Thirty Years of Machine Learning: The Road to Pareto-Optimal Wireless Networks

Future wireless networks have a substantial potential in terms of supporting a broad range of complex compelling applications both in military and civilian fields, where the users are able to enjoy high-rate, low-latency, low-cost and reliable information services. Achieving this ambitious goal requires new radio techniques for adaptive learning and intelligent decision making because of the complex heterogeneous nature of the network structures and wireless services. Machine learning (ML) algorithms have great success in supporting big data analytics, efficient parameter estimation and interactive decision making. Hence, in this article, we review the thirty-year history of ML by elaborating on supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning and deep learning. Furthermore, we investigate their employment in the compelling applications of wireless networks, including heterogeneous networks (HetNets), cognitive radios (CR), Internet of things (IoT), machine to machine networks (M2M), and so on. This article aims for assisting the readers in clarifying the motivation and methodology of the various ML algorithms, so as to invoke them for hitherto unexplored services as well as scenarios of future wireless networks.Comment: 46 pages, 22 fig

Opportunistic Routing for Vehicular Energy Network

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A critical analysis of research potential, challenges and future directives in industrial wireless sensor networks

In recent years, Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs) have emerged as an important research theme with applications spanning a wide range of industries including automation, monitoring, process control, feedback systems and automotive. Wide scope of IWSNs applications ranging from small production units, large oil and gas industries to nuclear fission control, enables a fast-paced research in this field. Though IWSNs offer advantages of low cost, flexibility, scalability, self-healing, easy deployment and reformation, yet they pose certain limitations on available potential and introduce challenges on multiple fronts due to their susceptibility to highly complex and uncertain industrial environments. In this paper a detailed discussion on design objectives, challenges and solutions, for IWSNs, are presented. A careful evaluation of industrial systems, deadlines and possible hazards in industrial atmosphere are discussed. The paper also presents a thorough review of the existing standards and industrial protocols and gives a critical evaluation of potential of these standards and protocols along with a detailed discussion on available hardware platforms, specific industrial energy harvesting techniques and their capabilities. The paper lists main service providers for IWSNs solutions and gives insight of future trends and research gaps in the field of IWSNs

A role-based software architecture to support mobile service computing in IoT scenarios

The interaction among components of an IoT-based system usually requires using low latency or real time for message delivery, depending on the application needs and the quality of the communication links among the components. Moreover, in some cases, this interaction should consider the use of communication links with poor or uncertain Quality of Service (QoS). Research efforts in communication support for IoT scenarios have overlooked the challenge of providing real-time interaction support in unstable links, making these systems use dedicated networks that are expensive and usually limited in terms of physical coverage and robustness. This paper presents an alternative to address such a communication challenge, through the use of a model that allows soft real-time interaction among components of an IoT-based system. The behavior of the proposed model was validated using state machine theory, opening an opportunity to explore a whole new branch of smart distributed solutions and to extend the state-of-the-art and the-state-of-the-practice in this particular IoT study scenario.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

SECURITY, PRIVACY AND APPLICATIONS IN VEHICULAR AD HOC NETWORKS

With wireless vehicular communications, Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) enable numerous applications to enhance traffic safety, traffic efficiency, and driving experience. However, VANETs also impose severe security and privacy challenges which need to be thoroughly investigated. In this dissertation, we enhance the security, privacy, and applications of VANETs, by 1) designing application-driven security and privacy solutions for VANETs, and 2) designing appealing VANET applications with proper security and privacy assurance. First, the security and privacy challenges of VANETs with most application significance are identified and thoroughly investigated. With both theoretical novelty and realistic considerations, these security and privacy schemes are especially appealing to VANETs. Specifically, multi-hop communications in VANETs suffer from packet dropping, packet tampering, and communication failures which have not been satisfyingly tackled in literature. Thus, a lightweight reliable and faithful data packet relaying framework (LEAPER) is proposed to ensure reliable and trustworthy multi-hop communications by enhancing the cooperation of neighboring nodes. Message verification, including both content and signature verification, generally is computation-extensive and incurs severe scalability issues to each node. The resource-aware message verification (RAMV) scheme is proposed to ensure resource-aware, secure, and application-friendly message verification in VANETs. On the other hand, to make VANETs acceptable to the privacy-sensitive users, the identity and location privacy of each node should be properly protected. To this end, a joint privacy and reputation assurance (JPRA) scheme is proposed to synergistically support privacy protection and reputation management by reconciling their inherent conflicting requirements. Besides, the privacy implications of short-time certificates are thoroughly investigated in a short-time certificates-based privacy protection (STCP2) scheme, to make privacy protection in VANETs feasible with short-time certificates. Secondly, three novel solutions, namely VANET-based ambient ad dissemination (VAAD), general-purpose automatic survey (GPAS), and VehicleView, are proposed to support the appealing value-added applications based on VANETs. These solutions all follow practical application models, and an incentive-centered architecture is proposed for each solution to balance the conflicting requirements of the involved entities. Besides, the critical security and privacy challenges of these applications are investigated and addressed with novel solutions. Thus, with proper security and privacy assurance, these solutions show great application significance and economic potentials to VANETs. Thus, by enhancing the security, privacy, and applications of VANETs, this dissertation fills the gap between the existing theoretic research and the realistic implementation of VANETs, facilitating the realistic deployment of VANETs

Motorway Vehicular Networks with Renewable Energy Powered Access Points

The goal of this work is to consider the potential of using renewable energy only to power roadside units (RSUs), which not only reduces CO2 footprint but also reduces the infrastructure needed in motorway vehicular communication. The thesis begins with collation and analysis of wind and motorway traffic data for the purpose of determining the energy demand of vehicular networks as well as the energy supply obtainable from wind. This is followed by the study of a standalone RSU powered by wind energy. Small size standalone wind energy systems which have benefits of low cost, easy and large scale deployments are implemented for the low power RSUs. The concept of wind energy based rate adaptation is introduced and implemented in the RSU through which RSU can vary transmission power according to the availability of wind energy. This reduces the outage and improves the overall service quality. Traditionally rate adaptation was employed to cater for wireless channel unavailability. A queuing model for the RSU is developed and verified through simulation to evaluate the performance in terms of delay, packet loss and utilisation. Channel fading is considered and the performance of the RSU is re-evaluated in terms of the same quality of service parameters, viz. delay, packet loss and utilisation to investigate the impact of fading in the network. Next, the reliability of the RSU is redefined in the context of unavailability of sufficient wind power. The transient nature of wind energy causes the RSUs to either transmit at full data rate or not transmit at all depending on the availability of sufficient energy. Thus, a failure occurs when the wind power is less than the load. Therefore, a framework has been developed for redefining a number of reliability parameters in the context of wind powered RSUs. A detailed wind data analysis was carried out based upon the hourly wind speed obtained from the UK air information resource (AIR) database for a period of five years, to determine the energy model of the deployed micro-turbine. An energy storage device (a small battery) is connected to the micro-wind turbine for improved service quality

Distributed scheduling algorithms for LoRa-based wide area cyber-physical systems

Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) are a class of wireless communication protocols that work over long distances, consume low power and support low datarates. LPWANs have been designed for monitoring applications, with sparse communication from nodes to servers and sparser from servers to nodes. Inspite of their initial design, LPWANs have the potential to target applications with higher and stricter requirements like those of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Due to their long-range capabilities, LPWANs can specifically target CPS applications distributed over a wide-area, which is referred to as Wide-Area CPS (WA-CPS). Augmenting WA-CPSs with wireless communication would allow for more flexible, low-cost and easily maintainable deployment. However, wireless communications come with problems like reduced reliability and unpredictable latencies, making them harder to use for CPSs. With this intention, this thesis explores the use of LPWANs, specifically LoRa, to meet the communication and control requirements of WA-CPSs. The thesis focuses on using LoRa due to its high resilience to noise, several communication parameters to choose from and a freely modifiable communication stack and servers making it ideal for research and deployment. However, LoRaWAN suffers from low reliability due to its ALOHA channel access method. The thesis posits that "Distributed algorithms would increase the protocol's reliability allowing it to meet the requirements of WA-CPSs". Three different application scenarios are explored in this thesis that leverage unexplored aspects of LoRa to meet their requirements. The application scenarios are delay-tolerant vehicular networks, multi-stakeholder WA-CPS deployments and water distribution networks. The systems use novel algorithms to facilitate communication between the nodes and gateways to ensure a highly reliable system. The results outperform state-of-art techniques to prove that LoRa is currently under-utilised and can be used for CPS applications.Open Acces

Recent Developments on Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks and Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

This book presents collective works published in the recent Special Issue (SI) entitled "Recent Developments on Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks and Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks”. These works expose the readership to the latest solutions and techniques for MANETs and VANETs. They cover interesting topics such as power-aware optimization solutions for MANETs, data dissemination in VANETs, adaptive multi-hop broadcast schemes for VANETs, multi-metric routing protocols for VANETs, and incentive mechanisms to encourage the distribution of information in VANETs. The book demonstrates pioneering work in these fields, investigates novel solutions and methods, and discusses future trends in these field