Radio Access Techniques for Energy Effcient and Energy Harvesting based Wireless Sensor Networks

Traditional Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) rely on batteries with finite stored energy. In the future with billions of such devices, it will be difficult to replace and dispose their batteries, which can cause a huge environmental threat. Hence, research is being done to eliminate batteries from sensor devices and replace them with harvesters. These harvesters can power the sensor network nodes by extracting energy from ambient sources. Harvesters are already being implemented in many real-life applications like structural health monitoring, environment monitoring and body area networks. A sensor network of multiple energy harvesting enabled devices is known as Energy Harvesting based Wireless Sensor Network (EH-WSN). For uninterrupted operation of EH-WSN, radio protocols must consider the energy harvesting constraints; (i) energy harvesting process unpredictability and; (ii) energy harvesting rate variations in time and space. EH-WSN comes with unique traits which discourage the use of existing WSNs radio protocols, as most of existing protocols are focussed on decreasing the energy consumption and increasing the network lifetime. This thesis work focusses on modifying an existing energyefficient Multipath Rings (MPR) routing protocol for low-power and low-bandwidth EH-WSN and evaluating its performance through simulations. Firstly, the topology setup phase is revised by implementing a new ring formation scheme for better data reliability. Secondly, controlled flooding of data packets is used by enabling selective forwarding, which leads to decrease in network traffic and overall energy consumption. Lastly, every node is equipped with a neighbors’ table on-board which helps in making energy-related routing decisions in multi-hop networks. A periodic energy update packet transmission helps in keeping latest neighbor information. This modified version of MPR routing protocol is called Energy Harvesting based Multipath Rings (EH-MPR) routing. This work also provides a comprehensive survey on existing MAC and Routing protocols for energy efficient and energy harvesting based WSNs. Through this work, the main constraints on using existing energy-efficient protocols for EH-WSN are discussed and depicted with the help of network simulations. The effects of using fixed duty cycle for energy harvesting enabled sensor nodes are outlined by simulating T-MAC (adaptive duty cycle) against S-MAC (fixed duty cycle). For all evaluation metrics, T-MAC outperformed S-MAC. Using Castalia’s realistic wireless channel and radio model, EH-MPR is simulated for low-power, low-data rate and low bandwidth (1 MHz) networks where satisfactory results are obtained for sub-GHz frequencies (433 MHz and 868 MHz). Next, the modified EH-MPR protocol is compared with original MPR routing under practical deployment scenarios. The metrics in consideration are successful packet transmissions, energy consumption, energy harvested-to-consumed ratio and failed packets. After thorough simulations, it was concluded that although the packet success rate is approximately equal for both protocols, EH-MPR has advantages over original MPR routing protocol in terms of energy cost and uninterrupted operations

DESIGN OF RELIABLE AND SUSTAINABLE WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS: CHALLENGES, PROTOCOLS AND CASE STUDIES

Integrated with the function of sensing, processing, and wireless communication, wireless sensors are attracting strong interest for a variety of monitoring and control applications. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been deployed for industrial and remote monitoring purposes. As energy shortage is a worldwide problem, more attention has been placed on incorporating energy harvesting devices in WSNs. The main objective of this research is to systematically study the design principles and technical approaches to address three key challenges in designing reliable and sustainable WSNs; namely, communication reliability, operation with extremely low and dynamic power sources, and multi-tier network architecture. Mathematical throughput models, sustainable WSN communication strategies, and multi-tier network architecture are studied in this research to address these challenges, leading to protocols for reliable communication, energy-efficient operation, and network planning for specific application requirements. To account for realistic operating conditions, the study has implemented three distinct WSN testbeds: a WSN attached to the high-speed rotating spindle of a turning lathe, a WSN powered by a microbial fuel cell based energy harvesting system, and a WSN with a multi-tier network architecture. With each testbed, models and protocols are extracted, verified and analyzed. Extensive research has studied low power WSNs and energy harvesting capabilities. Despite these efforts, some important questions have not been well understood. This dissertation addresses the following three dimensions of the challenge. First, for reliable communication protocol design, mathematical throughput or energy efficiency estimation models are essential, yet have not been investigated accounting for specific application environment characteristics and requirements. Second, for WSNs with energy harvesting power sources, most current networking protocols do not work efficiently with the systems considered in this dissertation, such as those powered by extremely low and dynamic energy sources. Third, for multi-tier wireless network system design, routing protocols that are adaptive to real-world network conditions have not been studied. This dissertation focuses on these questions and explores experimentally derived mathematical models for designing protocols to meet specific application requirements. The main contributions of this research are 1) for industrial wireless sensor systems with fast-changing but repetitive mobile conditions, understand the performance and optimal choice of reliable wireless sensor data transmission methods, 2) for ultra-low energy harvesting wireless sensor devices, design an energy neutral communication protocol, and 3) for distributed rural wireless sensor systems, understand the efficiency of realistic routing in a multi-tier wireless network. Altogether, knowledge derived from study of the systems, models, and protocols in this work fuels the establishment of a useful framework for designing future WSNs

Optimized Cluster-Based Dynamic Energy-Aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks in Agriculture Precision

[EN] Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are becoming one of the demanding platforms, where sensor nodes are sensing and monitoring the physical or environmental conditions and transmit the data to the base station via multihop routing. Agriculture sector also adopted these networks to promote innovations for environmental friendly farming methods, lower the management cost, and achieve scientific cultivation. Due to limited capabilities, the sensor nodes have suffered with energy issues and complex routing processes and lead to data transmission failure and delay in the sensor-based agriculture fields. Due to these limitations, the sensor nodes near the base station are always relaying on it and cause extra burden on base station or going into useless state. To address these issues, this study proposes a Gateway Clustering Energy-Efficient Centroid- (GCEEC-) based routing protocol where cluster head is selected from the centroid position and gateway nodes are selected from each cluster. Gateway node reduces the data load from cluster head nodes and forwards the data towards the base station. Simulation has performed to evaluate the proposed protocol with state-of-the-art protocols. The experimental results indicated the better performance of proposed protocol and provide more feasible WSN-based monitoring for temperature, humidity, and illumination in agriculture sector.This work has also been partially supported by the European Union through the ERANETMED (Euromediterranean Cooperation through ERANET joint activities and beyond) project ERANETMED3-227 SMARTWATIR.Qureshi, KN.; Bashir, MU.; Lloret, J.; León Fernández, A. (2020). Optimized Cluster-Based Dynamic Energy-Aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks in Agriculture Precision. Journal of Sensors. 2020:1-19. https://doi.org/10.1155/2020/9040395S1192020Sneha, K., Kamath, R., Balachandra, M., & Prabhu, S. (2019). New Gossiping Protocol for Routing Data in Sensor Networks for Precision Agriculture. 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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

An Energy Driven Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks

Most wireless sensor networks operate with very limited energy sources-their batteries, and hence their usefulness in real life applications is severely constrained. The challenging issues are how to optimize the use of their energy or to harvest their own energy in order to lengthen their lives for wider classes of application. Tackling these important issues requires a robust architecture that takes into account the energy consumption level of functional constituents and their interdependency. Without such architecture, it would be difficult to formulate and optimize the overall energy consumption of a wireless sensor network. Unlike most current researches that focus on a single energy constituent of WSNs independent from and regardless of other constituents, this paper presents an Energy Driven Architecture (EDA) as a new architecture and indicates a novel approach for minimising the total energy consumption of a WS

Resource Allocation in Wireless Networks with RF Energy Harvesting and Transfer

Radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting and transfer techniques have recently become alternative methods to power the next generation of wireless networks. As this emerging technology enables proactive replenishment of wireless devices, it is advantageous in supporting applications with quality-of-service (QoS) requirement. This article focuses on the resource allocation issues in wireless networks with RF energy harvesting capability, referred to as RF energy harvesting networks (RF-EHNs). First, we present an overview of the RF-EHNs, followed by a review of a variety of issues regarding resource allocation. Then, we present a case study of designing in the receiver operation policy, which is of paramount importance in the RF-EHNs. We focus on QoS support and service differentiation, which have not been addressed by previous literatures. Furthermore, we outline some open research directions.Comment: To appear in IEEE Networ

High Performance Communication Framework for Mobile Sinks Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor networks typically consist of thousand of nodes and each node has limited power, processing and bandwidth resources. Harvesting advances in the past decade in microelectronics, sensing, wireless communications and networking, sensor networks technology is expected to have a significant impact on our lives in the twenty-first century. Proposed applications of sensor networks include environmental monitoring, natural disaster prediction and relief, homeland security, healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, and home appliances and entertainment. However, Communication is one of the major challenges in wireless sensor networks as it is the main source for energy depletion. Improved network lifetime is a fundamental challenge of wireless sensor networks. Many researchers have proposed using mobile sinks as one possible solution to improve the lifetime of wireless sensor networks. The reason is that the typical manyto- one communication traffic pattern in wireless sensor networks imposes a heavy forwarding load on the nodes close to the sinks. However, it also introduces many research challenges such as the high communication overhead for updating the dynamic routing paths to connect to mobile sinks and packet loss problems while transmitted messages to mobile sinks. Therefore, our goal is to design a robust and efficient routing framework for both non-geographic aware and geographic aware mobile sinks wireless sensor networks. In order to achieve this goal in non-geographic based mobile sinks wireless sensor networks, we proposed a spider-net zone routing protocol to improve network efficiency and lifetime. Our proposed routing protocol utilise spider web topology inspired by the way spiders hunt prey in their web to provide reliable and high performance data delivery to mobile sinks. For routing in geographic aware based mobile sinks wireless sensor networks, we proposed a fault-tolerant magnetic coordinate routing algorithm to allow these network sensors to take advantage of geographic knowledge to build a routing protocol. Our proposed routing algorithm incorporates a coordinated routing algorithm for grid based network topology to improve network performance. Our third contribution is a component level fault diagnosis scheme for wireless sensor networks. The advantage of this scheme, causal model fault diagnosis, is that it can "deeply understand" and express the relationship among failure behaviours and node system components through causal relations. The above contributions constitute a novel routing framework to address the routing challenges in mobile sinks wireless sensor networks, Our framework considers both geographic and non-geographic aware based sensor networks to achieve energy efficient, high performance and network reliability. We have analyzed the proposed protocols and schemes and evaluated their performances using analytical study and simulations. The evaluation was based on the most important metries in wireless sensor networks, such as: power consumption and average delay. The evaluation shows that our solution is more energy efficient, improves the network performance, and provides data reliability in mobile sinks wireless sensor networks

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