Low-energy sensor network protocols and application to smart wind turbines

The Internet of Things (IoT) has shown promise as an enabling technology for a wide variety of applications, from smart homes to infrastructure monitoring and management. However, a number of challenges remain before the grand vision of an everything-sensed, everything-connected world can be achieved. One of these challenges is the energy problem: how can embedded, networked sensor devices be sustainably powered over the lifetime of an application? To that end, this dissertation focuses on reducing energy consumption of communication protocols in wireless sensor networks and the IoT. The motivating application is wind energy infrastructure monitoring and management, or smart wind turbines. A variety of approaches to low-energy protocol design are studied. The result is a family of low-energy communication protocols, including one specifically designed for nodes deployed on wind turbine blades. This dissertation also presents background information on monitoring and management of wind turbines, and a vision of how the proposed protocols could be integrated and deployed to enable smart wind turbine applications

Energy-Efficient \u3cem\u3ek\u3c/em\u3e-Coverage for Wireless Sensor Networks with Variable Sensing Radii

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of spatially-distributed autonomous sensors that can cooperatively monitor physical and environmental conditions. Because of sensors’ resource-constraints in terms of size, power, and bandwidth, one of the fundamental objectives in WSNs is improving energy-efficiency. In this paper, utilizing sensors with variable sensing radii, we propose a group-based technique to obtain energy-efficient k-coverage based on our previous work with the Delaunay-Triangulation-based 1-coverage algorithm. Our sensing-radii optimization technique ensures full coverage and attains nearly-optimal energy consumption in sensing. Furthermore, our ns-2 simulations confirm that the group-based k-coverage reduces sensing energy consumption and maintains a sound coverage ratio for reliable surveillance

IPv6 multicast forwarding in RPL-based wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor deployments, network layer multicast can be used to improve the bandwidth and energy efficiency for a variety of applications, such as service discovery or network management. However, despite efforts to adopt IPv6 in networks of constrained devices, multicast has been somewhat overlooked. The Multicast Forwarding Using Trickle (Trickle Multicast) internet draft is one of the most noteworthy efforts. The specification of the IPv6 routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) also attempts to address the area but leaves many questions unanswered. In this paper we highlight our concerns about both these approaches. Subsequently, we present our alternative mechanism, called stateless multicast RPL forwarding algorithm (SMRF), which addresses the aforementioned drawbacks. Having extended the TCP/IP engine of the Contiki embedded operating system to support both trickle multicast (TM) and SMRF, we present an in-depth comparison, backed by simulated evaluation as well as by experiments conducted on a multi-hop hardware testbed. Results demonstrate that SMRF achieves significant delay and energy efficiency improvements at the cost of a small increase in packet loss. The outcome of our hardware experiments show that simulation results were realistic. Lastly, we evaluate both algorithms in terms of code size and memory requirements, highlighting SMRF's low implementation complexity. Both implementations have been made available to the community for adoption

Recent Developments on Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks and Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

This book presents collective works published in the recent Special Issue (SI) entitled "Recent Developments on Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks and Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks”. These works expose the readership to the latest solutions and techniques for MANETs and VANETs. They cover interesting topics such as power-aware optimization solutions for MANETs, data dissemination in VANETs, adaptive multi-hop broadcast schemes for VANETs, multi-metric routing protocols for VANETs, and incentive mechanisms to encourage the distribution of information in VANETs. The book demonstrates pioneering work in these fields, investigates novel solutions and methods, and discusses future trends in these field