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

A Survey and Future Directions on Clustering: From WSNs to IoT and Modern Networking Paradigms

Many Internet of Things (IoT) networks are created as an overlay over traditional ad-hoc networks such as Zigbee. Moreover, IoT networks can resemble ad-hoc networks over networks that support device-to-device (D2D) communication, e.g., D2D-enabled cellular networks and WiFi-Direct. In these ad-hoc types of IoT networks, efficient topology management is a crucial requirement, and in particular in massive scale deployments. Traditionally, clustering has been recognized as a common approach for topology management in ad-hoc networks, e.g., in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Topology management in WSNs and ad-hoc IoT networks has many design commonalities as both need to transfer data to the destination hop by hop. Thus, WSN clustering techniques can presumably be applied for topology management in ad-hoc IoT networks. This requires a comprehensive study on WSN clustering techniques and investigating their applicability to ad-hoc IoT networks. In this article, we conduct a survey of this field based on the objectives for clustering, such as reducing energy consumption and load balancing, as well as the network properties relevant for efficient clustering in IoT, such as network heterogeneity and mobility. Beyond that, we investigate the advantages and challenges of clustering when IoT is integrated with modern computing and communication technologies such as Blockchain, Fog/Edge computing, and 5G. This survey provides useful insights into research on IoT clustering, allows broader understanding of its design challenges for IoT networks, and sheds light on its future applications in modern technologies integrated with IoT.acceptedVersio

Markov decision processes with applications in wireless sensor networks: A survey

Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier

Wireless Sensor Networks

The aim of this book is to present few important issues of WSNs, from the application, design and technology points of view. The book highlights power efficient design issues related to wireless sensor networks, the existing WSN applications, and discusses the research efforts being undertaken in this field which put the reader in good pace to be able to understand more advanced research and make a contribution in this field for themselves. It is believed that this book serves as a comprehensive reference for graduate and undergraduate senior students who seek to learn latest development in wireless sensor networks

A Collective Adaptive Approach to Decentralised k-Coverage in Multi-robot Systems

We focus on the online multi-object k-coverage problem (OMOkC), where mobile robots are required to sense a mobile target from k diverse points of view, coordinating themselves in a scalable and possibly decentralised way. There is active research on OMOkC, particularly in the design of decentralised algorithms for solving it. We propose a new take on the issue: Rather than classically developing new algorithms, we apply a macro-level paradigm, called aggregate computing, specifically designed to directly program the global behaviour of a whole ensemble of devices at once. To understand the potential of the application of aggregate computing to OMOkC, we extend the Alchemist simulator (supporting aggregate computing natively) with a novel toolchain component supporting the simulation of mobile robots. This way, we build a software engineering toolchain comprising language and simulation tooling for addressing OMOkC. Finally, we exercise our approach and related toolchain by introducing new algorithms for OMOkC; we show that they can be expressed concisely, reuse existing software components and perform better than the current state-of-the-art in terms of coverage over time and number of objects covered overall

Smart Wireless Sensor Networks

The recent development of communication and sensor technology results in the growth of a new attractive and challenging area - wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A wireless sensor network which consists of a large number of sensor nodes is deployed in environmental fields to serve various applications. Facilitated with the ability of wireless communication and intelligent computation, these nodes become smart sensors which do not only perceive ambient physical parameters but also be able to process information, cooperate with each other and self-organize into the network. These new features assist the sensor nodes as well as the network to operate more efficiently in terms of both data acquisition and energy consumption. Special purposes of the applications require design and operation of WSNs different from conventional networks such as the internet. The network design must take into account of the objectives of specific applications. The nature of deployed environment must be considered. The limited of sensor nodes� resources such as memory, computational ability, communication bandwidth and energy source are the challenges in network design. A smart wireless sensor network must be able to deal with these constraints as well as to guarantee the connectivity, coverage, reliability and security of network's operation for a maximized lifetime. This book discusses various aspects of designing such smart wireless sensor networks. Main topics includes: design methodologies, network protocols and algorithms, quality of service management, coverage optimization, time synchronization and security techniques for sensor networks

Multichannel Distributed Coordination for Wireless Sensor Networks: Convergence Delay and Energy Consumption Aspects

This thesis develops new approaches for distributed coordination of data-intensive communications between wireless sensor nodes. In particular, the topic of synchronization, and its dual primitive, desynchronization at the Medium Access Control (MAC) or the Application (APP) layer of the OSI stack, is studied in detail. In Chapters 1 and 2, the related literature on the problem of synchronization is overviewed and the main approaches for distributed (de)synchronization at the MAC or APP layers are analyzed, designed and implemented on IEEE802.15.4- enabled wireless sensor nodes. Beyond the experimental validation of distributed (de)synchronization approaches, the three main contributions of this thesis, corresponding to the related publications found below, are: • establishing for the first time the expected time for convergence to distributed time division multiple access (TDMA) operation under the two main desynchronization models proposed in the literature and validating the derived estimates via a real-world implementation (Chapter 3); • proposing the extension of the main desynchronization models towards multi-hop and multi-channel operation; the latter is achieved by extending the concept of reactive listening to multi-frequency operation (Chapter 4 and 5). • analyzing the energy consumption of the distributed TDMA approach under different transmission probability density functions (Chapter 6 and 7). Conclusions and items for future work in relation to the proposals of this thesis are described in Chapter 8

7. GI/ITG KuVS Fachgespräch Drahtlose Sensornetze

In dem vorliegenden Tagungsband sind die Beiträge des Fachgesprächs Drahtlose Sensornetze 2008 zusammengefasst. Ziel dieses Fachgesprächs ist es, Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler aus diesem Gebiet die Möglichkeit zu einem informellen Austausch zu geben – wobei immer auch Teilnehmer aus der Industrieforschung willkommen sind, die auch in diesem Jahr wieder teilnehmen.Das Fachgespräch ist eine betont informelle Veranstaltung der GI/ITG-Fachgruppe „Kommunikation und Verteilte Systeme“ (www.kuvs.de). Es ist ausdrücklich keine weitere Konferenz mit ihrem großen Overhead und der Anforderung, fertige und möglichst „wasserdichte“ Ergebnisse zu präsentieren, sondern es dient auch ganz explizit dazu, mit Neueinsteigern auf der Suche nach ihrem Thema zu diskutieren und herauszufinden, wo die Herausforderungen an die zukünftige Forschung überhaupt liegen.Das Fachgespräch Drahtlose Sensornetze 2008 findet in Berlin statt, in den Räumen der Freien Universität Berlin, aber in Kooperation mit der ScatterWeb GmbH. Auch dies ein Novum, es zeigt, dass das Fachgespräch doch deutlich mehr als nur ein nettes Beisammensein unter einem Motto ist.Für die Organisation des Rahmens und der Abendveranstaltung gebührt Dank den beiden Mitgliedern im Organisationskomitee, Kirsten Terfloth und Georg Wittenburg, aber auch Stefanie Bahe, welche die redaktionelle Betreuung des Tagungsbands übernommen hat, vielen anderen Mitgliedern der AG Technische Informatik der FU Berlin und natürlich auch ihrem Leiter, Prof. Jochen Schiller