Wireless communication, identification and sensing technologies enabling integrated logistics: a study in the harbor environment

In the last decade, integrated logistics has become an important challenge in the development of wireless communication, identification and sensing technology, due to the growing complexity of logistics processes and the increasing demand for adapting systems to new requirements. The advancement of wireless technology provides a wide range of options for the maritime container terminals. Electronic devices employed in container terminals reduce the manual effort, facilitating timely information flow and enhancing control and quality of service and decision made. In this paper, we examine the technology that can be used to support integration in harbor's logistics. In the literature, most systems have been developed to address specific needs of particular harbors, but a systematic study is missing. The purpose is to provide an overview to the reader about which technology of integrated logistics can be implemented and what remains to be addressed in the future

An Integrated Framework for Sensing Radio Frequency Spectrum Attacks on Medical Delivery Drones

Drone susceptibility to jamming or spoofing attacks of GPS, RF, Wi-Fi, and operator signals presents a danger to future medical delivery systems. A detection framework capable of sensing attacks on drones could provide the capability for active responses. The identification of interference attacks has applicability in medical delivery, disaster zone relief, and FAA enforcement against illegal jamming activities. A gap exists in the literature for solo or swarm-based drones to identify radio frequency spectrum attacks. Any non-delivery specific function, such as attack sensing, added to a drone involves a weight increase and additional complexity; therefore, the value must exceed the disadvantages. Medical delivery, high-value cargo, and disaster zone applications could present a value proposition which overcomes the additional costs. The paper examines types of attacks against drones and describes a framework for designing an attack detection system with active response capabilities for improving the reliability of delivery and other medical applications.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figures, 5 table

Design and practical deployment of a network-centric remotely piloted aircraft system

Remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPASs) are gaining more are more relevance during the last decade since more applications are being enabled by lighter planes with increasing autonomy, higher ceilings, and more powerful transmission technologies. The integration of the RPAS as part of network-centric warfare would be a very important milestone to achieve because of the huge amount of information and capabilities that all these aircrafts can incorporate into the global scheme. This integration is easier for handheld (short-range) RPASs since their communications are typically based on digital transmission like WiFi or WiMAX, but it may not be as obvious for bigger RPASs (long-range, e.g., tactical or medium/high altitude systems) because their line of sight communications are frequently based on analog transmissions. This implies indirect integration into network-centric warfare by means of the ground control station (satellite communications, when available, may suffer notorious delay for certain applications). This article presents a recent practical experience, including flight test campaigns, deploying an all- IP communication architecture into one of the most relevant Spanish tactical RPASs, the SIVA, used by both the Spanish Army and the Spanish Air Force for the last 10 years. This deployment enables cost-effective integration of this RPAS (and its natural successor, the MILANO, a medium- altitude RPAS) into the network-centric warfare by means of direct TCP/IP transmissions over a long-range digital line of sight channel combined with satellite communications for beyond line of sight operations. The proposed design includes network-level security over the radio interfaces, automatic data link selection, support of remote video terminals, and access connectivity toward external IPv6 networks.This work has been partially granted by the Spanish Ministry of Defense through the DRONE project (DN8644-COINCIDENTE-10032110042). The authors want to acknowledge the INTA and Erzia Technologies S.L. personnel who participated in the DRONE project for fruitful collaboration and excellent work. The work of Francisco Valera has been partially funded by the Spanish Government through the MINECO eeCONTENT Project (TEC2011-29688-C02-02)

A 3D-collaborative wireless network: towards resilient communication for rescuing flood victims

Every year, floods result in huge damage and devastation both to lives and properties all over the world. Much of this devastation and its prolonged effects result from a lack of collaboration among the rescue agents as a consequence of the lack of reliable and resilient communication platform in the disrupted and damaged environments. In order to counteract this issue, this paper aims to propose a three-dimensional (3D)- collaborative wireless network utilizing air, water and ground based communication infrastructures to support rescue missions in flood-affected areas. Through simulated Search and Rescue(SAR) activities, the effectiveness of the proposed network model is validated and its superiority over the traditional SAR is demonstrated, particularly in the harsh flood environments. The model of the 3D-Collaborative wireless network is expected to significantly assist the rescuing teams in accomplishing their task more effectively in the corresponding disaster areas

Drone Base Station Trajectory Management for Optimal Scheduling in LTE-Based Sparse Delay-Sensitive M2M Networks

Providing connectivity in areas out of reach of the cellular infrastructure is a very active area of research. This connectivity is particularly needed in case of the deployment of machine type communication devices (MTCDs) for critical purposes such as homeland security. In such applications, MTCDs are deployed in areas that are hard to reach using regular communications infrastructure while the collected data is timely critical. Drone-supported communications constitute a new trend in complementing the reach of the terrestrial communication infrastructure. In this study, drones are used as base stations to provide real-time communication services to gather critical data out of a group of MTCDs that are sparsely deployed in a marine environment. Studying different communication technologies as LTE, WiFi, LPWAN and Free-Space Optical communication (FSOC) incorporated with the drone communications was important in the first phase of this research to identify the best candidate for addressing this need. We have determined the cellular technology, and particularly LTE, to be the most suitable candidate to support such applications. In this case, an LTE base station would be mounted on the drone which will help communicate with the different MTCDs to transmit their data to the network backhaul. We then formulate the problem model mathematically and devise the trajectory planning and scheduling algorithm that decides the drone path and the resulting scheduling. Based on this formulation, we decided to compare between an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) based technique that optimizes the drone movement among the sparsely-deployed MTCDs and a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based solution that achieves the same purpose. This optimization is based on minimizing the energy cost of the drone movement while ensuring the data transmission deadline missing is minimized. We present the results of several simulation experiments that validate the different performance aspects of the technique

On The Continuous Coverage Problem for a Swarm of UAVs

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be used to provide wireless network and remote surveillance coverage for disaster-affected areas. During such a situation, the UAVs need to return periodically to a charging station for recharging, due to their limited battery capacity. We study the problem of minimizing the number of UAVs required for a continuous coverage of a given area, given the recharging requirement. We prove that this problem is NP-complete. Due to its intractability, we study partitioning the coverage graph into cycles that start at the charging station. We first characterize the minimum number of UAVs to cover such a cycle based on the charging time, the traveling time, and the number of subareas to be covered by the cycle. Based on this analysis, we then develop an efficient algorithm, the cycles with limited energy algorithm. The straightforward method to continuously cover a given area is to split it into N subareas and cover it by N cycles using N additional UAVs. Our simulation results examine the importance of critical system parameters: the energy capacity of the UAVs, the number of subareas in the covered area, and the UAV charging and traveling times.We demonstrate that the cycles with limited energy algorithm requires 69%-94% fewer additional UAVs relative to the straightforward method, as the energy capacity of the UAVs is increased, and 67%-71% fewer additional UAVs, as the number of subareas is increased.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure