A Priority-based Fair Queuing (PFQ) Model for Wireless Healthcare System

Healthcare is a very active research area, primarily due to the increase in the elderly population that leads to increasing number of emergency situations that require urgent actions. In recent years some of wireless networked medical devices were equipped with different sensors to measure and report on vital signs of patient remotely. The most important sensors are Heart Beat Rate (ECG), Pressure and Glucose sensors. However, the strict requirements and real-time nature of medical applications dictate the extreme importance and need for appropriate Quality of Service (QoS), fast and accurate delivery of a patient’s measurements in reliable e-Health ecosystem. As the elderly age and older adult population is increasing (65 years and above) due to the advancement in medicine and medical care in the last two decades; high QoS and reliable e-health ecosystem has become a major challenge in Healthcare especially for patients who require continuous monitoring and attention. Nevertheless, predictions have indicated that elderly population will be approximately 2 billion in developing countries by 2050 where availability of medical staff shall be unable to cope with this growth and emergency cases that need immediate intervention. On the other side, limitations in communication networks capacity, congestions and the humongous increase of devices, applications and IOT using the available communication networks add extra layer of challenges on E-health ecosystem such as time constraints, quality of measurements and signals reaching healthcare centres. Hence this research has tackled the delay and jitter parameters in E-health M2M wireless communication and succeeded in reducing them in comparison to current available models. The novelty of this research has succeeded in developing a new Priority Queuing model ‘’Priority Based-Fair Queuing’’ (PFQ) where a new priority level and concept of ‘’Patient’s Health Record’’ (PHR) has been developed and integrated with the Priority Parameters (PP) values of each sensor to add a second level of priority. The results and data analysis performed on the PFQ model under different scenarios simulating real M2M E-health environment have revealed that the PFQ has outperformed the results obtained from simulating the widely used current models such as First in First Out (FIFO) and Weight Fair Queuing (WFQ). PFQ model has improved transmission of ECG sensor data by decreasing delay and jitter in emergency cases by 83.32% and 75.88% respectively in comparison to FIFO and 46.65% and 60.13% with respect to WFQ model. Similarly, in pressure sensor the improvements were 82.41% and 71.5% and 68.43% and 73.36% in comparison to FIFO and WFQ respectively. Data transmission were also improved in the Glucose sensor by 80.85% and 64.7% and 92.1% and 83.17% in comparison to FIFO and WFQ respectively. However, non-emergency cases data transmission using PFQ model was negatively impacted and scored higher rates than FIFO and WFQ since PFQ tends to give higher priority to emergency cases. Thus, a derivative from the PFQ model has been developed to create a new version namely “Priority Based-Fair Queuing-Tolerated Delay” (PFQ-TD) to balance the data transmission between emergency and non-emergency cases where tolerated delay in emergency cases has been considered. PFQ-TD has succeeded in balancing fairly this issue and reducing the total average delay and jitter of emergency and non-emergency cases in all sensors and keep them within the acceptable allowable standards. PFQ-TD has improved the overall average delay and jitter in emergency and non-emergency cases among all sensors by 41% and 84% respectively in comparison to PFQ model

Optimal scheduling and fair servicepolicy for STDMA in underwater networks with acoustic communications

In this work, a multi-hop string network with a single sink node is analyzed. A periodic optimal scheduling for TDMA operation that considers the characteristic long propagation delay of the underwater acoustic channel is presented. This planning of transmissions is obtained with the help of a new geometrical method based on a 2D lattice in the space-time domain. In order to evaluate the performance of this optimal scheduling, two service policies have been compared: FIFO and Round-Robin. Simulation results, including achievable throughput, packet delay, and queue length, are shown. The network fairness has also been quantified with the Gini index

Droplet: A New Denial-of-Service Attack on Low Power Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper we present a new kind of Denial-of-Service attack against the PHY layer of low power wireless sensor networks. Overcoming the very limited range of jamming-based attacks, this attack can penetrate deep into a target network with high power efficiency. We term this the Droplet attack, as it attains enormous disruption by dropping small, payload-less frame headers to its victim's radio receiver, depriving the latter of bandwidth and sleep time. We demonstrate the Droplet attack's high damage rate to full duty-cycle receivers, and further show that a high frequency version of Droplet can even force nodes running on very low duty-cycle MAC protocols to drop most of their packets

Second year technical report on-board processing for future satellite communications systems

Advanced baseband and microwave switching techniques for large domestic communications satellites operating in the 30/20 GHz frequency bands are discussed. The nominal baseband processor throughput is one million packets per second (1.6 Gb/s) from one thousand T1 carrier rate customer premises terminals. A frequency reuse factor of sixteen is assumed by using 16 spot antenna beams with the same 100 MHz bandwidth per beam and a modulation with a one b/s per Hz bandwidth efficiency. Eight of the beams are fixed on major metropolitan areas and eight are scanning beams which periodically cover the remainder of the U.S. under dynamic control. User signals are regenerated (demodulated/remodulated) and message packages are reformatted on board. Frequency division multiple access and time division multiplex are employed on the uplinks and downlinks, respectively, for terminals within the coverage area and dwell interval of a scanning beam. Link establishment and packet routing protocols are defined. Also described is a detailed design of a separate 100 x 100 microwave switch capable of handling nonregenerated signals occupying the remaining 2.4 GHz bandwidth with 60 dB of isolation, at an estimated weight and power consumption of approximately 400 kg and 100 W, respectively

When Backpressure Meets Predictive Scheduling

Motivated by the increasing popularity of learning and predicting human user behavior in communication and computing systems, in this paper, we investigate the fundamental benefit of predictive scheduling, i.e., predicting and pre-serving arrivals, in controlled queueing systems. Based on a lookahead window prediction model, we first establish a novel equivalence between the predictive queueing system with a \emph{fully-efficient} scheduling scheme and an equivalent queueing system without prediction. This connection allows us to analytically demonstrate that predictive scheduling necessarily improves system delay performance and can drive it to zero with increasing prediction power. We then propose the \textsf{Predictive Backpressure (PBP)} algorithm for achieving optimal utility performance in such predictive systems. \textsf{PBP} efficiently incorporates prediction into stochastic system control and avoids the great complication due to the exponential state space growth in the prediction window size. We show that \textsf{PBP} can achieve a utility performance that is within $O(\epsilon)$ of the optimal, for any $\epsilon>0$, while guaranteeing that the system delay distribution is a \emph{shifted-to-the-left} version of that under the original Backpressure algorithm. Hence, the average packet delay under \textsf{PBP} is strictly better than that under Backpressure, and vanishes with increasing prediction window size. This implies that the resulting utility-delay tradeoff with predictive scheduling beats the known optimal $[O(\epsilon), O(\log(1/\epsilon))]$ tradeoff for systems without prediction

Implementation and evaluation of the sensornet protocol for Contiki

Sensornet Protocol (SP) is a link abstraction layer between the network layer and the link layer for sensor networks. SP was proposed as the core of a future-oriented sensor node architecture that allows flexible and optimized combination between multiple coexisting protocols. This thesis implements the SP sensornet protocol on the Contiki operating system in order to: evaluate the effectiveness of the original SP services; explore further requirements and implementation trade-offs uncovered by the original proposal. We analyze the original SP design and the TinyOS implementation of SP to design the Contiki port. We implement the data sending and receiving part of SP using Contiki processes, and the neighbor management part as a group of global routines. The evaluation consists of a single-hop traffic throughput test and a multihop convergecast test. Both tests are conducted using both simulation and experimentation. We conclude from the evaluation results that SP's link-level abstraction effectively improves modularity in protocol construction without sacrificing performance, and our SP implementation on Contiki lays a good foundation for future protocol innovations in wireless sensor networks