Energy-efficient wireless communication

In this chapter we present an energy-efficient highly adaptive network interface architecture and a novel data link layer protocol for wireless networks that provides Quality of Service (QoS) support for diverse traffic types. Due to the dynamic nature of wireless networks, adaptations in bandwidth scheduling and error control are necessary to achieve energy efficiency and an acceptable quality of service. In our approach we apply adaptability through all layers of the protocol stack, and provide feedback to the applications. In this way the applications can adapt the data streams, and the network protocols can adapt the communication parameters

Wireless industrial monitoring and control networks: the journey so far and the road ahead

While traditional wired communication technologies have played a crucial role in industrial monitoring and control networks over the past few decades, they are increasingly proving to be inadequate to meet the highly dynamic and stringent demands of today’s industrial applications, primarily due to the very rigid nature of wired infrastructures. Wireless technology, however, through its increased pervasiveness, has the potential to revolutionize the industry, not only by mitigating the problems faced by wired solutions, but also by introducing a completely new class of applications. While present day wireless technologies made some preliminary inroads in the monitoring domain, they still have severe limitations especially when real-time, reliable distributed control operations are concerned. This article provides the reader with an overview of existing wireless technologies commonly used in the monitoring and control industry. It highlights the pros and cons of each technology and assesses the degree to which each technology is able to meet the stringent demands of industrial monitoring and control networks. Additionally, it summarizes mechanisms proposed by academia, especially serving critical applications by addressing the real-time and reliability requirements of industrial process automation. The article also describes certain key research problems from the physical layer communication for sensor networks and the wireless networking perspective that have yet to be addressed to allow the successful use of wireless technologies in industrial monitoring and control networks

Increasing resilience of ATM networks using traffic monitoring and automated anomaly analysis

Systematic network monitoring can be the cornerstone for the dependable operation of safety-critical distributed systems. In this paper, we present our vision for informed anomaly detection through network monitoring and resilience measurements to increase the operators' visibility of ATM communication networks. We raise the question of how to determine the optimal level of automation in this safety-critical context, and we present a novel passive network monitoring system that can reveal network utilisation trends and traffic patterns in diverse timescales. Using network measurements, we derive resilience metrics and visualisations to enhance the operators' knowledge of the network and traffic behaviour, and allow for network planning and provisioning based on informed what-if analysis

Building Programmable Wireless Networks: An Architectural Survey

In recent times, there have been a lot of efforts for improving the ossified Internet architecture in a bid to sustain unstinted growth and innovation. A major reason for the perceived architectural ossification is the lack of ability to program the network as a system. This situation has resulted partly from historical decisions in the original Internet design which emphasized decentralized network operations through co-located data and control planes on each network device. The situation for wireless networks is no different resulting in a lot of complexity and a plethora of largely incompatible wireless technologies. The emergence of "programmable wireless networks", that allow greater flexibility, ease of management and configurability, is a step in the right direction to overcome the aforementioned shortcomings of the wireless networks. In this paper, we provide a broad overview of the architectures proposed in literature for building programmable wireless networks focusing primarily on three popular techniques, i.e., software defined networks, cognitive radio networks, and virtualized networks. This survey is a self-contained tutorial on these techniques and its applications. We also discuss the opportunities and challenges in building next-generation programmable wireless networks and identify open research issues and future research directions.Comment: 19 page

ATM-based TH-SSMA network for multimedia PCS

Personal communications services (PCS) promise to provide a variety of information exchanges among users with any type of mobility, at any time, in any place, through any available device. To achieve this ambitious goal, two of the major challenges in the system design are: i) to provide a high-speed wireless subsystem with large capacity and acceptable quality-of-service (QoS) and ii) to design a network architecture capable of supporting multimedia traffic and various kinds of user mobility. A time-hopping spread-spectrum wireless communication system called ultra-wide bandwidth (UWB) radio is used to provide communications that are low power, high data rate, fade resistant, and relatively shadow free in a dense multipath environment. Receiver-signal processing of UWB radio is described, and performance of such communications systems, in terms of multiple-access capability, is estimated under ideal multiple-access channel conditions. A UWB-signal propagation experiment is performed using the bandwidth in excess of 1 GHz in a typical modern office building in order to characterize the UWB-signal propagation channel. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the UWB radio and its robustness in a dense multipath environment. In this paper, an ATM network is used as the backbone network due to its high bandwidth, fast switching capability, flexibility, and well-developed infrastructure. To minimize the impact caused by user mobility on the system performance, a hierarchical network-control architecture is postulated. A wireless virtual circuit (WVC) concept is proposed to improve the transmission efficiency and simplify the network control in the wireless subsystem. The key advantage of this network architecture and WVC concept is that the handoff can be done locally most of the time, due to the localized behavior of PCS users.published_or_final_versio

Hybrid Coding Technique for Pulse Detection in an Optical Time Domain Reflectometer

The paper introduces a novel hybrid coding technique for improved pulse detection in an optical time domain reflectometer. The hybrid schemes combines Simplex codes with signal averaging to articulate a very sophisticated coding technique that considerably reduces the processing time to extract specified coding gains in comparison to the existing techniques. The paper quantifies the coding gain of the hybrid scheme mathematically and provide simulative results in direct agreement with the theoretical performance. Furthermore, the hybrid scheme has been tested on our self-developed OTDR