DESIGN OF MOBILE DATA COLLECTOR BASED CLUSTERING ROUTING PROTOCOL FOR WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consisting of hundreds or even thousands of nodes, canbe used for a multitude of applications such as warfare intelligence or to monitor the environment. A typical WSN node has a limited and usually an irreplaceable power source and the efficient use of the available power is of utmost importance to ensure maximum lifetime of eachWSNapplication. Each of the nodes needs to transmit and communicate sensed data to an aggregation point for use by higher layer systems. Data and message transmission among nodes collectively consume the largest amount of energy available in WSNs. The network routing protocols ensure that every message reaches thedestination and has a direct impact on the amount of transmissions to deliver messages successfully. To this end, the transmission protocol within the WSNs should be scalable, adaptable and optimized to consume the least possible amount of energy to suite different network architectures and application domains. The inclusion of mobile nodes in the WSNs deployment proves to be detrimental to protocol performance in terms of nodes energy efficiency and reliable message delivery. This thesis which proposes a novel Mobile Data Collector based clustering routing protocol for WSNs is designed that combines cluster based hierarchical architecture and utilizes three-tier multi-hop routing strategy between cluster heads to base station by the help of Mobile Data Collector (MDC) for inter-cluster communication. In addition, a Mobile Data Collector based routing protocol is compared with Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy and A Novel Application Specific Network Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks routing protocol. The protocol is designed with the following in mind: minimize the energy consumption of sensor nodes, resolve communication holes issues, maintain data reliability, finally reach tradeoff between energy efficiency and latency in terms of End-to-End, and channel access delays. Simulation results have shown that the Mobile Data Collector based clustering routing protocol for WSNs could be easily implemented in environmental applications where energy efficiency of sensor nodes, network lifetime and data reliability are major concerns

A Comparative Study of Energy Efficient Medium Access Control Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

This project investigates energy usage in three energy-efficient WSN MAC protocols (AS-MAC, SCP-MAC, and Crankshaft) on TelosB wireless sensors. It additionally presents BAS-MAC, an energy-efficient protocol of our own design. Our evaluations show that in single-hop networks with large send intervals and staggered sending, AS-MAC is best in the local gossip and convergecast scenarios, while SCP-MAC is best overall in the broadcast scenario. We conjecture that Crankshaft would perform best in extremely dense hybrid (unicast and broadcast) network topologies, especially those which broadcast frequently. Finally, BAS-MAC would be optimal in networks which utilize hybrid traffic with infrequent broadcasts, and where broadcasting is performed by motes that do not have an unlimited power source

Field Measurements in Determining Incumbent Spectrum Utilization and Protection Criteria in Wireless Co-existence Studies

Studies of spectrum sharing and co-existence between different wireless communication systems are important, as the current aim is to optimize their spectrum utilization and shift from static exclusive spectrum allocation to more dynamic co-existence of different systems within same frequency bands. The main goal of this thesis is to provide measurement methodologies for obtaining realistic results in modeling incumbent spectrum utilization and in determining incumbent protection criteria. The following research questions are considered in this thesis: Q1) How should field measurements be conducted and used to model incumbent spectrum utilization? Q2) How should field measurements be conducted and used to determine protection criteria for incumbents in a co-existence scenario with mobile broadband? and Q3) Which licensing methods and technological solutions are feasible to enable spectrum sharing in frequency bands with incumbents? To answer to Q1, this thesis describes the development of a spectrum observatory network concept created through international collaboration and presents measurement methodologies, which allow to obtain realistic spectrum occupancy data over geographical areas using interference map concept. A cautious approach should be taken in making strong conclusions from previous single fixed location spectrum occupancy studies, and measurements covering larger geographical areas might be needed if the measurement results are to be used in making spectrum management decisions. The field interference measurements considered in Q2 are not covered well in the current research literature. The measurements are expensive to conduct as they require substantial human resources, test network infrastructure, professional level measurement devices and radio licenses. However, field measurements are needed to study and verify hypotheses from computer simulations or theoretical analyses in realistic operating conditions, as field measurement conditions can not or are not practical to be adequately modeled in simulations. This thesis proposes measurement methodologies to obtain realistic results from field interference measurements, taking into account the propagation environments and external sources of interference. Less expensive simulations and laboratory measurements should be used both to aid in the planning of field measurements and to complement the results obtained from field measurements. Q3 is investigated through several field interference measurement campaigns to determine incumbent protection criteria and by analyzing the spectrum observatory data to determine the occupancy and trends in incumbent spectrum utilization. The field interference measurement campaigns have been conducted in real TV White Space, LTE Supplemental Downlink and Licensed Shared Access test network environments, and the obtained measurement results have been contributed to the development of the European spectrum regulation. In addition, field measurements have been conducted to contribute to the development and technical validation of the spectrum sharing frameworks. This thesis also presents an overview of the current status and possible directions in spectrum sharing. In conclusion, no single spectrum sharing method can provide universally optimal efficiency in spectrum utilization. Thus, an appropriate spectrum sharing framework should be chosen taking into account both the spectrum utilization of the current incumbents and the future needs in wireless communications.Siirretty Doriast

Networking Middleware and Online-Deployment Mechanisms for Java-Based Games

Currently, web-based online gaming applications are predominately utilising Adobe Flash or Java Applets as their core technologies. These games are often casual, two-dimensional games and do not utilise the specialist graphics hardware which has proliferated across modern PCs and Consoles. Multi-user online game play in these titles is often either non-existent or extremely limited. Computer games applications which grace the current generation of consoles and personal computers are designed to utilise the increasingly impressive hardware power at their disposal. However, these are commonly distributed using a physical medium or deployed through custom, proprietary networking mechanisms and rely upon platform-specific networking APIs to facilitate multi-user online game play. In order to unify the concepts of these disparate styles of gaming, this paper presents two interconnected systems which are implemented using Java Web Start and JXTA P2P technologies, providing a platform-independent framework capable of deploying hardware accelerated cross-platform, cross-browser online-enabled Java games, as part of the Homura Project

An energy-efficient routing protocol for Hybrid-RFID Sensor Network

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems facilitate detection and identification of objects that are not easily detectable or distinguishable. However, they do not provide information about the condition of the objects they detect. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), on the other hand provide information about the condition of the objects as well as the environment. The integration of these two technologies results in a new type of smart network where RFID-based components are combined with sensors. This research proposes an integration technique that combines conventional wireless sensor nodes, sensor-tags, hybrid RFID-sensor nodes and a base station into a smart network named Hybrid RFID-Sensor Network (HRSN)

A COMMUNICATION FRAMEWORK FOR MULTIHOP WIRELESS ACCESS AND SENSOR NETWORKS: ANYCAST ROUTING & SIMULATION TOOLS

The reliance on wireless networks has grown tremendously within a number of varied application domains, prompting an evolution towards the use of heterogeneous multihop network architectures. We propose and analyze two communication frameworks for such networks. A first framework is designed for communications within multihop wireless access networks. The framework supports dynamic algorithms for locating access points using anycast routing with multiple metrics and balancing network load. The evaluation shows significant performance improvement over traditional solutions. A second framework is designed for communication within sensor networks and includes lightweight versions of our algorithms to fit the limitations of sensor networks. Analysis shows that this stripped down version can work almost equally well if tailored to the needs of a sensor network. We have also developed an extensive simulation environment using NS-2 to test realistic situations for the evaluations of our work. Our tools support analysis of realistic scenarios including the spreading of a forest fire within an area, and can easily be ported to other simulation software. Lastly, we us our algorithms and simulation environment to investigate sink movements optimization within sensor networks. Based on these results, we propose strategies, to be addressed in follow-on work, for building topology maps and finding optimal data collection points. Altogether, the communication framework and realistic simulation tools provide a complete communication and evaluation solution for access and sensor networks

Pretend that it is real!: Convergence Culture in Practice

Media convergence has mainly been defined and explained as a technological and industrial phenomenon; as the process where new technologies are accommodated by existing media and communication industries and their cultures of production. One consequence of convergence in today’s hybrid media landscape is that the previously distinct borders between production and consumption have become blurred. This means that convergence also takes place as a bottom-up social process initiated by media users that move almost anywhere and everywhere in search of entertainment experiences of their liking. This thesis sheds light on the different types of media convergence that took place in the process of making the transmedia storytelling production Sanningen om Marika. The Swedish public service provider, SVT, and the pervasive games upstart company, The company P, combined their expertise in broadcasting and games development to craft this ‘participation drama’. During five months in 2007, the production offered Swedes nationwide rich possibilities to interact and participate, or just to watch or lurk on the production’s various platforms. Using an ethnographic approach, field studies were conducted throughout the design, implementation and production phases. The analysis shows that even if instances of convergence could be identified, the collaboration did not proceed smoothly. The companies’ different media logics with their differing cultures of production created tensions and frictions. The different logics of television, internet and games - different in quality demands and with different audience participation models - made it difficult to create a hybrid production. Television genres blurred fiction and facts, and the ordinary was blurred with activities of games and play in the production, making the audience reception and interpretations differ extensively. Lastly, the designed audience participation did not remove the asymmetrical relationship between producers and users in media, but instead highlighted issues of hierarchies, lack of participant empowerment and inequality between participants

An Emergent Architecture for Scaling Decentralized Communication Systems (DCS)

With recent technological advancements now accelerating the mobile and wireless Internet solution space, a ubiquitous computing Internet is well within the research and industrial community's design reach - a decentralized system design, which is not solely driven by static physical models and sound engineering principals, but more dynamically, perhaps sub-optimally at initial deployment and socially-influenced in its evolution. To complement today's Internet system, this thesis proposes a Decentralized Communication System (DCS) architecture with the following characteristics: flat physical topologies with numerous compute oriented and communication intensive nodes in the network with many of these nodes operating in multiple functional roles; self-organizing virtual structures formed through alternative mobility scenarios and capable of serving ad hoc networking formations; emergent operations and control with limited dependency on centralized control and management administration. Today, decentralized systems are not commercially scalable or viable for broad adoption in the same way we have to come to rely on the Internet or telephony systems. The premise in this thesis is that DCS can reach high levels of resilience, usefulness, scale that the industry has come to experience with traditional centralized systems by exploiting the following properties: (i.) network density and topological diversity; (ii.) self-organization and emergent attributes; (iii.) cooperative and dynamic infrastructure; and (iv.) node role diversity. This thesis delivers key contributions towards advancing the current state of the art in decentralized systems. First, we present the vision and a conceptual framework for DCS. Second, the thesis demonstrates that such a framework and concept architecture is feasible by prototyping a DCS platform that exhibits the above properties or minimally, demonstrates that these properties are feasible through prototyped network services. Third, this work expands on an alternative approach to network clustering using hierarchical virtual clusters (HVC) to facilitate self-organizing network structures. With increasing network complexity, decentralized systems can generally lead to unreliable and irregular service quality, especially given unpredictable node mobility and traffic dynamics. The HVC framework is an architectural strategy to address organizational disorder associated with traditional decentralized systems. The proposed HVC architecture along with the associated promotional methodology organizes distributed control and management services by leveraging alternative organizational models (e.g., peer-to-peer (P2P), centralized or tiered) in hierarchical and virtual fashion. Through simulation and analytical modeling, we demonstrate HVC efficiencies in DCS structural scalability and resilience by comparing static and dynamic HVC node configurations against traditional physical configurations based on P2P, centralized or tiered structures. Next, an emergent management architecture for DCS exploiting HVC for self-organization, introduces emergence as an operational approach to scaling DCS services for state management and policy control. In this thesis, emergence scales in hierarchical fashion using virtual clustering to create multiple tiers of local and global separation for aggregation, distribution and network control. Emergence is an architectural objective, which HVC introduces into the proposed self-management design for scaling and stability purposes. Since HVC expands the clustering model hierarchically and virtually, a clusterhead (CH) node, positioned as a proxy for a specific cluster or grouped DCS nodes, can also operate in a micro-capacity as a peer member of an organized cluster in a higher tier. As the HVC promotional process continues through the hierarchy, each tier of the hierarchy exhibits emergent behavior. With HVC as the self-organizing structural framework, a multi-tiered, emergent architecture enables the decentralized management strategy to improve scaling objectives that traditionally challenge decentralized systems. The HVC organizational concept and the emergence properties align with and the view of the human brain's neocortex layering structure of sensory storage, prediction and intelligence. It is the position in this thesis, that for DCS to scale and maintain broad stability, network control and management must strive towards an emergent or natural approach. While today's models for network control and management have proven to lack scalability and responsiveness based on pure centralized models, it is unlikely that singular organizational models can withstand the operational complexities associated with DCS. In this work, we integrate emergence and learning-based methods in a cooperative computing manner towards realizing DCS self-management. However, unlike many existing work in these areas which break down with increased network complexity and dynamics, the proposed HVC framework is utilized to offset these issues through effective separation, aggregation and asynchronous processing of both distributed state and policy. Using modeling techniques, we demonstrate that such architecture is feasible and can improve the operational robustness of DCS. The modeling emphasis focuses on demonstrating the operational advantages of an HVC-based organizational strategy for emergent management services (i.e., reachability, availability or performance). By integrating the two approaches, the DCS architecture forms a scalable system to address the challenges associated with traditional decentralized systems. The hypothesis is that the emergent management system architecture will improve the operational scaling properties of DCS-based applications and services. Additionally, we demonstrate structural flexibility of HVC as an underlying service infrastructure to build and deploy DCS applications and layered services. The modeling results demonstrate that an HVC-based emergent management and control system operationally outperforms traditional structural organizational models. In summary, this thesis brings together the above contributions towards delivering a scalable, decentralized system for Internet mobile computing and communications