2,298 research outputs found
EC-CENTRIC: An Energy- and Context-Centric Perspective on IoT Systems and Protocol Design
The radio transceiver of an IoT device is often where most of the energy is consumed. For this reason, most research so far has focused on low power circuit and energy efficient physical layer designs, with the goal of reducing the average energy per information bit required for communication. While these efforts are valuable per se, their actual effectiveness can be partially neutralized by ill-designed network, processing and resource management solutions, which can become a primary factor of performance degradation, in terms of throughput, responsiveness and energy efficiency. The objective of this paper is to describe an energy-centric and context-aware optimization framework that accounts for the energy impact of the fundamental functionalities of an IoT system and that proceeds along three main technical thrusts: 1) balancing signal-dependent processing techniques (compression and feature extraction) and communication tasks; 2) jointly designing channel access and routing protocols to maximize the network lifetime; 3) providing self-adaptability to different operating conditions through the adoption of suitable learning architectures and of flexible/reconfigurable algorithms and protocols. After discussing this framework, we present some preliminary results that validate the effectiveness of our proposed line of action, and show how the use of adaptive signal processing and channel access techniques allows an IoT network to dynamically tune lifetime for signal distortion, according to the requirements dictated by the application
Markov Decision Processes with Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of autonomous and resource-limited
devices. The devices cooperate to monitor one or more physical phenomena within
an area of interest. WSNs operate as stochastic systems because of randomness
in the monitored environments. For long service time and low maintenance cost,
WSNs require adaptive and robust methods to address data exchange, topology
formulation, resource and power optimization, sensing coverage and object
detection, and security challenges. In these problems, sensor nodes are to make
optimized decisions from a set of accessible strategies to achieve design
goals. This survey reviews numerous applications of the Markov decision process
(MDP) framework, a powerful decision-making tool to develop adaptive algorithms
and protocols for WSNs. Furthermore, various solution methods are discussed and
compared to serve as a guide for using MDPs in WSNs
Machine Learning in Wireless Sensor Networks: Algorithms, Strategies, and Applications
Wireless sensor networks monitor dynamic environments that change rapidly
over time. This dynamic behavior is either caused by external factors or
initiated by the system designers themselves. To adapt to such conditions,
sensor networks often adopt machine learning techniques to eliminate the need
for unnecessary redesign. Machine learning also inspires many practical
solutions that maximize resource utilization and prolong the lifespan of the
network. In this paper, we present an extensive literature review over the
period 2002-2013 of machine learning methods that were used to address common
issues in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The advantages and disadvantages of
each proposed algorithm are evaluated against the corresponding problem. We
also provide a comparative guide to aid WSN designers in developing suitable
machine learning solutions for their specific application challenges.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
Optimal Compression and Transmission Rate Control for Node-Lifetime Maximization
We consider a system that is composed of an energy constrained sensor node
and a sink node, and devise optimal data compression and transmission policies
with an objective to prolong the lifetime of the sensor node. While applying
compression before transmission reduces the energy consumption of transmitting
the sensed data, blindly applying too much compression may even exceed the cost
of transmitting raw data, thereby losing its purpose. Hence, it is important to
investigate the trade-off between data compression and transmission energy
costs. In this paper, we study the joint optimal compression-transmission
design in three scenarios which differ in terms of the available channel
information at the sensor node, and cover a wide range of practical situations.
We formulate and solve joint optimization problems aiming to maximize the
lifetime of the sensor node whilst satisfying specific delay and bit error rate
(BER) constraints. Our results show that a jointly optimized
compression-transmission policy achieves significantly longer lifetime (90% to
2000%) as compared to optimizing transmission only without compression.
Importantly, this performance advantage is most profound when the delay
constraint is stringent, which demonstrates its suitability for low latency
communication in future wireless networks.Comment: accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Wireless
Communicaiton
Energy Harvesting Wireless Communications: A Review of Recent Advances
This article summarizes recent contributions in the broad area of energy
harvesting wireless communications. In particular, we provide the current state
of the art for wireless networks composed of energy harvesting nodes, starting
from the information-theoretic performance limits to transmission scheduling
policies and resource allocation, medium access and networking issues. The
emerging related area of energy transfer for self-sustaining energy harvesting
wireless networks is considered in detail covering both energy cooperation
aspects and simultaneous energy and information transfer. Various potential
models with energy harvesting nodes at different network scales are reviewed as
well as models for energy consumption at the nodes.Comment: To appear in the IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communications
(Special Issue: Wireless Communications Powered by Energy Harvesting and
Wireless Energy Transfer
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
Distributed Optimization in Energy Harvesting Sensor Networks with Dynamic In-network Data Processing
Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks (EH- WSNs) have been attracting increasing interest in recent years. Most current EH-WSN approaches focus on sensing and net- working algorithm design, and therefore only consider the energy consumed by sensors and wireless transceivers for sensing and data transmissions respectively. In this paper, we incorporate CPU-intensive edge operations that constitute in-network data processing (e.g. data aggregation/fusion/compression) with sens- ing and networking; to jointly optimize their performance, while ensuring sustainable network operation (i.e. no sensor node runs out of energy). Based on realistic energy and network models, we formulate a stochastic optimization problem, and propose a lightweight on-line algorithm, namely Recycling Wasted Energy (RWE), to solve it. Through rigorous theoretical analysis, we prove that RWE achieves asymptotical optimality, bounded data queue size, and sustainable network operation. We implement RWE on a popular IoT operating system, Contiki OS, and eval- uate its performance using both real-world experiments based on the FIT IoT-LAB testbed, and extensive trace-driven simulations using Cooja. The evaluation results verify our theoretical analysis, and demonstrate that RWE can recycle more than 90% wasted energy caused by battery overflow, and achieve around 300% network utility gain in practical EH-WSNs
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