Mitigating interference coexistence issues in wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) comprise a collection of portable, wireless, interconnected sensors deployed over an area to monitor and report a variable of interest; example applications include wildlife monitoring and home automation systems. In order to cater for long network lifetimes without the need for regular maintenance, energy efficiency is paramount, alongside link reliability. To minimise energy consumption, WSN MAC protocols employ Clear Channel Assessment (CCA), to transmit and receive packets. For transmitting, CCA is used beforehand to determine if the channel is clear. For receiving, CCA is used to decide if the radio should wake up to receive an incoming transmission, or be left in a power efficient sleep state. Current CCA implementations cannot determine the device type occupying the media, leaving nodes unable to differentiate between WSN traffic and arbitrary interference from other devices, such as WiFi. This affects link performance as packet loss increases, and energy efficiency as the radio is idly kept in receive mode. To permit WSN deployments in these environments, it is necessary to be able to gauge the effect of interference. While tools exist to model and predict packet loss in these conditions, it is currently not possible to do the same for energy consumption. This would be beneficial, as parameters of the network could be tuned to meet lifetime and energy requirements. In this thesis, methods to predict energy consumption of WSN MAC protocols are presented. These are shown to accurately estimate the idle listening from environmental interference measurements. Further, in order to mitigate the effects of interference, it would be beneficial for a CCA check to determine the device type occupying the media. For example, transmitters may select back-off strategies depending on the observed channel occupier. Receivers could be made more efficient by ignoring all non-WSN traffic, staying awake only after detecting an incoming WSN transmission. P-DCCA is a novel method presented in this thesis to achieve this. Transmitters vary the output power of the radio while the packet is being sent. Receivers are able to identify signals with this characteristic power variation, enabling a P-DCCA check to reveal if the medium is currently occupied by WSN traffic or other interference. P-DCCA is implemented in a common WSN MAC protocol, and is shown to achieve high detection accuracy, and to improve energy efficiency and packet delivery in interference environments

Heterogeneous integration of optical wireless communications within next generation networks

Unprecedented traffic growth is expected in future wireless networks and new technologies will be needed to satisfy demand. Optical wireless (OW) communication offers vast unused spectrum and high area spectral efficiency. In this work, optical cells are envisioned as supplementary access points within heterogeneous RF/OW networks. These networks opportunistically offload traffic to optical cells while utilizing the RF cell for highly mobile devices and devices that lack a reliable OW connection. Visible light communication (VLC) is considered as a potential OW technology due to the increasing adoption of solid state lighting for indoor illumination. Results of this work focus on a full system view of RF/OW HetNets with three primary areas of analysis. First, the need for network densication beyond current RF small cell implementations is evaluated. A media independent model is developed and results are presented that provide motivation for the adoption of hyper dense small cells as complementary components within multi-tier networks. Next, the relationships between RF and OW constraints and link characterization parameters are evaluated in order to define methods for fair comparison when user-centric channel selection criteria are used. RF and OW noise and interference characterization techniques are compared and common OW characterization models are demonstrated to show errors in excess of 100x when dominant interferers are present. Finally, dynamic characteristics of hyper dense OW networks are investigated in order to optimize traffic distribution from a network-centric perspective. A Kalman Filter model is presented to predict device motion for improved channel selection and a novel OW range expansion technique is presented that dynamically alters coverage regions of OW cells by 50%. In addition to analytical results, the dissertation describes two tools that have been created for evaluation of RF/OW HetNets. A communication and lighting simulation toolkit has been developed for modeling and evaluation of environments with VLC-enabled luminaires. The toolkit enhances an iterative site based impulse response simulator model to utilize GPU acceleration and achieves 10x speedup over the previous model. A software defined testbed for OW has also been proposed and applied. The testbed implements a VLC link and a heterogeneous RF/VLC connection that demonstrates the RF/OW HetNet concept as proof of concept

Sub-GHz LPWAN network coexistence, management and virtualization : an overview and open research challenges

The IoT domain is characterized by many applications that require low-bandwidth communications over a long range, at a low cost and at low power. Low power wide area networks (LPWANs) fulfill these requirements by using sub-GHz radio frequencies (typically 433 or 868 MHz) with typical transmission ranges in the order of 1 up to 50 km. As a result, a single base station can cover large areas and can support high numbers of connected devices (> 1000 per base station). Notorious initiatives in this domain are LoRa, Sigfox and the upcoming IEEE 802.11ah (or "HaLow") standard. Although these new technologies have the potential to significantly impact many IoT deployments, the current market is very fragmented and many challenges exists related to deployment, scalability, management and coexistence aspects, making adoption of these technologies difficult for many companies. To remedy this, this paper proposes a conceptual framework to improve the performance of LPWAN networks through in-network optimization, cross-technology coexistence and cooperation and virtualization of management functions. In addition, the paper gives an overview of state of the art solutions and identifies open challenges for each of these aspects

Communications protocols for wireless sensor networks in perturbed environment

This thesis is mainly in the Smart Grid (SG) domain. SGs improve the safety of electrical networks and allow a more adapted use of electricity storage, available in a limited way. SGs also increase overall energy efficiency by reducing peak consumption. The use of this technology is the most appropriate solution because it allows more efficient energy management. In this context, manufacturers such as Hydro-Quebec deploy sensor networks in the nerve centers to control major equipment. To reduce deployment costs and cabling complexity, the option of a wireless sensor network seems the most obvious solution. However, deploying a sensor network requires in-depth knowledge of the environment. High voltages substations are strategic points in the power grid and generate impulse noise that can degrade the performance of wireless communications. The works in this thesis are focused on the development of high performance communication protocols for the profoundly disturbed environments. For this purpose, we have proposed an approach based on the concatenation of rank metric and convolutional coding with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. This technique is very efficient in reducing the bursty nature of impulsive noise while having a quite low level of complexity. Another solution based on a multi-antenna system is also designed. We have proposed a cooperative closed-loop coded MIMO system based on rank metric code and max−dmin precoder. The second technique is also an optimal solution for both improving the reliability of the system and energy saving in wireless sensor networks

Research on efficiency and privacy issues in wireless communication

Wireless spectrum is a limited resource that must be used efficiently. It is also a broadcast medium, hence, additional procedures are required to maintain communication over the wireless spectrum private. In this thesis, we investigate three key issues related to efficient use and privacy of wireless spectrum use. First, we propose GAVEL, a truthful short-term auction mechanism that enables efficient use of the wireless spectrum through the licensed shared access model. Second, we propose CPRecycle, an improved Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) receiver that retrieves useful information from the cyclic prefix for interference mitigation thus improving spectral efficiency. Third and finally, we propose WiFi Glass, an attack vector on home WiFi networks to infer private information about home occupants. First we consider, spectrum auctions. Existing short-term spectrum auctions do not satisfy all the features required for a heterogeneous spectrum market. We discover that this is due to the underlying auction format, the sealed bid auction. We propose GAVEL, a truthful auction mechanism, that is based on the ascending bid auction format, that avoids the pitfalls of existing auction mechanisms that are based on the sealed bid auction format. Using extensive simulations we observe that GAVEL can achieve better performance than existing mechanisms. Second, we study the use of cyclic prefix in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing. The cyclic prefix does contain useful information in the presence of interference. We discover that while the signal of interest is redundant in the cyclic prefix, the interference component varies significantly. We use this insight to design CPRecycle, an improved OFDM receiver that is capable of using the information in the cyclic prefix to mitigate various types of interference. It improves spectral efficiency by decoding packets in the presence of interference. CPRecycle require changes to the OFDM receiver and can be deployed in most networks today. Finally, home WiFi networks are considered private when encryption is enabled using WPA2. However, experiments conducted in real homes, show that the wireless activity on the home network can be used to infer occupancy and activity states such as sleeping and watching television. With this insight, we propose WiFi Glass, an attack vector that can be used to infer occupancy and activity states (limited to three activity classes), using only the passively sniffed WiFi signal from the home environment. Evaluation with real data shows that in most of the cases, only about 15 minutes of sniffed WiFi signal is required to infer private information, highlighting the need for countermeasures

Design of an Adaptive Frequency Hopping Algorithm Based On Probabilistic Channel Usage

Dealing with interference in the 2.4 GHz ISM band is of paramount importance due to an increase in the number of operating devices. For instance systems based on Bluetooth low energy technology are gaining lots of momentum due to their small size, reasonable cost and very low power consumptions. Thus the 2.4 GHz ISM band is becoming very hostile. Bluetooth specification enables the use of adaptive frequency hopping to improve performance in the presence of interference. This technique avoids the congested portions of the ISM band, however as the number of interferers increases for a given geographical environment, a greater number of bad channels are removed from the adapted hopping sequence. This results in longer channel occupancy, and consequently higher probability of collisions with coexisting devices, degrading their operation. At CoSa Research Group a novel algorithm, based on probabilistic channel usage of all channels (good and bad), is developed. The scheme is named Smooth Adaptive Frequency Hopping (SAFH) and uses an exponential smoothing filter to predict the conditions of the radio spectrum. Based on the predicted values, different usage probabilities are assigned to the channels, such as good channels are used more often than bad ones. The discrete probability distribution generated is then mapped to a set of frequencies, used for hopping. MATLAB/SIMULINK was used to investigate the performance of SAFH, in the presence of different types of interfering devices such as 802.11b , 802.15.4 and 802.15.1. Simulation study under different scenarios show, that our developed algorithm outperforms the conventional random frequency hopping as well as other adaptive hopping schemes. SAFH achieves lower average frame error rate and responds fast to changes in the channel conditions. Moreover it experiences smooth operation due to the exponential smoothing filter

Quantifying, generating and mitigating radio interference in Low-Power Wireless Networks

Doctoral Programme in Telecommunication - MAP-teleRadio interference a ects the performance of low-power wireless networks (LPWN), leading to packet loss and reduced energy-e ciency, among other problems. Reliability of communications is key to expand application domains for LPWN. Since most LPWN operate in the license-free Industrial Scienti c and Medical (ISM) bands and hence share the spectrum with other wireless technologies, addressing interference is an important challenge. In this context, we present JamLab: a low-cost infrastructure to augment existing LPWN testbeds with accurate interference generation in LPWN testbeds, useful to experimentally investigate the impact of interference on LPWN protocols. We investigate how interference in a shared wireless medium can be mitigated by performing wireless channel energy sensing in low-cost and low-power hardware. For this pupose, we introduce a novel channel quality metric|dubbed CQ|based on availability of the channel over time, which meaningfully quanti es interference. Using data collected from a number of Wi-Fi networks operating in a library building, we show that our metric has strong correlation with the Packet Reception Rate (PRR). We then explore dynamic radio resource adaptation techniques|namely packet size and error correction code overhead optimisations|based on instantaneous spectrum usage as quanti ed by our CQ metric. To conclude, we study emerging fast fading in the composite channel under constructive baseband interference, which has been recently introduced in low-power wireless networks as a promising technique. We show the resulting composite signal becomes vulnerable in the presence of noise, leading to signi cant deterioration of the link, whenever the carriers have similar amplitudes. Overall, our results suggest that the proposed tools and techniques have the potential to improve performance in LPWN operating in the unlicensed spectrum, improving coexistence while maintaining energy-e ciency. Future work includes implementation in next generation platforms, which provides superior computational capacity and more exible radio chip designs.A interferência de r adio afeta o desempenho das redes de comunicação sem o de baixo consumo - low-power wireless networks (LPWN), o que provoca perdas de pacotes, diminuição da e ciência energética, entre outros problemas. A contabilidade das comunicações e importante para a expansão e adoção das LPWN nos diversos domínios de potencial aplicação. Visto que a grande maioria das LPWN partilham o espectro radioelétrico com outras redes sem o, a interferência torna-se um desafio importante. Neste contexto, apresentamos o JamLab: uma infraestrutura de baixo custo para estender a funcionalidade dos ambientes laboratoriais para o estudo experimental do desempenho das LPWN sob interferência. Resultando, assim, numa ferramenta essencial para a adequada verificação dos protocolos de comunicações das LPWN. Para al em disso, a Tese introduz uma nova técnica para avaliar o ambiente radioelétrico e demostra a sua utilização para gerir recursos disponíveis no transceptor rádio, o que permite melhorar a fiabilidade das comunicações, nomeadamente nas plataformas de baixo consumo, garantindo e ciência energética. Assim, apresentamos uma nova métrica| denominada CQ - concebida especificamente para quantificar a qualidade do canal r adio, com base na sua disponibilidade temporal. Mediante dados adquiridos em v arias redes sem o Wi-Fi, instaladas no edifício de uma biblioteca universitária, demonstra-se que esta métrica tem um ótimo desempenho, evidenciando uma elevada correlação com a taxa de receção de pacotes. Investiga-se ainda a potencialidade da nossa métrica CQ para gerir dinamicamente recursos de radio como tamanho de pacote e taxa de correlação de erros dos códigos - baseado em medições instantâneas da qualidade do canal de radio. Posteriormente, estuda-se um modelo de canal composto, sob interferência construtiva de banda-base. A interferência construtiva de banda-base tem sido introduzida recentemente nas LPWN, evidenciando ser uma técnica prometedora no que diz respeito à baixa latência e à contabilidade das comunicações. Na Tese investiga-se o caso crítico em que o sinal composto se torna vulnerável na presença de ruído, o que acaba por deteriorar a qualidade da ligação, no caso em que as amplitudes das distintas portadoras presentes no receptor sejam similares. Finalmente, os resultados obtidos sugerem que as ferramentas e as técnicas propostas têm potencial para melhorar o desempenho das LPWN, num cenário de partilha do espectro radioelétrico com outras redes, melhorando a coexistência e mantendo e ciência energética. Prevê-se como trabalho futuro a implementação das técnicas propostas em plataformas de próxima geração, com maior flexibilidade e poder computacional para o processamento dos sinais rádio.This work was supported by FCT (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) and by ESF (European Social Fund) through POPH (Portuguese Human Potential Operational Program), under PhD grant SFRH/BD/62198/2009; also by FCT under project ref. FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-014922 (MASQOTS), and EU through the FP7 programme, under grant FP7-ICT-224053 (CONET)

Practical interference mitigation for Wi-Fi systems

Wi-Fi's popularity is also its Achilles' heel since in the dense deployments of multiple Wi-Fi networks typical in urban environments, concurrent transmissions interfere. The advent of networked devices with multiple antennas allows new ways to improve Wi-Fi's performance: a host can align the phases of the signals either received at or transmitted from its antennas so as to either maximize the power of the signal of interest through beamforming or minimize the power of interference through nulling. Theory predicts that these techniques should enable concurrent transmissions by proximal sender-receiver pairs, thus improving capacity. Yet practical challenges remain. Hardware platform limitations can prevent precise measurement of the wireless channel, or limit the accuracy of beamforming and nulling. The interaction between nulling and Wi-Fi's OFDM modulation, which transmits tranches of a packet's bits on distinct subcarriers, is subtle and can sacrifice the capacity gain expected from nulling. And in deployments where Wi-Fi networks are independently administered, APs must efficiently share channel measurements and coordinate their transmissions to null effectively. In this thesis, I design and experimentally evaluate beamforming and nulling techniques for use in Wi-Fi networks that address the aforementioned practical challenges. My contributions include: - Cone of Silence (CoS): a system that allows a Wi-Fi AP equipped with a phased-array antenna but only a single 802.11g radio to mitigate interference from senders other than its intended one, thus boosting throughput; - Cooperative Power Allocation (COPA): a system that efficiently shares channel measurements and coordinates transmissions between independent APs, and cooperatively allocates power so as to render received power across OFDM subcarriers flat at each AP's receiver, thus boosting throughput; - Power Allocation for Distributed MIMO (PADM): a system that leverages intelligent power allocation to mitigate inter-stream interference in distributed MIMO wireless networks, thus boosting throughput