Contribution to Research on Underwater Sensor Networks Architectures by Means of Simulation

El concepto de entorno inteligente concibe un mundo donde los diferentes tipos de dispositivos inteligentes colaboran para conseguir un objetivo común. En este concepto, inteligencia hace referencia a la habilidad de adquirir conocimiento y aplicarlo de forma autónoma para conseguir el objetivo común, mientras que entorno hace referencia al mundo físico que nos rodea. Por tanto, un entorno inteligente se puede definir como aquel que adquiere conocimiento de su entorno y aplicándolo permite mejorar la experiencia de sus habitantes. La computación ubicua o generalizada permitirá que este concepto de entorno inteligente se haga realidad. Normalmente, el término de computación ubicua hace referencia al uso de dispositivos distribuidos por el mundo físico, pequeños y de bajo precio, que pueden comunicarse entre ellos y resolver un problema de forma colaborativa. Cuando esta comunicación se lleva a cabo de forma inalámbrica, estos dispositivos forman una red de sensores inalámbrica o en inglés, Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). Estas redes están atrayendo cada vez más atención debido al amplio espectro de aplicaciones que tienen, des de soluciones para el ámbito militar hasta aplicaciones para el gran consumo. Esta tesis se centra en las redes de sensores inalámbricas y subacuáticas o en inglés, Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSN). Estas redes, a pesar de compartir los mismos principios que las WSN, tienen un medio de transmisión diferente que cambia su forma de comunicación de ondas de radio a ondas acústicas. Este cambio hace que ambas redes sean diferentes en muchos aspectos como el retardo de propagación, el ancho de banda disponible, el consumo de energía, etc. De hecho, las señales acústicas tienen una velocidad de propagación cinco órdenes de magnitud menor que las señales de radio. Por tanto, muchos algoritmos y protocolos necesitan adaptarse o incluso rediseñarse. Como el despliegue de este tipo de redes puede ser bastante complicado y caro, se debe planificar de forma precisa el hardware y los algoritmos que se necesitan. Con esta finalidad, las simulaciones pueden resultar una forma muy conveniente de probar todas las variables necesarias antes del despliegue de la aplicación. A pesar de eso, un nivel de precisión adecuado que permita extraer resultados y conclusiones confiables, solamente se puede conseguir utilizando modelos precisos y parámetros reales. Esta tesis propone un ecosistema para UWSN basado en herramientas libres y de código abierto. Este ecosistema se compone de un modelo de recolección de energía y unmodelo de unmódemde bajo coste y bajo consumo con un sistema de activación remota que, junto con otros modelos ya implementados en las herramientas, permite la realización de simulaciones precisas con datos ambientales del tiempo y de las condiciones marinas del lugar donde la aplicación objeto de estudio va a desplegarse. Seguidamente, este ecosistema se utiliza con éxito en el estudio y evaluación de diferentes protocolos de transmisión aplicados a una aplicación real de monitorización de una piscifactoría en la costa del mar Mediterráneo, que es parte de un proyecto de investigación español (CICYT CTM2011-2961-C02-01). Finalmente, utilizando el modelo de recolección de energía, esta plataforma de simulación se utiliza para medir los requisitos de energía de la aplicación y extraer las necesidades de hardware mínimas.Climent Bayarri, JS. (2014). Contribution to Research on Underwater Sensor Networks Architectures by Means of Simulation [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/3532

Effective Medium Access Control for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

This work is concerned with the design, analysis and development of effective Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs). The use of acoustic waves underwater places time-variant channel constraints on the functionality of MAC protocols. The contrast between traffic characteristics of the wide-ranging applications of UASNs makes it hard to design a single MAC protocol that can be adaptive to various applications. This thesis proposes MAC solutions that can meet the environmental and non-environmental challenges posed underwater. Scheduling-based schemes are the most common MAC solutions for UASNs, but scheduling is also challenging in such a dynamic environment. The preferable way of synchronisation underwater is the use of a global scheduler, guard intervals and exchange of timing signals. To this end, single-hop topologies suit UASN applications very well. The Combined Free and Demand Assignment Multiple Access (CFDAMA) is a centralised, scheduling-based MAC protocol demonstrating simplicity and adaptability to the time-variant channel and traffic characteristics. It is shown to minimise end-to-end delay, maximise channel utilisation and maintain fairness amongst nodes. This thesis primarily introduces two novel robust MAC solutions for UASNs, namely CFDAMA with Systematic Round Robin and CFDAMA without clock synchronisation (CFDAMA-NoClock). The former scheme is more suitable for large-scale and widely-spread UASNs, whereas the latter is a more feasible MAC solution when synchronisation amongst node clocks cannot be attained. Both analytical and comprehensive event-driven Riverbed simulations of underwater scenarios selected based on realistic sensor deployments show that the two protocols make it possible to load the channel up to higher levels of its capacity with controlled delay performance superior to that achievable with the traditional CFDAMA schemes. The new scheduling features make the CFDAMA-NoClock scheme a very feasible networking solution for robust and efficient UASN deployments in the real world

QoS Challenges in wireless sensor networked robotics

Wireless sensor networks and mobile robotics are two hot research topics. Integrating them leads to a wide range of new applications in many different environments such as terrestrial, underwater, underground and aerial. Where sensor networks are mainly used for large-scale monitoring and control, mobile robotics are used for performing fine-scale actions and automation. Network heterogeneity together with stringent Quality of Service (QoS) demands from applications such as voice and video make QoS support very challenging. Therefore, this paper investigates the QoS challenges in wireless sensor networked robotics and presents a novel QoS framework as solution to cope with these challenges

A collision aware priority level medium access control protocol for underwater acoustic sensor networks

The Underwater Acoustic Sensor Network (UASN) plays a significant role in many application areas like surveillance, security, commercial and industrial applications. In UASN routing, propagation delay and collision are perennial problems due to data transfers from various sensor nodes to the Sink Node (SN) at the same time. In this paper, we propose a Collision Aware Priority Level mechanism based on Medium Access Control protocol (CAPL-MAC) for transferring data from the Sensor Head (SH) to the SN. In the proposed protocol, we use Parallel Competition Scheme (PCS) for high channel utilization and energy saving of battery. In each Competition Cycle (CC), the data packet produced by each SH in a different time slot can join in CC for data packet transmission in parallel with high channel utilization. In CAPL-MAC, each SH is assigned with a different Priority Level Number (PLN) during every CC. Instead of broadcasting, each SH sends its respective PLN to each SH with the help of the nearest SH to save battery energy. Based on the highest PLN, each SH communicates with SN without collision, and it will also reduce propagation delay as well as improve timing efficiency. Finally, Quality of Service is also improved. We adopt the single-layer approach with the handshaking protocol for communication. We carried out the simulation utilizing Aqua-Sim Network Simulator 2. The simulation results showed that the proposed CAPL-MAC protocol achieved the earlier stated performance rather than by existing protocols such as Competitive Transmission-MAC and Channel Aware Aloh

Receiver-Initiated Handshaking MAC Based On Traffic Estimation for Underwater Sensor Networks

In underwater sensor networks (UWSNs), the unique characteristics of acoustic channels have posed great challenges for the design of medium access control (MAC) protocols. The long propagation delay problem has been widely explored in recent literature. However, the long preamble problem with acoustic modems revealed in real experiments brings new challenges to underwater MAC design. The overhead of control messages in handshaking-based protocols becomes significant due to the long preamble in underwater acoustic modems. To address this problem, we advocate the receiver-initiated handshaking method with parallel reservation to improve the handshaking efficiency. Despite some existing works along this direction, the data polling problem is still an open issue. Without knowing the status of senders, the receiver faces two challenges for efficient data polling: when to poll data from the sender and how much data to request. In this paper, we propose a traffic estimation-based receiver-initiated MAC (TERI-MAC) to solve this problem with an adaptive approach. Data polling in TERI-MAC depends on an online approximation of traffic distribution. It estimates the energy efficiency and network latency and starts the data request only when the preferred performance can be achieved. TERI-MAC can achieve a stable energy efficiency with arbitrary network traffic patterns. For traffic estimation, we employ a resampling technique to keep a small computation and memory overhead. The performance of TERI-MAC in terms of energy efficiency, channel utilization, and communication latency is verified in simulations. Our results show that, compared with existing receiver-initiated-based underwater MAC protocols, TERI-MAC can achieve higher energy efficiency at the price of a delay penalty. This confirms the strength of TERI-MAC for delay-tolerant applications

Receiver-Initiated Handshaking MAC Based on Traffic Estimation for Underwater Sensor Networks

In underwater sensor networks (UWSNs), the unique characteristics of acoustic channels have posed great challenges for the design of medium access control (MAC) protocols. The long propagation delay problem has been widely explored in recent literature. However,the long preamble problem with acoustic modems revealed in real experiments brings new challenges to underwater MAC design. The overhead of control messages in handshaking-based protocols becomes significant due to the long preamble in underwater acoustic modems. To address this problem, we advocate the receiver-initiated handshaking method with parallel reservation to improve the handshaking efficiency. Despite some existing works along this direction, the data polling problem is still an open issue. Without knowing the status of senders, the receiver faces two challenges for efficient data polling: when to poll data from the sender and how much data to request. In this paper, we propose a traffic estimation-basedreceiver-initiated MAC(TERI-MAC)to solve this problem with an adaptive approach. Data polling in TERI-MAC depends on an online approximation of traffic distribution. It estimates the energy efficiency and network latency and starts the data request only when the preferred performance can be achieved. TERI-MAC can achieve a stable energy efficiency with arbitrary network traffic patterns. For traffic estimation, we employ a resampling technique to keep a small computation and memory overhead. The performance of TERI-MAC in terms of energy efficiency, channel utilization, and communication latency is verified in simulations. Our results show that, compared with existing receiver-initiated-based underwater MAC protocols, TERI-MAC can achieve higher energy efficiency at the price of a delay penalty. This confirms the strength of TERI-MAC for delay-tolerant applications

ECS: Efficient Communication Scheduling for Underwater Sensor Networks

TDMA protocols have attracted a lot of attention for underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWSNs), because of the unique characteristics of acoustic signal propagation such as great energy consumption in transmission, long propagation delay and long communication range. Previous TDMA protocols all allocated transmission time to nodes based on discrete time slots. This paper proposes an efficient continuous time scheduling TDMA protocol (ECS) for UWSNs, including the continuous time based and sender oriented conflict analysis model, the transmission moment allocation algorithm and the distributed topology maintenance algorithm. Simulation results confirm that ECS improves network throughput by 20% on average, compared to existing MAC protocols

A Collision Avoidance Based Energy Efficient Medium Access Control Protocol for Clustered Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are typically deployed in energy constrained environments where recharging energy sources and replacing batteries are not viable. This makes energy efficiency in UWSNs a crucial directive to be followed during Medium Access Control (MAC) design. Multiplexing and scheduling based protocols are not ideal for UWSNs because of their strict synchronization requirements, longer latencies and constrained bandwidth.This paper presents the development and simulation analysis of a novel cross-layer communication based MAC protocol called Energy Efficient Collision Avoidance (EECA) MAC protocol. EECA-MAC protocol works on the principle of adaptive power control, controlling the transmission power based on the signal strength at the receiver. EECA-MAC enhances the conventional 4-way handshake to reduce carrier sensing by implementing an enhanced Request to Send (RTS) and Clear to Send (CTS) handshake and an improved back-off algorithm.Simulation analysis shows that the measures taken to achieve energy efficiency have a direct effect on the number of packet retransmissions. Compared to the Medium Access with Collision Avoidance (MACA) protocol, EECA-MAC shows a 40% reduction in the number of packets that are delivered after retransmissions. This reduction, coupled with the reduced signal interference, results in a 16% drop in the energy utilized by the nodes for data transmission