Machine Learning in Wireless Sensor Networks: Algorithms, Strategies, and Applications

Wireless sensor networks monitor dynamic environments that change rapidly over time. This dynamic behavior is either caused by external factors or initiated by the system designers themselves. To adapt to such conditions, sensor networks often adopt machine learning techniques to eliminate the need for unnecessary redesign. Machine learning also inspires many practical solutions that maximize resource utilization and prolong the lifespan of the network. In this paper, we present an extensive literature review over the period 2002-2013 of machine learning methods that were used to address common issues in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The advantages and disadvantages of each proposed algorithm are evaluated against the corresponding problem. We also provide a comparative guide to aid WSN designers in developing suitable machine learning solutions for their specific application challenges.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Energy-Efficient Design of Adhoc and Sensor Networks

Adhoc and sensor networks (ASNs) are emerging wireless networks that are expected to have significant impact on the efficiency of many military and civil applications. However, building ASNs efficiently poses a considerable technical challenge because of the many constraints imposed by the environment, or by the ASN nodes capabilities themselves. One of the main challenges is the finite supply energy.Since the network hosts are battery operated, they need to be energy conserving so that the nodes and hence the network itself does not expire. In this thesis different techniques for anenergy-efficient design for ASNs are presented. My work spans two layers of the network protocol stack; these are the Medium Access Layer (MAC) and the Routing Layer. This thesis first identifies and highlights the different sources of energy inefficiency in ASNs, and then it describes how each of these inefficiencies is handled. Toward this goal, I first focus on the Medium Access (MAC) Layer and present my work that handles the wasted energy in transmission and describe how the transmission distance is optimized to extend the network lifetime. I then describe BLAM, an energy-efficient extension for the IEEE 802.11, that handles the wasted energy in collisions. Next, TDMA-ASAP, a new MAC protocol for sensor networks, is introduced. TDMA-ASAP targets the wasted energy in idle listening. I also investigate energy-efficiency at the routing layer level. First, the ``Flooding-Waves' problem is identified. This is a problem in any cost-based energy-efficient routing protocol for adhoc networks, different ways of solving this problem are presented. For sensor networks routing trees are usually used, I introduce a new routing scheme called RideSharing which is energy-efficient and fault-tolerant. RideSharing will deliver a better aggregate result to the end user while masking network linkfailures. Next, I present how to extend the RideSharing scheme to handle different link quality models. Finally, I introduce GroupBeat,a new health detection system for sensor networks, which when combined with RideSharing can deliver the information to the end user even in case of node failures

Routing Protocols for Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks: A Review

With the advances in micro-electronics, wireless sensor gadgets have been made substantially littler and more coordinated, and large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs) based the participation among the noteworthy measure of nodes have turned into a hotly debated issue. "Large-scale" implies for the most part large region or high thickness of a system. As needs be the routing protocols must scale well to the system scope augmentation and node thickness increments. A sensor node is regularly energy-constrained and can't be energized, and in this manner its energy utilization has a very critical impact on the adaptability of the protocol. To the best of our insight, at present the standard strategies to tackle the energy issue in large-scale WSNs are the various leveled routing protocols. In a progressive routing protocol, every one of the nodes are separated into a few gatherings with various task levels. The nodes inside the abnormal state are in charge of data aggregation and administration work, and the low level nodes for detecting their environment and gathering data. The progressive routing protocols are ended up being more energy-proficient than level ones in which every one of the nodes assume a similar part, particularly as far as the data aggregation and the flooding of the control bundles. With concentrate on the various leveled structure, in this paper we give an understanding into routing protocols planned particularly for large-scale WSNs. As per the distinctive goals, the protocols are by and large ordered in light of various criteria, for example, control overhead decrease, energy utilization mitigation and energy adjust. Keeping in mind the end goal to pick up a thorough comprehension of every protocol, we feature their imaginative thoughts, portray the basic standards in detail and break down their points of interest and hindrances. Also a correlation of each routing protocol is led to exhibit the contrasts between the protocols as far as message unpredictability, memory necessities, localization, data aggregation, bunching way and different measurements. At last some open issues in routing protocol plan in large-scale wireless sensor networks and conclusions are proposed

Routing Protocols for Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks: A Review

With the advances in micro-electronics, wireless sensor gadgets have been made substantially littler and more coordinated, and large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSNs) based the participation among the noteworthy measure of nodes have turned into a hotly debated issue. "Large-scale" implies for the most part large region or high thickness of a system. As needs be the routing protocols must scale well to the system scope augmentation and node thickness increments. A sensor node is regularly energy-constrained and can't be energized, and in this manner its energy utilization has a very critical impact on the adaptability of the protocol. To the best of our insight, at present the standard strategies to tackle the energy issue in large-scale WSNs are the various leveled routing protocols. In a progressive routing protocol, every one of the nodes are separated into a few gatherings with various task levels. The nodes inside the abnormal state are in charge of data aggregation and administration work, and the low level nodes for detecting their environment and gathering data. The progressive routing protocols are ended up being more energy-proficient than level ones in which every one of the nodes assume a similar part, particularly as far as the data aggregation and the flooding of the control bundles. With concentrate on the various leveled structure, in this paper we give an understanding into routing protocols planned particularly for large-scale WSNs. As per the distinctive goals, the protocols are by and large ordered in light of various criteria, for example, control overhead decrease, energy utilization mitigation and energy adjust. Keeping in mind the end goal to pick up a thorough comprehension of every protocol, we feature their imaginative thoughts, portray the basic standards in detail and break down their points of interest and hindrances. Also a correlation of each routing protocol is led to exhibit the contrasts between the protocols as far as message unpredictability, memory necessities, localization, data aggregation, bunching way and different measurements. At last some open issues in routing protocol plan in large-scale wireless sensor networks and conclusions are proposed

Fault-tolerant wireless sensor networks using evolutionary games

This dissertation proposes an approach to creating robust communication systems in wireless sensor networks, inspired by biological and ecological systems, particularly by evolutionary game theory. In this approach, a virtual community of agents live inside the network nodes and carry out network functions. The agents use different strategies to execute their functions, and these strategies are tested and selected by playing evolutionary games. Over time, agents with the best strategies survive, while others die. The strategies and the game rules provide the network with an adaptive behavior that allows it to react to changes in environmental conditions by adapting and improving network behavior. To evaluate the viability of this approach, this dissertation also describes a micro-component framework for implementing agent-based wireless sensor network services, an evolutionary data collection protocol built using this framework, ECP, and experiments evaluating the performance of this protocol in a faulty environment. The framework addresses many of the programming challenges in writing network software for wireless sensor networks, while the protocol built using the framework provides a means of evaluating the general viability of the agent-based approach. The results of this evaluation show that an evolutionary approach to designing wireless sensor networks can improve the performance of wireless sensor network protocols in the presence of node failures. In particular, we compared the performance of ECP with a non-evolutionary rule-based variant of ECP. While the purely-evolutionary version of ECP has more routing timeouts than the rule-based approach in failure-free networks, it sends significantly fewer beacon packets and incurs statistically fewer routing timeouts in both simple fault and periodic fault scenarios

Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks

In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge, and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control, learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity, localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature, and identify topics that require more research attention in the future

Protecting informative messages over burst error channels in chain-based wireless sensor networks

Regardless of the application, the way that data and information are disseminated is an important aspect in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The wireless data dissemination protocol should often guarantee a minimum reliability requirement. In this regard and to well-balance the energy and reliability, the more important packets should be protected by more powerful error control codes than the less important ones. This information-aware capability allows a system to deliver critical information with high reliability but potentially at a higher resource cost. In this paper, we first find and evaluate the factors that may influence the importance level of a packet and then design an error control approach by adaptively selecting codes for each individual links which experience long-term-fading and for each individual packet at run-time instead of applying network-wide settings prior to deployment. Moreover, we target the poor-explored chain-based topology that is of interest for many applications (e.g. monitoring bridge, tunnel, etc.). Simulation results validate the superiority of our approach compared with a number of Reed-Solomon-based error control approaches