarien vorgenommen. Außerdem werden verschiedene Szenarien mit unterschiedlicher Anzahl von Ferry Knoten, verschiedener Geschwindigkeit der Ferry Knoten und verschiedener Ansätze zum Nachrichtenaustausch zwischen Ferry Knoten studiert. Zur Evaluierung der offline Wegplanungsstrategie wird das Problem als Multiple Traveling Salesmen Problem (mTSP) modelliert und ein genetischer Algorithmus zur Approximation der Lösung verwendet. Es werden verschiedene Netzwerkarchitekturen zur Pfadplanung der Ferry Knoten vorgestellt und studiert. Schließlich werden die Strategien zur Steuerung der Mobilität der Ferry Knoten verglichen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Performance der Strategien in Bezug auf die Ende-zu-Ende-Verzögerung von dem Szenario des Nachrichtenverkehrs abhängt. In Szenarien, wie Nachrichtenverkehr in Sensor-Netzwerken, in denen ein Knoten die Nachrichten zu allen anderen Knoten sendet oder von allen anderen Knoten empfängt, zeigt die offline Wegplanung, basierend auf der mTSP Lösung, bessere Performance als die on-the-fly Strategie. Andererseits ist die on-the-fly Stratgie eine bessere Wahl in Szenarien wie Nachrichtenaustausch zwischen Rettungskräften während einer Katastrophe, in denen alle drahtlose Knoten die Nachrichten austauschen müssen. Zudem ist die on-the-fly Strategie flexibler, robuster als offline Wegplanung und benötigt keine Initialisierungszeit.In a wireless network with isolated and stationary nodes, ad hoc and delay tolerant routing approaches fail to deliver messages. Message ferry networks are the solution for such networks where one or multiple mobile nodes, i.e. message ferry, apply the store-carry-forward mechanism and travel between nodes to exchange their messages. Messages usually experience a long delivery delay in this type of network. To improve the performance of message ferry networks, the mobility of ferries can be controlled. In this thesis, two main strategies to control mobility of multiple message ferries are studied. The strategies are the on-the-fly mobility decision making in ferries and the offline path planning for ferries. To apply the on-the-fly strategy, this work proposes a decision maker in ferries which makes mobility decisions based on the local observations of ferries. To coordinate multiple ferries, which have no global view from the network, an indirect signaling of ferries is proposed. For cooperation of ferries in message delivery, message forwarding and replication schemes are proposed where the mobility decision maker shares its information with the delay tolerant router of ferries to improve the efficiency of message exchange between ferries. An extensive simulation study is performed to investigate the performance of the proposed schemes and the impact of different traffic scenarios in a network. Moreover, different scenarios with different number of ferries, different speed of ferries and different message exchange approaches between ferries are studied. To study the offline path planning strategy, the problem is modeled as multiple traveling salesmen problem (mTSP) and a genetic algorithm is applied to approximate the solution. Different network architectures are proposed and studied where the path of ferries are planned in advance. Finally, the strategies to control the mobility of ferries are compared. The results show that the performance of each strategy, in terms of the average end-to-end delay of messages, depends on the traffic scenario in a network. In traffic scenarios same as the traffic in sensor networks, where only a single node generates messages to all nodes or receives messages from all node, the offline path planning based on mTSP solution performs better than the on-the-fly decision making. On the other hand, in traffic scenarios same as the traffic in disaster scenarios, where all nodes in a network may send and receive messages, the on-the-fly decision making provides a better performance. Moreover, the on-thy-fly decision making is always more flexible, more robust and does not need any initialization time

Quality and Availability of spectrum based routing for Cognitive radio enabled IoT networks

With the recent emergence and its wide spread applicability Internet of Things (IoT) is putting pressure on network resources and most importantly on availability of spectrum. Spectrum scarcity is the issue to be addressed in networking within IoT. Cognitive radio is the technology which addresses the problem of spectrum scarcity in an efficient way. Equipping the IoT devices with cognitive radio capability will lead to a new dimension called cognitive radio enabled IoT devices. To achieve ON-demand IoT solutions and interference free communications cognitive radio enabled IoT devices will become an effective platform for many applications. As there is high dynamicity in availability of spectrum it is challenging for designing an efficient routing protocol for secondary users in cognitive device networks. In this work we are going to estimate spectrum quality and spectrum availability based on two parameters called global information about spectrum usage and instant spectrum status information. Enhanced energy detector is used at each and every node for better probability of detection. For estimating spectrum quality and availability we are introducing novel routing metrics. To have restriction on the number of reroutings and to increase the performance of routing in our proposed routing metric only one retransmission is allowed. Then, two algorithms for routing are designed for evaluating the performance of routing and we find that the bit error rates of proposed algorithms (nodes are dynamic) have decreased a lot when compared to conventional methods (Nodes are static) and throughput of proposed algorithm also improved a lot

Medium access control, error control and routing in underwater acoustic networks: a discussion on protocol design and implementation

The journey of underwater communication which began from Leonardo’s era took four and a half centuries to find practical applications for military purposes during World War II. However, over the last three decades, underwater acoustic communications witnessed a massive development due to the advancements in the design of underwater communicating peripherals and their supporting protocols. Successively, doors are opened for a wide range of applications to employ in the underwater environment, such as oceanography, pollution monitoring, offshore exploration, disaster prevention, navigation assistance, monitoring, coastal patrol and surveillance. Different applications may have different characteristics and hence, may require different network architectures. For instance, routing protocols designed for unpartitioned multi-hop networks are not suitable for Delay-Tolerant Networks. Furthermore, single-hop networks do not need routing protocols at all. Therefore, before developing a protocol one must study the network architecture properly and design it accordingly. There are several other factors which should also be considered with the network architecture while designing an efficient protocol for underwater networks, such as long propagation delay, limited bandwidth, limited battery power, high bit error rate of the channel and several other adverse properties of the channel, such as, multi-path, fading and refractive behaviors. Moreover, the environment also has an impact on the performance of the protocols designed for underwater networks. Even temperature changes in a single day have an impact on the performance of the protocols. A good protocol designed for any network should consider some or all of these characteristics to achieve better performance. In this thesis, we first discuss the impact of the environment on the performance of MAC and routing protocols. From our investigation, we discover that even temperature changes within a day may affect the sound speed profile and hence, the channel changes and the protocol performance vary. After that we discuss several protocols which are specifically designed for underwater acoustic networks to serve different purposes and for different network architectures. Underwater Selective Repeat (USR) is an error control protocol designed to assure reliable data transmission in the MAC layer. One may suspect that employing an error control technique over a channel which already suffers from long propagation delays is a burden. However, USR utilizes long propagation by transmitting multiple packets in a single RTT using an interlacing technique. After USR, a routing protocol for surveillance networks is discussed where some sensors are laid down at the bottom of the sea and some sinks are placed outside the area. If a sensor detects an asset within its detection range, it announces the presence of intruders by transmitting packets to the sinks. It may happen that the discovered asset is an enemy ship or an enemy submarine which creates noise to jam the network. Therefore, in surveillance networks, it is necessary that the protocols have jamming resistance capabilities. Moreover, since the network supports multiple sinks with similar anycast address, we propose a Jamming Resistance multi-path Multi-Sink Routing Protocol (MSRP) using a source routing technique. However, the problem of source routing is that it suffers from large overhead (every packet includes the whole path information) with respect to other routing techniques, and also suffers from the unidirectional link problem. Therefore, another routing protocol based on a distance vector technique, called Multi-path Routing with Limited Cross-Path Interference (L-CROP) protocol is proposed, which employs a neighbor-aware multi-path discovery algorithm to support low interference multiple paths between each source-destination pair. Following that, another routing protocol is discussed for next generation coastal patrol and surveillance network, called Underwater Delay-Tolerant Network (UDTN) routing where some AUVs carry out the patrolling work of a given area and report to a shore based control-center. Since the area to be patrolled is large, AUVs experience intermittent connectivity. In our proposed protocol, two nodes that understand to be in contact with each other calculate and divide their contact duration equally so that every node gets a fair share of the contact duration to exchange data. Moreover, a probabilistic spray technique is employed to restrict the number of packet transmissions and for error correction a modified version of USR is employed. In the appendix, we discuss a framework which was designed by our research group to realize underwater communication through simulation which is used in most of the simulations in this thesis, called DESERT Underwater (short for DEsign, Simulate, Emulate and Realize Test-beds for Underwater network protocols). It is an underwater extension of the NS-Miracle simulator to support the design and implementation of underwater network protocols. Its creation assists the researchers in to utilizing the same codes designed for the simulator to employ in actual hardware devices and test in the real underwater scenario

Distributed Database Management Techniques for Wireless Sensor Networks

Authors and/or their employers shall have the right to post the accepted version of IEEE-copyrighted articles on their own personal servers or the servers of their institutions or employers without permission from IEEE, provided that the posted version includes a prominently displayed IEEE copyright notice and, when published, a full citation to the original IEEE publication, including a link to the article abstract in IEEE Xplore. Authors shall not post the final, published versions of their papers.In sensor networks, the large amount of data generated by sensors greatly influences the lifetime of the network. In order to manage this amount of sensed data in an energy-efficient way, new methods of storage and data query are needed. In this way, the distributed database approach for sensor networks is proved as one of the most energy-efficient data storage and query techniques. This paper surveys the state of the art of the techniques used to manage data and queries in wireless sensor networks based on the distributed paradigm. A classification of these techniques is also proposed. The goal of this work is not only to present how data and query management techniques have advanced nowadays, but also show their benefits and drawbacks, and to identify open issues providing guidelines for further contributions in this type of distributed architectures.This work was partially supported by the Instituto de Telcomunicacoes, Next Generation Networks and Applications Group (NetGNA), Portugal, by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion, through the Plan Nacional de I+D+i 2008-2011 in the Subprograma de Proyectos de Investigacion Fundamental, project TEC2011-27516, by the Polytechnic University of Valencia, though the PAID-05-12 multidisciplinary projects, by Government of Russian Federation, Grant 074-U01, and by National Funding from the FCT-Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia through the Pest-OE/EEI/LA0008/2013 Project.Diallo, O.; Rodrigues, JJPC.; Sene, M.; Lloret, J. (2013). Distributed Database Management Techniques for Wireless Sensor Networks. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. PP(99):1-17. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2013.207S117PP9

Fault-tolerant wireless sensor networks using evolutionary games

This dissertation proposes an approach to creating robust communication systems in wireless sensor networks, inspired by biological and ecological systems, particularly by evolutionary game theory. In this approach, a virtual community of agents live inside the network nodes and carry out network functions. The agents use different strategies to execute their functions, and these strategies are tested and selected by playing evolutionary games. Over time, agents with the best strategies survive, while others die. The strategies and the game rules provide the network with an adaptive behavior that allows it to react to changes in environmental conditions by adapting and improving network behavior. To evaluate the viability of this approach, this dissertation also describes a micro-component framework for implementing agent-based wireless sensor network services, an evolutionary data collection protocol built using this framework, ECP, and experiments evaluating the performance of this protocol in a faulty environment. The framework addresses many of the programming challenges in writing network software for wireless sensor networks, while the protocol built using the framework provides a means of evaluating the general viability of the agent-based approach. The results of this evaluation show that an evolutionary approach to designing wireless sensor networks can improve the performance of wireless sensor network protocols in the presence of node failures. In particular, we compared the performance of ECP with a non-evolutionary rule-based variant of ECP. While the purely-evolutionary version of ECP has more routing timeouts than the rule-based approach in failure-free networks, it sends significantly fewer beacon packets and incurs statistically fewer routing timeouts in both simple fault and periodic fault scenarios