Adaptive Resource Allocation Algorithms For Data And Energy Integrated Networks Supporting Internet of Things

According to the forecast, there are around 2.1 billion IoT devices connected to the network by 2022. The rapidly increased IoT devices bring enormous pressure to the energy management work as most of them are battery-powered gadgets. What’s more, in some specific scenarios, the IoT nodes are fitted in some extreme environment. For example, a large-scale IoT pressure sensor system is deployed underneath the floor to detect people moving across the floor. A density-viscosity sensor is deployed inside the fermenting vat to discriminate variations in density and viscosity for monitoring the wine fermentation. A strain distribution wireless sensor for detecting the crack formation of the bridge is deployed underneath the bridge and attached near the welded part of the steel. It is difficult for people to have an access to the extreme environment. Hence, the energy management work, namely, replacing batteries for the rapidly increased IoT sensors in the extreme environment brings more challenges. In order to reduce the frequency of changing batteries, the thesis proposes a self-management Data and Energy Integrated Network (DEIN) system, which designs a stable and controllable ambient RF resource to charge the battery-less IoT wireless devices. It embraces an adaptive energy management mechanism for automatically maintaining the energy level of the battery-less IoT wireless devices, which always keeps the devices within a workable voltage range that is from 2.9 to 4.0 volts. Based on the DEIN system, RF energy transmission is achieved by transmitting the designed packets with enhanced transmission power. However, it partly occupies the bandwidth which was only used for wireless information transmission. Hence, a scheduling cycle mechanism is proposed in the thesis for organizing the RF energy and wireless information transmission in separate time slots. In addition, a bandwidth allocation algorithm is proposed to minimize the bandwidth for RF energy transmission in order to maximize the throughput of wireless information. To harvest the RF energy, the RF-to-DC energy conversion is essential at the receiver side. According to the existing technologies, the hardware design of the RF-to-DC energy converter is normally realized by the voltage rectifier which is structured by multiple Schottky diodes and capacitors. Research proves that a maximum of 84% RF-to-DC conversion efficiency is obtained by comparing a variety of different wireless band for transmitting RF energy. Furthermore, there is energy loss in the air during transmitting the RF energy to the receiver. Moreover, the circuital loss happens when the harvested energy is utilized by electronic components. Hence, how to improve the efficiency of RF energy utilization is considered in the thesis. According to the scenario proposed in the thesis, the harvested energy is mainly consumed for uplink transmission. a resource allocation algorithm is proposed to minimize the system’s energy consumption per bit of uplink data. It works out the optimal transmission power for RF energy as well as the bandwidth allocated for RF energy and wireless information transmission. Referring to the existing RF energy transmission and harvesting application on the market, the Powercast uses the supercapacitor to preserve the harvested RF energy. Due to the lack of self-control energy management mechanism for the embedded sensor, the harvested energy is consumed quickly, and the system has to keep transmitting RF energy. Existing jobs have proposed energy-saving methods for IoT wireless devices such as how to put them in sleep mode and how to reduce transmission power. However,they are not adaptive, and that would be an issue for a practical application. In the thesis, an energy-saving algorithm is designed to adaptively manage the transmission power of the device for uplink data transmission. The algorithm balances the trade-off between the transmission power and the packet loss rate. It finds the optimal transmission power to minimize the average energy cost for uplink data transmission, which saves the harvested energy to reduce the frequency of RF energy transmission to free more bandwidth for wireless information

Practical Experiences of a Smart Livestock Location Monitoring System leveraging GNSS, LoRaWAN and Cloud Services.

Livestock farming is, in most cases in Europe, unsupervised, thus making it difficult to ensure adequate control of the position of the animals for the improvement of animal welfare. In addition, the geographical areas involved in livestock grazing usually have difficult access with harsh orography and lack of communications infrastructure, thus the need to provide a low-power livestock localization and monitoring system is of paramount importance, which is crucial not for a sustainable agriculture, but also for the protection of native breeds and meats thanks to their controlled supervision. In this context, this work presents an Internet of things (IoT)-based system integrating low-power wide area (LPWA) technology, cloud and virtualization services to provide real-time livestock location monitoring. Taking into account the constraints coming from the environment in terms of energy supply and network connectivity, our proposed system is based on a wearable device equipped with inertial sensors, Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver and LoRaWAN transceiver, which can provide a satisfactory compromise between performance, cost and energy consumption. At first, this article provides the state-of-the-art localization techniques and technologies applied to smart livestock. Then, we proceed to provide the hardware and firmware co-design to achieve very low energy consumption, thus providing a significant positive impact to the battery life. The proposed platform has been evaluated in a pilot test in the Northern part of Italy, evaluating different configurations in terms of sampling period, experimental duration and number of devices. The results are analyzed and discussed for packe delivery ratio, energy consumption, localization accuracy, battery discharge measurement and delay

On a Joint Physical Layer and Medium Access Control Sublayer Design for Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks and Applications

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are distributed networks comprising small sensing devices equipped with a processor, memory, power source, and often with the capability for short range wireless communication. These networks are used in various applications, and have created interest in WSN research and commercial uses, including industrial, scientific, household, military, medical and environmental domains. These initiatives have also been stimulated by the finalisation of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, which defines the medium access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) for low-rate wireless personal area networks (LR-WPAN). Future applications may require large WSNs consisting of huge numbers of inexpensive wireless sensor nodes with limited resources (energy, bandwidth), operating in harsh environmental conditions. WSNs must perform reliably despite novel resource constraints including limited bandwidth, channel errors, and nodes that have limited operating energy. Improving resource utilisation and quality-of-service (QoS), in terms of reliable connectivity and energy efficiency, are major challenges in WSNs. Hence, the development of new WSN applications with severe resource constraints will require innovative solutions to overcome the above issues as well as improving the robustness of network components, and developing sustainable and cost effective implementation models. The main purpose of this research is to investigate methods for improving the performance of WSNs to maintain reliable network connectivity, scalability and energy efficiency. The study focuses on the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC/PHY layers and the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) based networks. First, transmission power control (TPC) is investigated in multi and single-hop WSNs using typical hardware platform parameters via simulation and numerical analysis. A novel approach to testing TPC at the physical layer is developed, and results show that contrary to what has been reported from previous studies, in multi-hop networks TPC does not save energy. Next, the network initialization/self-configuration phase is addressed through investigation of the 802.15.4 MAC beacon interval setting and the number of associating nodes, in terms of association delay with the coordinator. The results raise doubt whether that the association energy consumption will outweigh the benefit of duty cycle power management for larger beacon intervals as the number of associating nodes increases. The third main contribution of this thesis is a new cross layer (PHY-MAC) design to improve network energy efficiency, reliability and scalability by minimising packet collisions due to hidden nodes. This is undertaken in response to findings in this thesis on the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC performance in the presence of hidden nodes. Specifically, simulation results show that it is the random backoff exponent that is of paramount importance for resolving collisions and not the number of times the channel is sensed before transmitting. However, the random backoff is ineffective in the presence of hidden nodes. The proposed design uses a new algorithm to increase the sensing coverage area, and therefore greatly reduces the chance of packet collisions due to hidden nodes. Moreover, the design uses a new dynamic transmission power control (TPC) to further reduce energy consumption and interference. The above proposed changes can smoothly coexist with the legacy 802.15.4 CSMA/CA. Finally, an improved two dimensional discrete time Markov chain model is proposed to capture the performance of the slotted 802.15.4 CSMA/CA. This model rectifies minor issues apparent in previous studies. The relationship derived for the successful transmission probability, throughput and average energy consumption, will provide better performance predictions. It will also offer greater insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the MAC operation, and possible enhancement opportunities. Overall, the work presented in this thesis provides several significant insights into WSN performance improvements with both existing protocols and newly designed protocols. Finally, some of the numerous challenges for future research are described