Cooperative sensing and compression in vehicular sensor networks for urban monitoring

A Vehicular Sensor Network (VSN) may be used for urban environment surveillance utilizing vehicle-based sensors to provide an affordable yet good coverage for the urban area. The sensors in VSN enjoy the vehicle's steady power supply and strong computational capacity not available in traditional Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). However, the mobility of the vehicles results in highly dynamic and unpredictable network topology, leading to packet losses and distorted surveillance results. To resolve these problems, we propose a cooperative data sensing and compression approach with zero inter-sensor collaboration overhead based on sparse random projections. The algorithm provides excellent reconstruction accuracy for the sensed field, and by taking advantage of the spatial correlation of the data, enjoys much smaller communication traffic load compared to traditional sampling algorithms in wireless sensor networks. Real urban environment data sets are used in the experiments to test the reconstruction accuracy and energy efficiency under different vehicular mobility models. The results show that our approach is superior to the conventional sampling and interpolation strategy which propagates data in an uncompressed form, with 4-5dB gain in reconstruction quality and 21-55% savings in communication cost for the same sampling times. ©2010 IEEE.published_or_final_versionThe IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) 2010, Cape Town, South Africa, 23-27 May 2010. In Proceedings of the IEEE ICC, 2010, p. 1-

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

Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks

In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge, and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control, learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity, localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature, and identify topics that require more research attention in the future

Spectrum cartography techniques, challenges, opportunities, and applications: A survey

The spectrum cartography finds applications in several areas such as cognitive radios, spectrum aware communications, machine-type communications, Internet of Things, connected vehicles, wireless sensor networks, and radio frequency management systems, etc. This paper presents a survey on state-of-the-art of spectrum cartography techniques for the construction of various radio environment maps (REMs). Following a brief overview on spectrum cartography, various techniques considered to construct the REMs such as channel gain map, power spectral density map, power map, spectrum map, power propagation map, radio frequency map, and interference map are reviewed. In this paper, we compare the performance of the different spectrum cartography methods in terms of mean absolute error, mean square error, normalized mean square error, and root mean square error. The information presented in this paper aims to serve as a practical reference guide for various spectrum cartography methods for constructing different REMs. Finally, some of the open issues and challenges for future research and development are discussed.publishedVersio

RTS: road topology-based scheme for traffic condition estimation via vehicular crowdsensing

Urban traffic condition usually serves as basic information for some intelligent urban applications, for example, intelligent transportation system. The traditional acquisition of such information is often costly because of the dependencies on infrastructures, such as cameras and loop detectors. Crowdsensing, as a new economic paradigm, can be utilized together with vehicular networks to efficiently gather vehicle-sensed data for estimating the traffic condition. However, it has the problem of being lack of data uploading efficiency and data usage effectiveness. In this paper, we take into account the topology of the road net to deal with these problems. Specifically, we divide the road net into road sections and junction areas. Based on this division, we introduce a two-phased data collection and processing scheme named road topology-based scheme. It leverages the correlations among adjacent roads. In a junction area, data collected by vehicles are first processed and integrated by a sponsor vehicle to locally calculate traffic condition. Both the selection of the sponsor and the calculation of road condition utilize the road correlation. The sponsor then uploads the local data to a server. By employing the inherent relations among roads, the server processes data and estimates traffic condition for the road sections without vehicular data in a global vision. We conduct experiments based on real vehicle trace data. The results indicate that our design can commendably handle the problems of efficiency and effectiveness in traffic condition evaluation using the vehicular crowdsensing data.N/

Device Free Localisation Techniques in Indoor Environments

The location estimation of a target for a long period was performed only by device based localisation technique which is difficult in applications where target especially human is non-cooperative. A target was detected by equipping a device using global positioning systems, radio frequency systems, ultrasonic frequency systems, etc. Device free localisation (DFL) is an upcoming technology in automated localisation in which target need not equip any device for identifying its position by the user. For achieving this objective, the wireless sensor network is a better choice due to its growing popularity. This paper describes the possible categorisation of recently developed DFL techniques using wireless sensor network. The scope of each category of techniques is analysed by comparing their potential benefits and drawbacks. Finally, future scope and research directions in this field are also summarised

Uav-assisted data collection in wireless sensor networks: A comprehensive survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are usually deployed to different areas of interest to sense phenomena, process sensed data, and take actions accordingly. The networks are integrated with many advanced technologies to be able to fulfill their tasks that is becoming more and more complicated. These networks tend to connect to multimedia networks and to process huge data over long distances. Due to the limited resources of static sensor nodes, WSNs need to cooperate with mobile robots such as unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in their developments. The mobile devices show their maneuverability, computational and energystorage abilities to support WSNs in multimedia networks. This paper addresses a comprehensive survey of almost scenarios utilizing UAVs and UGVs with strogly emphasising on UAVs for data collection in WSNs. Either UGVs or UAVs can collect data from static sensor nodes in the monitoring fields. UAVs can either work alone to collect data or can cooperate with other UAVs to increase their coverage in their working fields. Different techniques to support the UAVs are addressed in this survey. Communication links, control algorithms, network structures and different mechanisms are provided and compared. Energy consumption or transportation cost for such scenarios are considered. Opening issues and challenges are provided and suggested for the future developments

Fatigue Assessment of Highway Bridges under Traffic Loading Using Microscopic Traffic Simulation

Fatigue is a common failure mode of steel bridges induced by truck traffic. Despite the deterioration caused by environmental factors, the increasing truck traffic volume and weight pose a premier threat to steel highway bridges. Given the uncertainties of the complicated traffic loading and the complexity of the bridge structure, fatigue evaluation based on field measurements under actual traffic flow is recommended. As the quality and the quantity of the available long-term traffic monitoring data and information have been improved, methodologies have been developed to obtain more realistic vehicular live load traffic. A case study of a steel interstate highway bridge using microscopic traffic simulation is presented herein. The knowledge of actual traffic loading may reduce the uncertainty involved in the evaluation of the load-carrying capacity, estimation of the rate of deterioration, and prediction of remaining fatigue life. This chapter demonstrates a systematic approach using traffic simulation and bridge health monitoring-based fatigue assessment