A Sleep-Scheduling-Based Cross-Layer Design Approach for Application-Specific Wireless Sensor Networks

The pervasiveness and operational autonomy of mesh-based wireless sensor networks (WSNs) make them an ideal candidate in offering sustained monitoring functions at reasonable cost over a wide area. To extend the functional lifetime of battery-operated sensor nodes, stringent sleep scheduling strategies with communication duty cycles running at sub-1% range are expected to be adopted. Although ultra-low communication duty cycles can cast a detrimental impact on sensing coverage and network connectivity, its effects can be mitigated with adaptive sleep scheduling, node deployment redundancy and multipath routing within the mesh WSN topology. This work proposes a cross-layer organizational approach based on sleep scheduling, called Sense-Sleep Trees (SS-Trees), that aims to harmonize the various engineering issues and provides a method to extend monitoring capabilities and operational lifetime of mesh-based WSNs engaged in wide-area surveillance applications. Various practical considerations such as sensing coverage requirements, duty cycling, transmission range assignment, data messaging, and protocol signalling are incorporated to demonstrate and evaluate the feasibility of the proposed design approach

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-Enabled Wireless Communications and Networking

The emerging massive density of human-held and machine-type nodes implies larger traffic deviatiolns in the future than we are facing today. In the future, the network will be characterized by a high degree of flexibility, allowing it to adapt smoothly, autonomously, and efficiently to the quickly changing traffic demands both in time and space. This flexibility cannot be achieved when the network’s infrastructure remains static. To this end, the topic of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) have enabled wireless communications, and networking has received increased attention. As mentioned above, the network must serve a massive density of nodes that can be either human-held (user devices) or machine-type nodes (sensors). If we wish to properly serve these nodes and optimize their data, a proper wireless connection is fundamental. This can be achieved by using UAV-enabled communication and networks. This Special Issue addresses the many existing issues that still exist to allow UAV-enabled wireless communications and networking to be properly rolled out

An energy-aware and QOS assured wireless multi-hop transmission protocol

A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science by researchThe Ad-hoc network is set up with multiple wireless devices without any pre-existing infrastructure. It usually supports best-effort traffic and occasionally some kinds of Quality of Service (QoS). However, there are some applications with real-time traffic requirements where deadlines must be met. To meet deadlines, the communication network has to support the timely delivery of inter-task messages. Furthermore, energy efficiency is a critical issue for battery-powered mobile devices in ad-hoc networks. Thus, A QoS guaranteed and energy-aware transmission scheme is one hot of research topics in the research area. The MSc research work is based on the idea of Real-Time Wireless Multi-hop Protocol (RT-WMP). RT-WMP is a well known protocol originally used in the robots control area. It allows wireless real-time traffic in relatively small mobile ad-hoc networks using the low-cost commercial IEEE 802.11 technology. The proposed scheme is based on a token-passing approach and message exchange is priority based. The idea of energy-aware routing mechanism is based on the AODV protocol. This energy-saving mechanism is analysed and simulated in our study as an extension of the RT-WMP. From the simulation results and analysis, it has been shown that adding energy-aware mechanism to RT-WMP is meaningful to optimise the performance of traffic on the network

Networks, Communication, and Computing Vol. 2

Networks, communications, and computing have become ubiquitous and inseparable parts of everyday life. This book is based on a Special Issue of the Algorithms journal, and it is devoted to the exploration of the many-faceted relationship of networks, communications, and computing. The included papers explore the current state-of-the-art research in these areas, with a particular interest in the interactions among the fields

DESIGN OF RELIABLE AND SUSTAINABLE WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS: CHALLENGES, PROTOCOLS AND CASE STUDIES

Integrated with the function of sensing, processing, and wireless communication, wireless sensors are attracting strong interest for a variety of monitoring and control applications. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been deployed for industrial and remote monitoring purposes. As energy shortage is a worldwide problem, more attention has been placed on incorporating energy harvesting devices in WSNs. The main objective of this research is to systematically study the design principles and technical approaches to address three key challenges in designing reliable and sustainable WSNs; namely, communication reliability, operation with extremely low and dynamic power sources, and multi-tier network architecture. Mathematical throughput models, sustainable WSN communication strategies, and multi-tier network architecture are studied in this research to address these challenges, leading to protocols for reliable communication, energy-efficient operation, and network planning for specific application requirements. To account for realistic operating conditions, the study has implemented three distinct WSN testbeds: a WSN attached to the high-speed rotating spindle of a turning lathe, a WSN powered by a microbial fuel cell based energy harvesting system, and a WSN with a multi-tier network architecture. With each testbed, models and protocols are extracted, verified and analyzed. Extensive research has studied low power WSNs and energy harvesting capabilities. Despite these efforts, some important questions have not been well understood. This dissertation addresses the following three dimensions of the challenge. First, for reliable communication protocol design, mathematical throughput or energy efficiency estimation models are essential, yet have not been investigated accounting for specific application environment characteristics and requirements. Second, for WSNs with energy harvesting power sources, most current networking protocols do not work efficiently with the systems considered in this dissertation, such as those powered by extremely low and dynamic energy sources. Third, for multi-tier wireless network system design, routing protocols that are adaptive to real-world network conditions have not been studied. This dissertation focuses on these questions and explores experimentally derived mathematical models for designing protocols to meet specific application requirements. The main contributions of this research are 1) for industrial wireless sensor systems with fast-changing but repetitive mobile conditions, understand the performance and optimal choice of reliable wireless sensor data transmission methods, 2) for ultra-low energy harvesting wireless sensor devices, design an energy neutral communication protocol, and 3) for distributed rural wireless sensor systems, understand the efficiency of realistic routing in a multi-tier wireless network. Altogether, knowledge derived from study of the systems, models, and protocols in this work fuels the establishment of a useful framework for designing future WSNs

Optimal Mission Planning of Autonomous Mobile Agents for Applications in Microgrids, Sensor Networks, and Military Reconnaissance

As technology advances, the use of collaborative autonomous mobile systems for various applications will become evermore prevalent. One interesting application of these multi-agent systems is for autonomous mobile microgrids. These systems will play an increasingly important role in applications such as military special operations for mobile ad-hoc power infrastructures and for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. In performing these operations with these autonomous energy assets, there is a crucial need to optimize their functionality according to their specific application and mission. Challenges arise in determining mission characteristics such as how each resource should operate, when, where, and for how long. This thesis explores solutions in determining optimal mission plans around the applications of autonomous mobile microgrids and resource scheduling with UGVs and UAVs. Optimal network connections, energy asset locations, and cabling trajectories are determined in the mobile microgrid application. The resource scheduling applications investigate the use of a UGV to recharge wireless sensors in a wireless sensor network. Optimal recharging of mobile distributed UAVs performing reconnaissance missions is also explored. With genetic algorithm solution approaches, the results show the proposed methods can provide reasonable a-priori mission plans, considering the applied constraints and objective functions in each application. The contributions of this thesis are: (1) The development and analysis of solution methodologies and mission simulators for a-priori mission plan development and testing, for applications in organizing and scheduling power delivery with mobile energy assets. Applying these methods results in (2) the development and analysis of reasonable a-priori mission plans for autonomous mobile microgrids/assets, in various scenarios. This work could be extended to include a more diverse set of heterogeneous agents and incorporate dynamic loads to provide power to

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Guiding readers through the basics of these rapidly emerging networks to more advanced concepts and future expectations, Mobile Ad hoc Networks: Current Status and Future Trends identifies and examines the most pressing research issues in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). Containing the contributions of leading researchers, industry professionals, and academics, this forward-looking reference provides an authoritative perspective of the state of the art in MANETs. The book includes surveys of recent publications that investigate key areas of interest such as limited resources and the mobility of mobile nodes. It considers routing, multicast, energy, security, channel assignment, and ensuring quality of service. Also suitable as a text for graduate students, the book is organized into three sections: Fundamentals of MANET Modeling and Simulation—Describes how MANETs operate and perform through simulations and models Communication Protocols of MANETs—Presents cutting-edge research on key issues, including MAC layer issues and routing in high mobility Future Networks Inspired By MANETs—Tackles open research issues and emerging trends Illustrating the role MANETs are likely to play in future networks, this book supplies the foundation and insight you will need to make your own contributions to the field. It includes coverage of routing protocols, modeling and simulations tools, intelligent optimization techniques to multicriteria routing, security issues in FHAMIPv6, connecting moving smart objects to the Internet, underwater sensor networks, wireless mesh network architecture and protocols, adaptive routing provision using Bayesian inference, and adaptive flow control in transport layer using genetic algorithms

Joint optimization for wireless sensor networks in critical infrastructures

Energy optimization represents one of the main goals in wireless sensor network design where a typical sensor node has usually operated by making use of the battery with limited-capacity. In this thesis, the following main problems are addressed: first, the joint optimization of the energy consumption and the delay for conventional wireless sensor networks is presented. Second, the joint optimization of the information quality and energy consumption of the wireless sensor networks based structural health monitoring is outlined. Finally, the multi-objectives optimization of the former problem under several constraints is shown. In the first main problem, the following points are presented: we introduce a joint multi-objective optimization formulation for both energy and delay for most sensor nodes in various applications. Then, we present the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker analysis to demonstrate the optimal solution for each formulation. We introduce a method of determining the knee on the Pareto front curve, which meets the network designer interest for focusing on more practical solutions. The sensor node placement optimization has a significant role in wireless sensor networks, especially in structural health monitoring. In the second main problem of this work, the existing work optimizes the node placement and routing separately (by performing routing after carrying out the node placement). However, this approach does not guarantee the optimality of the overall solution. A joint optimization of sensor placement, routing, and flow assignment is introduced and is solved using mixed-integer programming modelling. In the third main problem of this study, we revisit the placement problem in wireless sensor networks of structural health monitoring by using multi-objective optimization. Furthermore, we take into consideration more constraints that were not taken into account before. This includes the maximum capacity per link and the node-disjoint routing. Since maximum capacity constraint is essential to study the data delivery over limited-capacity wireless links, node-disjoint routing is necessary to achieve load balancing and longer wireless sensor networks lifetime. We list the results of the previous problems, and then we evaluate the corresponding results