Practical mobile ad hoc networks for large scale cattle monitoring

This thesis is concerned with identification of realistic requirements for the cattle monitoring system and design of the practical architecture addressing these requirements. Automated monitoring of cattle with wireless monitoring devices mounted on the animals can increase efficiency of cattle production, decrease its reliance on human labour and thus increase its profitability. Multi-hop ad hoc wireless communication has the potential to increase battery life of the animal mounted devices, decrease their size and combat disconnections. This thesis reveals that no current approach sufficiently addresses energy constrains of the animal mounted devices and potential disconnections. We propose a delay tolerant store and forward architecture that provides data retention, detecting custom events, issues notifications, answers remote and in-situ queries, based on requirements identified during field experiments we conducted. This architecture utilizes fixed infrastructure but also works in ad hoc infrastructureless conditions. The core of the proposed architecture, Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) communication, provides offloading data for long term storage by sending data to farm servers via sinks that are a part of MANET and handles in-situ queries issued by users collocated with the animals. The proposed MANET routing algorithm addresses high mobility of nodes and disconnections. It provides lower and more balanced energy usage, shorter delays and increased success ratio of delivering answers to in-situ queries than more generic existing approaches. Problems of large scale deployment of the envisaged system are also addressed. We discuss the necessary configuration process performed during the system installation as well as pervasive mobile and home access to the target system. We propose cost efficient strategies for sinks installation and connecting sinks to farm servers, adaptive to different requirements, estates layout, available infrastructure and existing human and vehicle mobility. We also propose a cost efficient security model for the target system based on public key cryptography

Energy balanced broadcasting through delayed intelligence

Abstract — Ad hoc wireless networks are growing in popularity and usefulness, however they rely on broadcasting as a fundamental process for routing. Improvements to broadcasting have made ad hoc networks more feasible, but sometimes benefit only specific situations. Delayed Intelligence (DI) is proposed as a new load balancing approach where small delays are introduced to allow distributed responsibility delegation. Preliminary results show delayed intelligence, when applied in existing broadcasting methods such as passive clustering, can be used to improve the energy disparity and therefore extend ad hoc network lifetime