Markov Decision Processes with Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of autonomous and resource-limited devices. The devices cooperate to monitor one or more physical phenomena within an area of interest. WSNs operate as stochastic systems because of randomness in the monitored environments. For long service time and low maintenance cost, WSNs require adaptive and robust methods to address data exchange, topology formulation, resource and power optimization, sensing coverage and object detection, and security challenges. In these problems, sensor nodes are to make optimized decisions from a set of accessible strategies to achieve design goals. This survey reviews numerous applications of the Markov decision process (MDP) framework, a powerful decision-making tool to develop adaptive algorithms and protocols for WSNs. Furthermore, various solution methods are discussed and compared to serve as a guide for using MDPs in WSNs

Distributed Database Management Techniques for Wireless Sensor Networks

Authors and/or their employers shall have the right to post the accepted version of IEEE-copyrighted articles on their own personal servers or the servers of their institutions or employers without permission from IEEE, provided that the posted version includes a prominently displayed IEEE copyright notice and, when published, a full citation to the original IEEE publication, including a link to the article abstract in IEEE Xplore. Authors shall not post the final, published versions of their papers.In sensor networks, the large amount of data generated by sensors greatly influences the lifetime of the network. In order to manage this amount of sensed data in an energy-efficient way, new methods of storage and data query are needed. In this way, the distributed database approach for sensor networks is proved as one of the most energy-efficient data storage and query techniques. This paper surveys the state of the art of the techniques used to manage data and queries in wireless sensor networks based on the distributed paradigm. A classification of these techniques is also proposed. The goal of this work is not only to present how data and query management techniques have advanced nowadays, but also show their benefits and drawbacks, and to identify open issues providing guidelines for further contributions in this type of distributed architectures.This work was partially supported by the Instituto de Telcomunicacoes, Next Generation Networks and Applications Group (NetGNA), Portugal, by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion, through the Plan Nacional de I+D+i 2008-2011 in the Subprograma de Proyectos de Investigacion Fundamental, project TEC2011-27516, by the Polytechnic University of Valencia, though the PAID-05-12 multidisciplinary projects, by Government of Russian Federation, Grant 074-U01, and by National Funding from the FCT-Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia through the Pest-OE/EEI/LA0008/2013 Project.Diallo, O.; Rodrigues, JJPC.; Sene, M.; Lloret, J. (2013). Distributed Database Management Techniques for Wireless Sensor Networks. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. PP(99):1-17. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2013.207S117PP9

Towards Spatial Queries over Phenomena in Sensor Networks

Today, technology developments enable inexpensive production and deployment of tiny sensing and computing nodes. Networked through wireless radio, such senor nodes form a new platform, wireless sensor networks, which provide novel ability to monitor spatiotemporally continuous phenomena. By treating a wireless sensor network as a database system, users can pose SQL-based queries over phenomena without needing to program detailed sensor node operations. DBMS-internally, intelligent and energyefficient data collection and processing algorithms have to be implemented to support spatial query processing over sensor networks. This dissertation proposes spatial query support for two views of continuous phenomena: field-based and object-based. A field-based view of continuous phenomena depicts them as a value distribution over a geographical area. However, due to the discrete and comparatively sparse distribution of sensor nodes, estimation methods are necessary to generate a field-based query result, and it has to be computed collaboratively ‘in-the-network’ due to energy constraints. This dissertation proposes SWOP, an in-network algorithm using Gaussian Kernel estimation. The key contribution is the use of a small number of Hermite coefficients to approximate the Gaussian Kernel function for sub-clustered sensor nodes, and processes the estimation result efficiently. An object-based view of continuous phenomena is interested in aspects such as the boundary of an ‘interesting region’ (e.g. toxic plume). This dissertation presents NED, which provides object boundary detection in sensor networks. NED encodes partial event estimation results based on confidence levels into optimized, variable length messages exchanged locally among neighboring sensor nodes to save communication cost. Therefore, sensor nodes detect objects and boundaries based on moving averages to eliminate noise effects and enhance detection quality. Furthermore, the dissertation proposes the SNAKE-based approach, which uses deformable curves to track the spatiotemporal changes of such objects incrementally in sensor networks. In the proposed algorithm, only neighboring nodes exchange messages to maintain the curve structures. Based on in-network tracking of deformable curves, other types of spatial and spatiotemporal properties of objects, such as area, can be provided by the sensor network. The experimental results proved that our approaches are resource friendly within the constrained sensor networks, while providing high quality query results

EC-CENTRIC: An Energy- and Context-Centric Perspective on IoT Systems and Protocol Design

The radio transceiver of an IoT device is often where most of the energy is consumed. For this reason, most research so far has focused on low power circuit and energy efficient physical layer designs, with the goal of reducing the average energy per information bit required for communication. While these efforts are valuable per se, their actual effectiveness can be partially neutralized by ill-designed network, processing and resource management solutions, which can become a primary factor of performance degradation, in terms of throughput, responsiveness and energy efficiency. The objective of this paper is to describe an energy-centric and context-aware optimization framework that accounts for the energy impact of the fundamental functionalities of an IoT system and that proceeds along three main technical thrusts: 1) balancing signal-dependent processing techniques (compression and feature extraction) and communication tasks; 2) jointly designing channel access and routing protocols to maximize the network lifetime; 3) providing self-adaptability to different operating conditions through the adoption of suitable learning architectures and of flexible/reconfigurable algorithms and protocols. After discussing this framework, we present some preliminary results that validate the effectiveness of our proposed line of action, and show how the use of adaptive signal processing and channel access techniques allows an IoT network to dynamically tune lifetime for signal distortion, according to the requirements dictated by the application

Wireless Sensor Networks

The aim of this book is to present few important issues of WSNs, from the application, design and technology points of view. The book highlights power efficient design issues related to wireless sensor networks, the existing WSN applications, and discusses the research efforts being undertaken in this field which put the reader in good pace to be able to understand more advanced research and make a contribution in this field for themselves. It is believed that this book serves as a comprehensive reference for graduate and undergraduate senior students who seek to learn latest development in wireless sensor networks

Performance assessment of real-time data management on wireless sensor networks

Technological advances in recent years have allowed the maturity of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), which aim at performing environmental monitoring and data collection. This sort of network is composed of hundreds, thousands or probably even millions of tiny smart computers known as wireless sensor nodes, which may be battery powered, equipped with sensors, a radio transceiver, a Central Processing Unit (CPU) and some memory. However due to the small size and the requirements of low-cost nodes, these sensor node resources such as processing power, storage and especially energy are very limited. Once the sensors perform their measurements from the environment, the problem of data storing and querying arises. In fact, the sensors have restricted storage capacity and the on-going interaction between sensors and environment results huge amounts of data. Techniques for data storage and query in WSN can be based on either external storage or local storage. The external storage, called warehousing approach, is a centralized system on which the data gathered by the sensors are periodically sent to a central database server where user queries are processed. The local storage, in the other hand called distributed approach, exploits the capabilities of sensors calculation and the sensors act as local databases. The data is stored in a central database server and in the devices themselves, enabling one to query both. The WSNs are used in a wide variety of applications, which may perform certain operations on collected sensor data. However, for certain applications, such as real-time applications, the sensor data must closely reflect the current state of the targeted environment. However, the environment changes constantly and the data is collected in discreet moments of time. As such, the collected data has a temporal validity, and as time advances, it becomes less accurate, until it does not reflect the state of the environment any longer. Thus, these applications must query and analyze the data in a bounded time in order to make decisions and to react efficiently, such as industrial automation, aviation, sensors network, and so on. In this context, the design of efficient real-time data management solutions is necessary to deal with both time constraints and energy consumption. This thesis studies the real-time data management techniques for WSNs. It particularly it focuses on the study of the challenges in handling real-time data storage and query for WSNs and on the efficient real-time data management solutions for WSNs. First, the main specifications of real-time data management are identified and the available real-time data management solutions for WSNs in the literature are presented. Secondly, in order to provide an energy-efficient real-time data management solution, the techniques used to manage data and queries in WSNs based on the distributed paradigm are deeply studied. In fact, many research works argue that the distributed approach is the most energy-efficient way of managing data and queries in WSNs, instead of performing the warehousing. In addition, this approach can provide quasi real-time query processing because the most current data will be retrieved from the network. Thirdly, based on these two studies and considering the complexity of developing, testing, and debugging this kind of complex system, a model for a simulation framework of the real-time databases management on WSN that uses a distributed approach and its implementation are proposed. This will help to explore various solutions of real-time database techniques on WSNs before deployment for economizing money and time. Moreover, one may improve the proposed model by adding the simulation of protocols or place part of this simulator on another available simulator. For validating the model, a case study considering real-time constraints as well as energy constraints is discussed. Fourth, a new architecture that combines statistical modeling techniques with the distributed approach and a query processing algorithm to optimize the real-time user query processing are proposed. This combination allows performing a query processing algorithm based on admission control that uses the error tolerance and the probabilistic confidence interval as admission parameters. The experiments based on real world data sets as well as synthetic data sets demonstrate that the proposed solution optimizes the real-time query processing to save more energy while meeting low latency.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologi

Multi-dimensional data stream compression for embedded systems

The rise of embedded systems and wireless technologies led to the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT). Connected objects in IoT communicate with each other by transferring data streams over the network. For instance, in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), sensor-equipped devices use sensors to capture properties, such as temperature or accelerometer, and send 1D or nD data streams to a host system. Power consumption is a critical problem for connected objects that have to work for a long time without being recharged, as it greatly affects their lifetime and usability. Data summarization is key for energy-constrained connected devices, as transmitting fewer data can reduce energy usage during transmission. Data compression, in particular, can compress the data stream while preserving information to a great extent. Many compression methods have been proposed in previous research. However, most of them are either not applicable to connected objects, due to resource limitation, or only handle one-dimensional streams while data acquired in connected objects are often multi-dimensional. Lightweight Temporal Compression (LTC) is among the lossy stream compression methods that provide the highest compression rate for the lowest CPU and memory consumption. In this thesis, we investigate the extension of LTC to multi-dimensional streams. First, we provide a formulation of the algorithm in an arbitrary vectorial space of dimension n. Then, we implement the algorithm for the infinity and Euclidean norms, in spaces of dimension 2D+t and 3D+t. We evaluate our implementation on 3D acceleration streams of human activities, on Neblina, a module integrating multiple sensors developed by our partner Motsai. Results show that the 3D implementation of LTC can save up to 20% in energy consumption for slow-paced activities, with a memory usage of about 100 B. Finally, we compare our method with polynomial regression compression methods in different dimensions. Our results show that our extension of LTC gives a higher compression ratio than the polynomial regression method, while using less memory and CPU

Energy-Efficient Data Management in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are deployed widely for various applications. A variety of useful data are generated by these deployments. Since WSNs have limited resources and unreliable communication links, traditional data management techniques are not suitable. Therefore, designing effective data management techniques for WSNs becomes important. In this dissertation, we address three key issues of data management in WSNs. For data collection, a scheme of making some nodes sleep and estimating their values according to the other active nodes’ readings has been proved energy-efficient. For the purpose of improving the precision of estimation, we propose two powerful estimation models, Data Estimation using a Physical Model (DEPM) and Data Estimation using a Statistical Model (DESM). Most of existing data processing approaches of WSNs are real-time. However, historical data of WSNs are also significant for various applications. No previous study has specifically addressed distributed historical data query processing. We propose an Index based Historical Data Query Processing scheme which stores historical data locally and processes queries energy-efficiently by using a distributed index tree. Area query processing is significant for various applications of WSNs. No previous study has specifically addressed this issue. We propose an energy-efficient in-network area query processing scheme. In our scheme, we use an intelligent method (Grid lists) to describe an area, thus reducing the communication cost and dropping useless data as early as possible. With a thorough simulation study, it is shown that our schemes are effective and energy- efficient. Based on the area query processing algorithm, an Intelligent Monitoring System is designed to detect various events and provide real-time and accurate information for escaping, rescuing, and evacuation when a dangerous event happened

Data and resource management in wireless networks via data compression, GPS-free dissemination, and learning

“This research proposes several innovative approaches to collect data efficiently from large scale WSNs. First, a Z-compression algorithm has been proposed which exploits the temporal locality of the multi-dimensional sensing data and adapts the Z-order encoding algorithm to map multi-dimensional data to a one-dimensional data stream. The extended version of Z-compression adapts itself to working in low power WSNs running under low power listening (LPL) mode, and comprehensively analyzes its performance compressing both real-world and synthetic datasets. Second, it proposed an efficient geospatial based data collection scheme for IoTs that reduces redundant rebroadcast of up to 95% by only collecting the data of interest. As most of the low-cost wireless sensors won’t be equipped with a GPS module, the virtual coordinates are used to estimate the locations. The proposed work utilizes the anchor-based virtual coordinate system and DV-Hop (Distance vector of hops to anchors) to estimate the relative location of nodes to anchors. Also, it uses circle and hyperbola constraints to encode the position of interest (POI) and any user-defined trajectory into a data request message which allows only the sensors in the POI and routing trajectory to collect and route. It also provides location anonymity by avoiding using and transmitting GPS location information. This has been extended also for heterogeneous WSNs and refined the encoding algorithm by replacing the circle constraints with the ellipse constraints. Last, it proposes a framework that predicts the trajectory of the moving object using a Sequence-to-Sequence learning (Seq2Seq) model and only wakes-up the sensors that fall within the predicted trajectory of the moving object with a specially designed control packet. It reduces the computation time of encoding geospatial trajectory by more than 90% and preserves the location anonymity for the local edge servers”--Abstract, page iv