GUARDIANS final report

Emergencies in industrial warehouses are a major concern for firefghters. The large dimensions together with the development of dense smoke that drastically reduces visibility, represent major challenges. The Guardians robot swarm is designed to assist fire fighters in searching a large warehouse. In this report we discuss the technology developed for a swarm of robots searching and assisting fire fighters. We explain the swarming algorithms which provide the functionality by which the robots react to and follow humans while no communication is required. Next we discuss the wireless communication system, which is a so-called mobile ad-hoc network. The communication network provides also one of the means to locate the robots and humans. Thus the robot swarm is able to locate itself and provide guidance information to the humans. Together with the re ghters we explored how the robot swarm should feed information back to the human fire fighter. We have designed and experimented with interfaces for presenting swarm based information to human beings

ALGORITHMS FOR FAULT TOLERANCE IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS AND ROUTING IN AD HOC NETWORKS

Checkpointing and rollback recovery are well-known techniques for coping with failures in distributed systems. Future generation Supercomputers will be message passing distributed systems consisting of millions of processors. As the number of processors grow, failure rate also grows. Thus, designing efficient checkpointing and recovery algorithms for coping with failures in such large systems is important for these systems to be fully utilized. We presented a novel communication-induced checkpointing algorithm which helps in reducing contention for accessing stable storage to store checkpoints. Under our algorithm, a process involved in a distributed computation can independently initiate consistent global checkpointing by saving its current state, called a tentative checkpoint. Other processes involved in the computation come to know about the consistent global checkpoint initiation through information piggy-backed with the application messages or limited control messages if necessary. When a process comes to know about a new consistent global checkpoint initiation, it takes a tentative checkpoint after processing the message. The tentative checkpoints taken can be flushed to stable storage when there is no contention for accessing stable storage. The tentative checkpoints together with the message logs stored in the stable storage form a consistent global checkpoint. Ad hoc networks consist of a set of nodes that can form a network for communication with each other without the aid of any infrastructure or human intervention. Nodes are energy-constrained and hence routing algorithm designed for these networks should take this into consideration. We proposed two routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks which prevent nodes from broadcasting route requests unnecessarily during the route discovery phase and hence conserve energy and prevent contention in the network. One is called Triangle Based Routing (TBR) protocol. The other routing protocol we designed is called Routing Protocol with Selective Forwarding (RPSF). Both of the routing protocols greatly reduce the number of control packets which are needed to establish routes between pairs of source nodes and destination nodes. As a result, they reduce the energy consumed for route discovery. Moreover, these protocols reduce congestion and collision of packets due to limited number of nodes retransmitting the route requests

A critical analysis of research potential, challenges and future directives in industrial wireless sensor networks

In recent years, Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs) have emerged as an important research theme with applications spanning a wide range of industries including automation, monitoring, process control, feedback systems and automotive. Wide scope of IWSNs applications ranging from small production units, large oil and gas industries to nuclear fission control, enables a fast-paced research in this field. Though IWSNs offer advantages of low cost, flexibility, scalability, self-healing, easy deployment and reformation, yet they pose certain limitations on available potential and introduce challenges on multiple fronts due to their susceptibility to highly complex and uncertain industrial environments. In this paper a detailed discussion on design objectives, challenges and solutions, for IWSNs, are presented. A careful evaluation of industrial systems, deadlines and possible hazards in industrial atmosphere are discussed. The paper also presents a thorough review of the existing standards and industrial protocols and gives a critical evaluation of potential of these standards and protocols along with a detailed discussion on available hardware platforms, specific industrial energy harvesting techniques and their capabilities. The paper lists main service providers for IWSNs solutions and gives insight of future trends and research gaps in the field of IWSNs

PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS AND OPTIMIZATION OF QUERY-BASED WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

This dissertation is concerned with the modeling, analysis, and optimization of large-scale, query-based wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It addresses issues related to the time sensitivity of information retrieval and dissemination, network lifetime maximization, and optimal clustering of sensor nodes in mobile WSNs. First, a queueing-theoretic framework is proposed to evaluate the performance of such networks whose nodes detect and advertise significant events that are useful for only a limited time; queries generated by sensor nodes are also time-limited. The main performance parameter is the steady state proportion of generated queries that fail to be answered on time. A scalable approximation for this parameter is first derived assuming the transmission range of sensors is unlimited. Subsequently, the proportion of failed queries is approximated using a finite transmission range. The latter approximation is remarkably accurate, even when key model assumptions related to event and query lifetime distributions and network topology are violated. Second, optimization models are proposed to maximize the lifetime of a query-based WSN by selecting the transmission range for all of the sensor nodes, the resource replication level (or time-to-live counter) and the active/sleep schedule of nodes, subject to connectivity and quality-of-service constraints. An improved lower bound is provided for the minimum transmission range needed to ensure no network nodes are isolated with high probability. The optimization models select the optimal operating parameters in each period of a finite planning horizon, and computational results indicate that the maximum lifetime can be significantly extended by adjusting the key operating parameters as sensors fail over time due to energy depletion. Finally, optimization models are proposed to maximize the demand coverage and minimize the costs of locating, and relocating, cluster heads in mobile WSNs. In these models, the locations of mobile sensor nodes evolve randomly so that each sensor must be optimally assigned to a cluster head during each period of a finite planning horizon. Additionally, these models prescribe the optimal times at which to update the sensor locations to improve coverage. Computational experiments illustrate the usefulness of dynamically updating cluster head locations and sensor location information over time