Special Issue on Recent Advance on Mobile Sensor Systems

Shu, L.; Vasilakos, AV.; Lloret, J.; Pathan, AK. (2011). Special Issue on Recent Advance on Mobile Sensor Systems. Telecommunication Systems. doi:10.1007/s11235-011-9560-y

Medium access control schemes for flat mobile wireless sensor networks

One aspect of Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks (MWSNs) is the MAC protocol, which is critical in terms of reliability, delay and energy consumption. This work begins with a literature review, showing that the majority of MWSN MACs are designed for hierarchical architectures, demonstrating that there is a lack of MACs intended for flat architecture MWSNs. Subsequently, we propose three new MAC protocols, uniquely designed for flat MWSNs. Explicitly, the proposed MACs are Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Dedicated Slots, Network Division Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance and Network Division Multiple Access with Dedicated Slots, which are specifically designed to work with the state-of-the-art Location Aware Sensor Routing protocol. Extensive modelling and simulation is done in dense and sparse scenarios with varying traffic levels to evaluate the impact of the proposed from the perspective of both the link and network layers. Given the uniqueness of the proposed protocols, four well-known MACs are also included to give a performance reference to the results. The MAC results show that the collision-free protocols give the best reliability and that Global-TDMA consistently yields the highest level of throughput. This highlights the importance of taking into account both MAC and routing during the design process

Dynamic duty cycle mechnism for mobility in wirless sensor networks

Appeared in previous years to connect the physical environments with the digital world Wireless sensing networks (WSN). There are several small sensor units through which small devices are created in which WSN is configured and can sense the physical environment properties such as heat, pressure, light, soil formation, location, and others. Physical environment properties. Through receivers and transmitters, the sensor nodes send the data hop by hopto the sink node or base station, and these devices have a short-range and a very low frequency. Through a very precise complement, the sensors are small size but at the same time contain sensors as well as radio transmitters and receivers with microprocessors that can implement local data processing that done as well as operate networks using. Besides,through a wireless medium that has been Sensing the data of the wireless transceiver in the process of transmitting and receiving data that will take place in the network.The increased demand for mobility within different applications raises the increasing question about power consumption and how to reduce itin nodes of the WSN. An example of these applications is the application of environmental monitoring, medical observation, and automation of home and this is why wireless sensor networks (WSN) usually consist of a fixed node. The aim of this project is to design a dynamic duty cycle mechanism for mobility as well as fixed nodes within wireless sensor networks through a Contiki simulator through which power consumption, Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and duty cycle aremeasured by nodes under the mobility and fixed condition. Done through two diverse scenarios that are the sink and the sensor nodes fixed, and the sink nodes and the nodes are the mobility that occurs. We analyze the performance of the mechanism that will be produced by Contiki on three different measures: Excel extracts PDR, power consumption and duty cycle, to reduce power consumption and these percentages

Collision Free Mobility Adaptive (CFMA) MAC for Wireless sensor networks

In this paper we propose high throughput collision free, mobility adaptive and energy efficient medium access protocol (MAC) called Collision Free Mobility Adaptive (CFMA) for wireless sensor networks. CFMA ensures that transmissions incur no collisions, and allows nodes to undergo sleep mode whenever they are not transmitting or receiving. It uses delay allocation scheme based on traffic priority at each node and avoids allocating same backoff delay for more than one node unless they are in separate clusters. It also allows nodes to determine when they can switch to sleep mode during operation. CFMA for mobile nodes provides fast association between the mobile node and the cluster coordinator. The proposed MAC performs well in both static and mobile scenarios, which shows its significance over existing MAC protocols proposed for mobile applications. The performance of CFMA is evaluated through extensive simulation, analysis and comparison with other mobility aware MAC protocols. The results show that CFMA outperforms significantly the existing CSMA/CA, Sensor Mac (S-MAC), Mobile MAC (MOB-MAC), Adaptive Mobility MAC (AM-MAC), Mobility Sensor MAC (MS-MAC), Mobility aware Delay sensitive MAC (MD-MAC) and Dynamic Sensor MAC (DS-MAC) protocols including throughput, latency and energy consumption

Innovative energy-efficient wireless sensor network applications and MAC sub-layer protocols employing RTS-CTS with packet concatenation

of energy-efficiency as well as the number of available applications. As a consequence there are challenges that need to be tackled for the future generation of WSNs. The research work from this Ph.D. thesis has involved the actual development of innovative WSN applications contributing to different research projects. In the Smart-Clothing project contributions have been given in the development of a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) to monitor the foetal movements of a pregnant woman in the last four weeks of pregnancy. The creation of an automatic wireless measurement system for remotely monitoring concrete structures was an contribution for the INSYSM project. This was accomplished by using an IEEE 802.15.4 network enabling for remotely monitoring the temperature and humidity within civil engineering structures. In the framework of the PROENEGY-WSN project contributions have been given in the identification the spectrum opportunities for Radio Frequency (RF) energy harvesting through power density measurements from 350 MHz to 3 GHz. The design of the circuits to harvest RF energy and the requirements needed for creating a WBAN with electromagnetic energy harvesting and Cognitive Radio (CR) capabilities have also been addressed. A performance evaluation of the state-of-the art of the hardware WSN platforms has also been addressed. This is explained by the fact that, even by using optimized Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols, if the WSNs platforms do not allow for minimizing the energy consumption in the idle and sleeping states, energy efficiency and long network lifetime will not be achieved. The research also involved the development of new innovative mechanisms that tries and solves overhead, one of the fundamental reasons for the IEEE 802.15.4 standard MAC inefficiency. In particular, this Ph.D. thesis proposes an IEEE 802.15.4 MAC layer performance enhancement by employing RTS/CTS combined with packet concatenation. The results have shown that the use of the RTS/CTS mechanism improves channel efficiency by decreasing the deferral time before transmitting a data packet. In addition, the Sensor Block Acknowledgment MAC (SBACK-MAC) protocol has been proposed that allows the aggregation of several acknowledgment responses in one special Block Acknowledgment (BACK) Response packet. Two different solutions are considered. The first one considers the SBACK-MAC protocol in the presence of BACK Request (concatenation) while the second one considers the SBACK-MAC in the absence of BACK Request (piggyback). The proposed solutions address a distributed scenario with single-destination and single-rate frame aggregation. The throughput and delay performance is mathematically derived under both ideal conditions (a channel environment with no transmission errors) and non ideal conditions (a channel environment with transmission errors). An analytical model is proposed, capable of taking into account the retransmission delays and the maximum number of backoff stages. The simulation results successfully validate our analytical model. For more than 7 TX (aggregated packets) all the MAC sub-layer protocols employing RTS/CTS with packet concatenation allows for the optimization of channel use in WSNs, v8-48 % improvement in the maximum average throughput and minimum average delay, and decrease energy consumption

Routing protocols for next generation mobile wireless sensor networks

The recent research interest in wireless sensor networks has caused the development of many new applications and subsequently, these emerging applications have ever increasing requirements. One such requirement is that of mobility, which has inspired an entirely new array of applications in the form of mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSNs). In terms of communications, MWSNs present a challenging environment due to the high rate at which the topology may be changing. As such, the motivation of this work is to investigate potential communications solutions, in order to satisfy the performance demands of new and future MWSN applications. As such this work begins by characterising and evaluating the requirement of a large variety of these emerging applications. This thesis focuses on the area of routing, which is concerned with the reliable and timely delivery of data from multiple, mobile sensor nodes to a data sink. For this purpose the technique of gradient routing was identified as a suitable solution, since data can quickly be passed down a known gradient that is anchored at the sink. However, in a mobile network, keeping the gradient up-to-date is a key issue. This work proposes the novel use of a global time division multiple access (GTDMA) MAC as a solution to this problem, which mitigates the need for regularly flooding the network. Additionally, the concept of blind forwarding is utilised for its low overhead and high reliability through its inherent route diversity. The key contribution of this thesis is in three novel routing protocols, which use the aforementioned principles. The first protocol, PHASeR, uses a hop-count metric and encapsulates data from multiple nodes in its packets. The hop-count metric was chosen because it is simple and requires no additional hardware. The inclusion of encapsulation is intended to enable the protocol to cope with network congestion. The second protocol, LASeR, utilises location awareness to maintain a gradient and performs no encapsulation. Since many applications require location awareness, the communications systems may also take advantage of this readily available information and it can be used as a gradient metric. This protocol uses no encapsulation in order to reduce delay times. The third protocol, RASeR, uses the hop-count metric as a gradient and also does not perform encapsulation. The reduced delay time and the relaxed requirement for any existing method of location awareness makes this the most widely applicable of the three protocols. In addition to analytical expressions being derived, all three protocols are thoroughly tested through simulation. Results show the protocols to improve on the state-of-the-art and yield excellent performance over varying speeds, node numbers and data generation rates. LASeR shows the lowest overhead and delay, which comes from the advantage of having available location information. Alternatively, at the expense of increased overhead, RASeR gives comparatively high performance metrics without the need for location information. Overall, RASeR can be suitably deployed in the widest range of applications, which is taken further by including four additional modes of operation. These include a supersede mode for applications in which the timely delivery of the most recent data is prioritised. A reverse flooding mechanism, to enable the sink to broadcast control messages to the sensor nodes. An energy saving mode, which uses sleep cycles to reduce the networks power consumption, and finally a pseudo acknowledgement scheme to increase the reliability of the protocol. These additions enable RASeR to satisfy the needs of some of the most demanding MWSN applications. In order to assess the practicality of implementation, RASeR was also evaluated using a small testbed of mobile nodes. The successful results display the protocols feasibility to be implemented on commercially available hardware and its potential to be deployed in the real world. Furthermore, a key issue in the real world deployment of networks, is security and for this reason a fourth routing protocol was designed called RASeR-S. RASeR-S is based on RASeR, but introduces the use of encryption and suggests a security framework that should be followed in order to significantly reduce the possibility of a security threat. Whilst the main focus of this work is routing, alternative MAC layers are assessed for LASeR. Unlike the other two protocols, LASeR uses available location information to determine its gradient and as such, it is not reliant on the GTDMA MAC. For this reason several MAC layers are tested and the novel idea of dedicated sensing slots is introduced, as well as a network division multiple access scheme. The selected and proposed MACs are simulated and the GTDMA and two proposed protocols are shown to give the best results in certain scenarios. This work demonstrates the high levels of performance that can be achieved using gradient orientated routing in a mobile network. It has also shown that the use of a GTDMA MAC is an efficient solution to the gradient maintenance problem. The high impact of this work comes from the versatility and reliability of the presented routing protocols, which means they are able to meet the requirements of a large number of MWSN applications. Additionally, given the importance of security, RASeR-S has been designed to provide a secure and adaptable routing solution for vulnerable or sensitive applications