System Development for Geolocation in Harsh Environments

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) consist of a set of distributed devices equipped with multiple sensors, which can be employed in different environments of varying characteristics. Nowadays, node localization has become one of their most basic and important requirements. Due to the nature of certain environments, typical positioning systems, such as Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), cannot be employed. Therefore, in recent years several alternative positioning mechanisms have risen. ROMOVI is a project which has as its main goal the development of low cost autonomous robots capable of monitoring and perform logistic tasks on the steep slopes of the Douro river vineyards. Integrated in this project, this dissertation proposes the development of a full-custom wireless communication system for geolocation purposes in harsh environments. Using a Symmetric Double Sided Two Way Ranging (SDS-TWR) algorithm, it is possible to achieve ranging measures between nodes, thus providing accurate relative positioning. This work focuses mainly on the study of the SDS-TWR algorithm and its major error sources, such as those due to digital clock drift, among others. A preamble based on Frank-Zadoff-Chu sequence was developed and, due to its good periodic autocorrelation properties, a system employing the transmission and reception of this preamble was implemented in hardware, through a field programmable gate array (FPGA). By employing an embedded logic processor, the Altera Nios II, control over the complete procedure of the aforementioned algorithm is possible, to perform and analyze the main advantages of the SDS-TWR algorithm. Finally, a medium access control (MAC) layer frame format was defined, in order to enable future development of communication among multiple nodes, to enhance the original algorithm and, as such, provide the capability of trilateration

Channel Access Management in Data Intensive Sensor Networks

There are considerable challenges for channel access in Data Intensive Sensor Networks - DISN, supporting Data Intensive Applications like Structural Health Monitoring. As the data load increases, considerable degradation of the key performance parameters of such sensor networks is observed. Successful packet delivery ratio drops due to frequent collisions and retransmissions. The data glut results in increased latency and energy consumption overall. With the considerable limitations on sensor node resources like battery power, this implies that excessive transmissions in response to sensor queries can lead to premature network death. After a certain load threshold the performance characteristics of traditional WSNs become unacceptable. Research work indicates that successful packet delivery ratio in 802.15.4 networks can drop from 95% to 55% as the offered network load increases from 1 packet/sec to 10 packets/sec. This result in conjunction with the fact that it is common for sensors in an SHM system to generate 6-8 packets/sec of vibration data makes it important to design appropriate channel access schemes for such data intensive applications.In this work, we address the problem of significant performance degradation in a special-purpose DISN. Our specific focus is on the medium access control layer since it gives a fine-grained control on managing channel access and reducing energy waste. The goal of this dissertation is to design and evaluate a suite of channel access schemes that ensure graceful performance degradation in special-purpose DISNs as the network traffic load increases.First, we present a case study that investigates two distinct MAC proposals based on random access and scheduling access. The results of the case study provide the motivation to develop hybrid access schemes. Next, we introduce novel hybrid channel access protocols for DISNs ranging from a simple randomized transmission scheme that is robust under channel and topology dynamics to one that utilizes limited topological information about neighboring sensors to minimize collisions and energy waste. The protocols combine randomized transmission with heuristic scheduling to alleviate network performance degradation due to excessive collisions and retransmissions. We then propose a grid-based access scheduling protocol for a mobile DISN that is scalable and decentralized. The grid-based protocol efficiently handles sensor mobility with acceptable data loss and limited overhead. Finally, we extend the randomized transmission protocol from the hybrid approaches to develop an adaptable probability-based data transmission method. This work combines probabilistic transmission with heuristics, i.e., Latin Squares and a grid network, to tune transmission probabilities of sensors, thus meeting specific performance objectives in DISNs. We perform analytical evaluations and run simulation-based examinations to test all of the proposed protocols

An Energy Aware and Secure MAC Protocol for Tackling Denial of Sleep Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks which form part of the core for the Internet of Things consist of resource constrained sensors that are usually powered by batteries. Therefore, careful energy awareness is essential when working with these devices. Indeed,the introduction of security techniques such as authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data, can place higher energy load on the sensors. However, the absence of security protection c ould give room for energy drain attacks such as denial of sleep attacks which have a higher negative impact on the life span ( of the sensors than the presence of security features. This thesis, therefore, focuses on tackling denial of sleep attacks from two perspectives A security perspective and an energy efficiency perspective. The security perspective involves evaluating and ranking a number of security based techniques to curbing denial of sleep attacks. The energy efficiency perspective, on the other hand, involves exploring duty cycling and simulating three Media Access Control ( protocols Sensor MAC, Timeout MAC andTunableMAC under different network sizes and measuring different parameters such as the Received Signal Strength RSSI) and Link Quality Indicator ( Transmit power, throughput and energy efficiency Duty cycling happens to be one of the major techniques for conserving energy in wireless sensor networks and this research aims to answer questions with regards to the effect of duty cycles on the energy efficiency as well as the throughput of three duty cycle protocols Sensor MAC ( Timeout MAC ( and TunableMAC in addition to creating a novel MAC protocol that is also more resilient to denial of sleep a ttacks than existing protocols. The main contributions to knowledge from this thesis are the developed framework used for evaluation of existing denial of sleep attack solutions and the algorithms which fuel the other contribution to knowledge a newly developed protocol tested on the Castalia Simulator on the OMNET++ platform. The new protocol has been compared with existing protocols and has been found to have significant improvement in energy efficiency and also better resilience to denial of sleep at tacks Part of this research has been published Two conference publications in IEEE Explore and one workshop paper

Millimeter-wave Wireless LAN and its Extension toward 5G Heterogeneous Networks

Millimeter-wave (mmw) frequency bands, especially 60 GHz unlicensed band, are considered as a promising solution for gigabit short range wireless communication systems. IEEE standard 802.11ad, also known as WiGig, is standardized for the usage of the 60 GHz unlicensed band for wireless local area networks (WLANs). By using this mmw WLAN, multi-Gbps rate can be achieved to support bandwidth-intensive multimedia applications. Exhaustive search along with beamforming (BF) is usually used to overcome 60 GHz channel propagation loss and accomplish data transmissions in such mmw WLANs. Because of its short range transmission with a high susceptibility to path blocking, multiple number of mmw access points (APs) should be used to fully cover a typical target environment for future high capacity multi-Gbps WLANs. Therefore, coordination among mmw APs is highly needed to overcome packet collisions resulting from un-coordinated exhaustive search BF and to increase the total capacity of mmw WLANs. In this paper, we firstly give the current status of mmw WLANs with our developed WiGig AP prototype. Then, we highlight the great need for coordinated transmissions among mmw APs as a key enabler for future high capacity mmw WLANs. Two different types of coordinated mmw WLAN architecture are introduced. One is the distributed antenna type architecture to realize centralized coordination, while the other is an autonomous coordination with the assistance of legacy Wi-Fi signaling. Moreover, two heterogeneous network (HetNet) architectures are also introduced to efficiently extend the coordinated mmw WLANs to be used for future 5th Generation (5G) cellular networks.Comment: 18 pages, 24 figures, accepted, invited paper

PERFORMANCE STUDY FOR CAPILLARY MACHINE-TO-MACHINE NETWORKS

Communication technologies witness a wide and rapid pervasiveness of wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. It is emerging to apply for data transfer among devices without human intervention. Capillary M2M networks represent a candidate for providing reliable M2M connectivity. In this thesis, we propose a wireless network architecture that aims at supporting a wide range of M2M applications (either real-time or non-real-time) with an acceptable QoS level. The architecture uses capillary gateways to reduce the number of devices communicating directly with a cellular network such as LTE. Moreover, the proposed architecture reduces the traffic load on the cellular network by providing capillary gateways with dual wireless interfaces. One interface is connected to the cellular network, whereas the other is proposed to communicate to the intended destination via a WiFi-based mesh backbone for cost-effectiveness. We study the performance of our proposed architecture with the aid of the ns-2 simulator. An M2M capillary network is simulated in different scenarios by varying multiple factors that affect the system performance. The simulation results measure average packet delay and packet loss to evaluate the quality-of-service (QoS) of the proposed architecture. Our results reveal that the proposed architecture can satisfy the required level of QoS with low traffic load on the cellular network. It also outperforms a cellular-based capillary M2M network and WiFi-based capillary M2M network. This implies a low cost of operation for the service provider while meeting a high-bandwidth service level agreement. In addition, we investigate how the proposed architecture behaves with different factors like the number of capillary gateways, different application traffic rates, the number of backbone routers with different routing protocols, the number of destination servers, and the data rates provided by the LTE and Wi-Fi technologies. Furthermore, the simulation results show that the proposed architecture continues to be reliable in terms of packet delay and packet loss even under a large number of nodes and high application traffic rates

Analysis of Energy Efficiency in IEEE 802.11ah

Recently, machine to machine (M2M) communication has been considerably evolved and occupied a large proportion of the wireless markets. The distinct feature of M2M applications brings new challenges to the design of the wireless systems. In order to increase the competence for M2M markets, several enhancements have been proposed accordingly in different wireless technologies. The thesis introduces these M2M enhancements with a focus on the Wi-Fi solution - 802.11ah technology. 802.11ah is a new amendment of Wi-Fi technology for M2M applications. In 802.11ah, a new mechanism named TIM segmentation has been introduced to provide scalable operation for a large number of devices as well as reduce the energy consumption. The scope of the thesis is to evaluate the energy efficiency of TIM segmentation in uplink traffic assuming Poisson process. To thoughtfully understand the principle of this mechanism, the fundamental MAC layer functions in Wi-Fi technologies have also been introduced. In addition, the thesis also proposed an energy-saving solution called additional sleeping (AS) cycles. The performance evaluation is based on a Matlab system-level simulator. The simulations are carried out for various TIM segmentation deployments for a selected M2M use case, the agriculture scenario. The results show that the TIM segmentation can deteriorate the performance for uplink transmission. This is because that in sporadic traffic, restricting the uplink access causes the increase in packet buffering and these packets leads to simultaneous transmission. This can be a serious issue especially for the network with a large number of devices. The random backoff procedure in Wi-Fi cannot efficiently solve this collision problem. In addition, results shows that the AS cycles can reduce the energy consumption in busy-channel sensing and also decrease the collision probability by adding extra randomness

High Performance Signal Processing-Based Collision Resolution for Random Access Schemes

Els darrers anys han experimentat un augment de la demanda de serveis interactius per satèl·lit per al gran consum, cobrint serveis fixes i mòbils, tal i com accés de banda ampla, comunicacions màquina-màquina (M2M), supervisió, control i adquisició de dades (SCADA), transaccions i aplicacions de seguretat crítiques. Aquestes xarxes de comunicacions es caracteritzen per tenir una gran població d’usuaris compartint l’amplada de banda amb unes condicions de tràfic molt dinàmiques. Concretament, en el canal de retorn (de l’usuari a la xarxa) de xarxes d’accés de banda ampla, els usuaris residencials generen grans ràfegues de tràfic amb períodes d’inactivitat freqüents. Una situació similar succeeix en xarxes de comunicacions mòbils per satèl·lit, on una gran població de terminals generen transmissions infreqüents de senyalització, serveis basats en la localització or altres aplicacions de missatgeria. Aquests serveis requereixen el desenvolupament de protocols d’accés múltiple eficients que puguin operar en les condicions descrites anteriorment. Els protocols d´accés aleatori són bons candidats per servir tràfic poc predictiu, amb transmissions infreqüents així com sensibles amb el retard. A més, els protocols d´accés aleatori suporten un gran nombre de terminals compartint el canal de comunicacions i requereixen poca complexitat en el terminals. El protocols d´accés aleatori han estat àmpliament estudiats i desplegats en xarxes terrestres, però les seves prestacions són pobres en el entorn satèl·lital, que està caracteritzat per retards de propagació molt grans. Avui en dia, el seu ús en les xarxes de comunicacions per satèl·lit està principalment limitat a la senyalització d’inici de sessió, transmissió de paquets de control i en alguns casos a la transmissió de petits volums de dades amb unes eficiència d’utilització del canal molt baixa. Aquesta tesi proposa tres noves tècniques d’accés aleatori, bens adaptades per proveir els serveis esmentats anteriorment en un entorn satèl·lital, amb altes prestacions i una complexitat en el terminal d’usuari reduïda. Les noves tècniques d’accés aleatori són Contention Resolution Diversity Slotted Aloha (CRDSA), Asynchronous Contention Resolution Diversity Aloha (ACRDA) i Enhanced Spread Spectrum Aloha (E-SSA), adaptades per un tipus d’accés ranurat, asíncron i d’espectre eixamplat respectivament. Les tres tècniques utilitzen una codificació de canal (FEC) robusta, capaç d’operar en front de interferències elevades, que són típiques en l’accés aleatori, i d’un mecanisme de cancel·lació successiva d’interferència que s’implementa en el receptor sobre els paquets descodificats satisfactòriament. Els nous protocols obtenen un throughput normalitzat superior a 1 bit/s/Hz amb una tassa de pèrdua de paquets inferior a 10-3, el qual representa un factor de millora de 1000 respecte a protocols d’accés aleatori tradicionals com l’ALOHA ranurat. Les prestacions de les noves tècniques d’accés aleatori has estat analitzades per mitjà de simulacions, així com amb nou models analítics desenvolupats en aquesta tesi capaços de caracteritzar el tràfic, la distribució estadística de la potència dels paquets, les prestacions de la codificació de canal (FEC) i el procés de cancel·lació d’interferència successiva.Los últimos años han experimentado un crecimiento de la demanda de servicios interactivos por satélite para el gran consumo, cubriendo servicios fijos i móviles, como el acceso de banda ancha, comunicaciones máquina a máquina (M2M), supervisión, control y adquisición de datos (SCADA), transacciones i aplicaciones criticas de seguridad. Estas redes de comunicaciones se caracterizan por tener una gran población de usuarios compartiendo el ancho de banda en unas condiciones de tráfico muy dinámicas. Concretamente, en el canal de retorno (del usuario a la red) de redes de acceso de banda ancha, los usuarios residenciales generan grandes ráfagas de tráfico con periodos frecuentes de inactividad. Una situación similar ocurre en las redes de comunicaciones móviles por satélite, donde una gran población de terminales generan transmisiones infrecuentes de señalización, servicios basados en la localización u otras aplicaciones me mensajería. Estos servicios requieren el desarrollo de protocolos de acceso múltiple eficientes capaces de operar en las condiciones descritas anteriormente. Los protocolos de acceso aleatorio son buenos candidatos para servir el tráfico poco predictivo, con transmisiones infrecuentes así como sensibles al retardo. Además, los protocolos de acceso soportan un gran número de terminales compartiendo el canal de comunicaciones y requieren poca complejidad en los terminales. Los protocolos de acceso aleatorio han estado ampliamente estudiados i desplegados en las redes terrestres, pero sus prestaciones son pobres en el entorno satelital, que se caracteriza por retardos de comunicaciones muy elevados. Hoy en día, su uso en la redes de comunicaciones por satélite está principalmente limitado a la señalización de inicio de sesión, transmisión de pequeños volumenes de datos con eficiencia de utilización del canal muy baja. Esta tesis propone tres nuevas técnicas de acceso aleatorio bien adaptadas para proveer los servicios mencionados anteriormente en un entorno de comunicaciones por satélite, con altas prestaciones y una complejidad en el terminal de usuario reducida. Las nuevas técnicas de acceso aleatorio son Contention Resolution Diversity Slotted Aloha (CRDSA), Asynchronous Contention Resolution Diversity Aloha (ACRDA) y Enhanced Spread Spectrum Aloha (E-SSA), adaptadas para un tipo de acceso ranurado, asíncrono y de espectro ensanchado respectivamente. Las tres técnicas utilizan una codificación de canal (FEC) robusta, capaz de operar en condiciones de interferencia elevadas, que son típicas en el acceso aleatorio, y de un mecanismo de cancelación sucesiva de interferencias que se implementa en el receptor sobre los paquetes que han sido decodificados satisfactoriamente. Los nuevos protocolos obtienen un throughput normalizado superior a 1 bit/s/Hz con una tasa de pérdida de paquetes inferior a 10-3, lo cual representa un factor de mejora de 1000 respecto a los protocolos de acceso aleatorio tradicionales como el ALOHA ranurado. Las prestaciones de las nuevas técnicas de acceso aleatorio han sido analizadas con simulaciones así como con nuevos modelos analíticos desarrollados en esta tesis, capaces de caracterizar el tráfico, la distribución estadística de la potencia de los paquetes, las prestaciones de la codificación de canal (FEC) y el proceso de cancelación sucesiva de interferencias.Over the past years there has been a fast growing demand for low-cost interactive satellite terminals supporting both fixed and mobile services, such as consumer broadband access, machine-to-machine communications (M2M), supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), transaction and safety of life applications. These networks, are generally characterized by a large population of terminals sharing the available resources under very dynamic traffic conditions. In particular, in the return link (user to network) of commercial satellite broadband access networks, residential users are likely to generate a large amount of low duty cycle bursty traffic with extended inactivity periods. A similar situation occurs in satellite mobile networks whereby a large number of terminals typically generate infrequent packets for signaling transmission as well for position reporting or other messaging applications. These services call for the development of efficient multiple access protocols able to cope with the above operating conditions. Random Access (RA) techniques are by nature, good candidates for the less predictive, low duty cycle as well as time sensitive return link traffic. Besides, RA techniques are capable of supporting large population of terminals sharing the same capacity and require low terminal complexity. RA schemes have been widely studied and deployed in terrestrial networks, but do not perform well in the satellite environment, which is characterized by very long propagation delays. Today, their use in satellite networks is mainly limited to initial network login, the transmission of control packets, and in some cases, for the transmission of very small volumes of data with very low channel utilization. This thesis proposes three novel RA schemes well suited for the provision of the above-mentioned services over a satellite environment with high performance and low terminal complexity. The new RA schemes are Contention Resolution Diversity Slotted Aloha (CRDSA), Asynchronous Contention Resolution Diversity Aloha (ACRDA) and Enhanced Spread Spectrum Aloha (E-SSA), suited for slotted, unslotted and spread spectrum-based systems respectively. They all use strong Forward Error Correction (FEC) codes, able to cope with heavy co-channel interference typically present in RA, and successive interference cancellation implemented over the successfully decoded packets. The new schemes achieve a normalized throughput above 1 bit/s/Hz for a packet loss ratio below 10-3, which represents a 1000-fold increase compared to Slotted ALOHA. The performance of the proposed RA schemes has been analyzed by means of detailed simulations as well as novel analytical frameworks that characterize traffic and packets power statistical distributions, the performance of the FEC coding as well as the iterative interference cancellation processing at the receiver