A critical analysis of research potential, challenges and future directives in industrial wireless sensor networks

In recent years, Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs) have emerged as an important research theme with applications spanning a wide range of industries including automation, monitoring, process control, feedback systems and automotive. Wide scope of IWSNs applications ranging from small production units, large oil and gas industries to nuclear fission control, enables a fast-paced research in this field. Though IWSNs offer advantages of low cost, flexibility, scalability, self-healing, easy deployment and reformation, yet they pose certain limitations on available potential and introduce challenges on multiple fronts due to their susceptibility to highly complex and uncertain industrial environments. In this paper a detailed discussion on design objectives, challenges and solutions, for IWSNs, are presented. A careful evaluation of industrial systems, deadlines and possible hazards in industrial atmosphere are discussed. The paper also presents a thorough review of the existing standards and industrial protocols and gives a critical evaluation of potential of these standards and protocols along with a detailed discussion on available hardware platforms, specific industrial energy harvesting techniques and their capabilities. The paper lists main service providers for IWSNs solutions and gives insight of future trends and research gaps in the field of IWSNs

A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201

Radio Communications

In the last decades the restless evolution of information and communication technologies (ICT) brought to a deep transformation of our habits. The growth of the Internet and the advances in hardware and software implementations modified our way to communicate and to share information. In this book, an overview of the major issues faced today by researchers in the field of radio communications is given through 35 high quality chapters written by specialists working in universities and research centers all over the world. Various aspects will be deeply discussed: channel modeling, beamforming, multiple antennas, cooperative networks, opportunistic scheduling, advanced admission control, handover management, systems performance assessment, routing issues in mobility conditions, localization, web security. Advanced techniques for the radio resource management will be discussed both in single and multiple radio technologies; either in infrastructure, mesh or ad hoc networks

Design of medium access control techniques for cooperative wireless networks

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Location Aided Energy Balancing Strategy in Green Cellular Networks

Most cellular network communication strategies are focused on data traffic scenarios rather than energy balance and efficient utilization. Thus mobile users in hot cells may suffer from low throughput due to energy loading imbalance problem. In state of art cellular network technologies, relay stations extend cell coverage and enhance signal strength for mobile users. However, busy traffic makes the relay stations in hot area run out of energy quickly. In this paper, we propose an energy balancing strategy in which the mobile nodes are able to dynamically select and hand over to the relay station with the highest potential energy capacity to resume communication. Key to the strategy is that each relay station merely maintains two parameters that contains the trend of its previous energy consumption and then predicts its future quantity of energy, which is defined as the relay station potential energy capacity. Then each mobile node can select the relay station with the highest potential energy capacity. Simulations demonstrate that our approach significantly increase the aggregate throughput and the average life time of relay stations in cellular network environment.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1108.5493 by other author

Full-Duplex Cognitive Radio: A New Design Paradigm for Enhancing Spectrum Usage

With the rapid growth of demand for ever-increasing data rate, spectrum resources have become more and more scarce. As a promising technique to increase the efficiency of the spectrum utilization, cognitive radio (CR) technique has the great potential to meet such a requirement by allowing un-licensed users to coexist in licensed bands. In conventional CR systems, the spectrum sensing is performed at the beginning of each time slot before the data transmission. This unfortunately results in two major problems: 1) transmission time reduction due to sensing, and 2) sensing accuracy impairment due to data transmission. To tackle these problems, in this paper we present a new design paradigm for future CR by exploring the full-duplex (FD) techniques to achieve the simultaneous spectrum sensing and data transmission. With FD radios equipped at the secondary users (SUs), SUs can simultaneously sense and access the vacant spectrum, and thus, significantly improve sensing performances and meanwhile increase data transmission efficiency. The aim of this article is to transform the promising conceptual framework into the practical wireless network design by addressing a diverse set of challenges such as protocol design and theoretical analysis. Several application scenarios with FD enabled CR are elaborated, and key open research directions and novel algorithms in these systems are discussed

Thirty Years of Machine Learning: The Road to Pareto-Optimal Wireless Networks

Future wireless networks have a substantial potential in terms of supporting a broad range of complex compelling applications both in military and civilian fields, where the users are able to enjoy high-rate, low-latency, low-cost and reliable information services. Achieving this ambitious goal requires new radio techniques for adaptive learning and intelligent decision making because of the complex heterogeneous nature of the network structures and wireless services. Machine learning (ML) algorithms have great success in supporting big data analytics, efficient parameter estimation and interactive decision making. Hence, in this article, we review the thirty-year history of ML by elaborating on supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning and deep learning. Furthermore, we investigate their employment in the compelling applications of wireless networks, including heterogeneous networks (HetNets), cognitive radios (CR), Internet of things (IoT), machine to machine networks (M2M), and so on. This article aims for assisting the readers in clarifying the motivation and methodology of the various ML algorithms, so as to invoke them for hitherto unexplored services as well as scenarios of future wireless networks.Comment: 46 pages, 22 fig

Capacity Enhancement in 60 GHz Based D2D Networks by Relay Selection and Scheduling

Millimeter-wave or 60 GHz communication is a promising technology that enables data rates in multigigabits. However, its tremendous propagation loss and signal blockage may severely affect the network throughput. In current data-centric device-to-device (D2D) communication networks, the devices with intended data communications usually lay in close proximity, unlike the case in voice-centric networks. So the network can be visualized as a naturally formed groups of devices. In this paper, we jointly consider resource scheduling and relay selection to improve network capacity in 60 GHz based D2D networks. Two types of transmission scenarios are considered in wireless personal area networks (WPANs), intra and intergroup. A distributed receiver based relay selection scheme is proposed for intragroup transmission, while a distance based relay selection scheme is proposed for intergroup transmission. The outage analysis of our proposed relay selection scheme is provided along with the numerical results. We then propose a concurrent transmission scheduling algorithm based on vertex coloring technique. The proposed scheduling algorithm employs time and space division in mmWave WPANs. Using vertex multicoloring, we allow transmitter-receiver (Tx-Rx) communication pairs to span over more colors, enabling better time slot utilization. We evaluate our scheduling algorithm in single-hop and multihop scenarios and discover that it outperforms other schemes by significantly improving network throughput

Spectrum-efficient Architecture for Cognitive Wireless Sensor Networks

Projecte realitzat en col.laboració amb el centre Université Libre de BruxellesHoy en día existe la creencia de que en unos pocos años las actuales Redes Inalámbricas de Sensores estarán presentes en muchas aplicaciones. Mientras estas sigan actuando en la banda sin licencia de ISM 2,4GHz, tendrán que coexistir con otras exitosas tecnologías como Wi-Fi o Bluetooth. En consecuencia, resulta obvio asegurar que la banda en cuestión estará superpoblada en un futuro próximo. Sin embargo y gracias a las nuevas técnicas de Radio Cognitiva, que permitirán la aplicación de un eficiente Acceso al Espectro Dinámico, se conseguirá una distribución racional, dentro del espectro disponible en ese momento y lugar, de las comunicaciones inalámbricas que se estén llevando a cabo. Esta actuación permitirá acceder a frecuencias menos pobladas para poder transmitir con menos interferencias e incluso con menos pérdidas de propagación. A lo largo de este trabajo se va a presentar una arquitectura eficiente, espectralmente hablando, para Redes Inalámbricas de Sensores y Cognitivas. Este esquema desarrolla un protocolo de recolección de datos, para una red con topología de árbol, totalmente escalable y con finalidades genéricas. A través de las pruebas realizadas, podemos afirmar que nuestro esquema, sin alterar el ciclo normal de recolección de datos, puede detectar la presencia de otras Redes Inalámbricas de Sensores y, consecuentemente, migrar la red a nueva frecuencia mientras que todas estas operaciones están ocultas al usuario final. También es eficiente a nivel de energía, ya que no se realizan comprobaciones redundantes de la presencia de otras redes. De esta manera, nuestra propuesta asegura un mejor comportamiento en caso de la existencia de una Red Inalámbrica de Sensores externa, sin realizar operaciones complicadas ni añadiendo más tráfico a la red