Data Aggregation Scheduling in Wireless Networks

Data aggregation is one of the most essential data gathering operations in wireless networks. It is an efficient strategy to alleviate energy consumption and reduce medium access contention. In this dissertation, the data aggregation scheduling problem in different wireless networks is investigated. Since Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are one of the most important types of wireless networks and data aggregation plays a vital role in WSNs, the minimum latency data aggregation scheduling problem for multi-regional queries in WSNs is first studied. A scheduling algorithm is proposed with comprehensive theoretical and simulation analysis regarding time efficiency. Second, with the increasing popularity of Cognitive Radio Networks (CRNs), data aggregation scheduling in CRNs is studied. Considering the precious spectrum opportunity in CRNs, a routing hierarchy, which allows a secondary user to seek a transmission opportunity among a group of receivers, is introduced. Several scheduling algorithms are proposed for both the Unit Disk Graph (UDG) interference model and the Physical Interference Model (PhIM), followed by performance evaluation through simulations. Third, the data aggregation scheduling problem in wireless networks with cognitive radio capability is investigated. Under the defined network model, besides a default working spectrum, users can access extra available spectrum through a cognitive radio. The problem is formalized as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem and solved through an optimization method in the beginning. The simulation results show that the ILP based method has a good performance. However, it is difficult to evaluate the solution theoretically. A heuristic scheduling algorithm with guaranteed latency bound is presented in our further investigation. Finally, we investigate how to make use of cognitive radio capability to accelerate data aggregation in probabilistic wireless networks with lossy links. A two-phase scheduling algorithm is proposed, and the effectiveness of the algorithm is verified through both theoretical analysis and numerical simulations

Thirty Years of Machine Learning: The Road to Pareto-Optimal Wireless Networks

Future wireless networks have a substantial potential in terms of supporting a broad range of complex compelling applications both in military and civilian fields, where the users are able to enjoy high-rate, low-latency, low-cost and reliable information services. Achieving this ambitious goal requires new radio techniques for adaptive learning and intelligent decision making because of the complex heterogeneous nature of the network structures and wireless services. Machine learning (ML) algorithms have great success in supporting big data analytics, efficient parameter estimation and interactive decision making. Hence, in this article, we review the thirty-year history of ML by elaborating on supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning and deep learning. Furthermore, we investigate their employment in the compelling applications of wireless networks, including heterogeneous networks (HetNets), cognitive radios (CR), Internet of things (IoT), machine to machine networks (M2M), and so on. This article aims for assisting the readers in clarifying the motivation and methodology of the various ML algorithms, so as to invoke them for hitherto unexplored services as well as scenarios of future wireless networks.Comment: 46 pages, 22 fig

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

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