Off-body wireless link simulation framework using deterministic channel modeling

Body-centric communication concerns wireless links in which the human body represents the central element, exchanging data by means of wearable antennas with a different node in the external environment or on the human body itself. During the link design phase, it is very advantageous to be able to model the link and predict its performance before its real implementation, resulting in reduction of design time and costs. In the present contribution, we propose a novel computer simulation framework to describe a complete off-body communication link between a human user and a remote base station, including all the components of the communication link such as wearable and fixed antennas, human body and propagation channel at the physical level, also taking into account the digital data transmission at link level. The proposed framework was constructed by applying the most appropriate modeling tools for each component, including ray tracing for the deterministic channel modeling. The framework provides as output the most common link performance parameters such as Bit-Error-Rate (BER), received Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and channel correlations. The validity of the proposed method was verified by comparing the figures of merit of a real off-body communication link, studied during a previous measurement campaign, with the ones obtained by the proposed simulation framework. A good agreement is obtained in terms of both BERs and SNRs

Analysis of Energy Consumption Performance towards Optimal Radioplanning of Wireless Sensor Networks in Heterogeneous Indoor Environments

In this paper the impact of complex indoor environment in the deployment and energy consumption of a wireless sensor network infrastructure is analyzed. The variable nature of the radio channel is analyzed by means of deterministic in-house 3D ray launching simulation of an indoor scenario, in which wireless sensors, based on an in-house CyFi implementation, typically used for environmental monitoring, are located. Received signal power and current consumption measurement results of the in-house designed wireless motes have been obtained, stating that adequate consideration of the network topology and morphology lead to optimal performance and power consumption reduction. The use of radioplanning techniques therefore aid in the deployment of more energy efficient elements, optimizing the overall performance of the variety of deployed wireless systems within the indoor scenario

Acoustic Integrity Codes: Secure Device Pairing Using Short-Range Acoustic Communication

Secure Device Pairing (SDP) relies on an out-of-band channel to authenticate devices. This requires a common hardware interface, which limits the use of existing SDP systems. We propose to use short-range acoustic communication for the initial pairing. Audio hardware is commonly available on existing off-the-shelf devices and can be accessed from user space without requiring firmware or hardware modifications. We improve upon previous approaches by designing Acoustic Integrity Codes (AICs): a modulation scheme that provides message authentication on the acoustic physical layer. We analyze their security and demonstrate that we can defend against signal cancellation attacks by designing signals with low autocorrelation. Our system can detect overshadowing attacks using a ternary decision function with a threshold. In our evaluation of this SDP scheme's security and robustness, we achieve a bit error ratio below 0.1% for a net bit rate of 100 bps with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 14 dB. Using our open-source proof-of-concept implementation on Android smartphones, we demonstrate pairing between different smartphone models.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figures. Published at ACM WiSec 2020 (13th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks). Updated reference

Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Communication Networks for the Maritime Internet of Things: Key Technologies, Opportunities, and Challenges

With the rapid development of marine activities, there has been an increasing number of maritime mobile terminals, as well as a growing demand for high-speed and ultra-reliable maritime communications to keep them connected. Traditionally, the maritime Internet of Things (IoT) is enabled by maritime satellites. However, satellites are seriously restricted by their high latency and relatively low data rate. As an alternative, shore & island-based base stations (BSs) can be built to extend the coverage of terrestrial networks using fourth-generation (4G), fifth-generation (5G), and beyond 5G services. Unmanned aerial vehicles can also be exploited to serve as aerial maritime BSs. Despite of all these approaches, there are still open issues for an efficient maritime communication network (MCN). For example, due to the complicated electromagnetic propagation environment, the limited geometrically available BS sites, and rigorous service demands from mission-critical applications, conventional communication and networking theories and methods should be tailored for maritime scenarios. Towards this end, we provide a survey on the demand for maritime communications, the state-of-the-art MCNs, and key technologies for enhancing transmission efficiency, extending network coverage, and provisioning maritime-specific services. Future challenges in developing an environment-aware, service-driven, and integrated satellite-air-ground MCN to be smart enough to utilize external auxiliary information, e.g., sea state and atmosphere conditions, are also discussed

Modeling, Simulation and Analysis of Video Streaming Errors in Wireless Wideband Access Networks

Analysis of simulated models has become a veritable tool for investigating network behavioral patterns vis-à-vis transmitted content. The streaming video research domain employs modeling extensively due to availability of relevant tools. A vast majority of which are presented on the FOSS platform. The transmission of audio and video streaming services over different media is becoming ever more popular. This widespread increase is accompanied by the difficult task of maintaining the QoS of streaming video. The use of very accurate coding techniques for transmissions over wireless networks alone cannot guarantee a complete eradication of distortions characteristic of the video signal. A software- hardware composite system has been developed for investigating the effect of single bit error and bit packet errors in wideband wireless access systems on the quality of H.264/AVC standard video streams. Numerical results of the modeling and analysis of the effect of interference robustness on quality of video streaming are presented and discussed. Analytic results also suggest that the Markov model of packetization of error obtained from a real network for streaming video can be used in the simulations of transmission of video across networks in the hardware- software complex developed by the authors in a previous work

Active Queue Management for Fair Resource Allocation in Wireless Networks

This paper investigates the interaction between end-to-end flow control and MAC-layer scheduling on wireless links. We consider a wireless network with multiple users receiving information from a common access point; each user suffers fading, and a scheduler allocates the channel based on channel quality,but subject to fairness and latency considerations. We show that the fairness property of the scheduler is compromised by the transport layer flow control of TCP New Reno. We provide a receiver-side control algorithm, CLAMP, that remedies this situation. CLAMP works at a receiver to control a TCP sender by setting the TCP receiver's advertised window limit, and this allows the scheduler to allocate bandwidth fairly between the users

Effect of Wideband Wireless Access Systems Interference Robustness on the Quality of Video Streaming

The transmission of audio and video streaming services over different conduits (wireless access systems, Internet, etc.) is becoming ever more popular. This widespread increase is accompanied by the attendant new and difficult task of maintaining the quality of service of streaming video. The use of very accurate coding techniques for transmissions over wireless networks alone cannot guarantee a complete eradication of distortions characteristic of the video signal. A software-hardware composite system has been developed for investigating the effect of single bit error and bit packet errors in wideband wireless access systems on the quality of H.264/AVC standard bursty video streams. Numerical results of the modeling and analysis of the effect of interference robustness on quality of video streaming are presented and discussed