A comprehensive survey of wireless body area networks on PHY, MAC, and network layers solutions

Recent advances in microelectronics and integrated circuits, system-on-chip design, wireless communication and intelligent low-power sensors have allowed the realization of a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). A WBAN is a collection of low-power, miniaturized, invasive/non-invasive lightweight wireless sensor nodes that monitor the human body functions and the surrounding environment. In addition, it supports a number of innovative and interesting applications such as ubiquitous healthcare, entertainment, interactive gaming, and military applications. In this paper, the fundamental mechanisms of WBAN including architecture and topology, wireless implant communication, low-power Medium Access Control (MAC) and routing protocols are reviewed. A comprehensive study of the proposed technologies for WBAN at Physical (PHY), MAC, and Network layers is presented and many useful solutions are discussed for each layer. Finally, numerous WBAN applications are highlighted

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

MOBILITY CONTROL IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become one of the most important topics in wireless communication during the last decade. WSNs integrates many different technologies such as in hardware, software, data fusion, and applications. Hence, WSNs has received recently special research activities. WSNs have so many applications in different areas such as health-care systems, monitoring and control systems, rescue systems, and military applications. Since WSNs are usually deployed with large numbers of nodes in wide areas, they should be reliable, inexpensive, with very low power consumption, and with high redundancy to preserve the life-time of the whole network. In this M.Sc. thesis we consider one extremely important research topic in WSNs which is the mobility control. The mobility control is analyzed theoretically as well as with extensive simulations. In the simulation scenarios, static sensor nodes are first randomly deployed to the decided area. Then a reference trajectory for the mobile node is created based on the observed point phenomena, and the network guides the mobile node to move along the trajectory. A simulation platform called PiccSIM is used to simulate the scenarios. It is developed by the Communication and Control Engineering Groups at Helsinki University of Technology (TKK). The obtained results from these simulations are discussed and analyzed. This work opens the doors for more real applications in this area in the nearby future.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

New Waves of IoT Technologies Research – Transcending Intelligence and Senses at the Edge to Create Multi Experience Environments

The next wave of Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) brings new technological developments that incorporate radical advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), edge computing processing, new sensing capabilities, more security protection and autonomous functions accelerating progress towards the ability for IoT systems to self-develop, self-maintain and self-optimise. The emergence of hyper autonomous IoT applications with enhanced sensing, distributed intelligence, edge processing and connectivity, combined with human augmentation, has the potential to power the transformation and optimisation of industrial sectors and to change the innovation landscape. This chapter is reviewing the most recent advances in the next wave of the IoT by looking not only at the technology enabling the IoT but also at the platforms and smart data aspects that will bring intelligence, sustainability, dependability, autonomy, and will support human-centric solutions.acceptedVersio

A sensor node soC architecture for extremely autonomous wireless sensor networks

Tese de Doutoramento em Engenharia Eletrónica e de Computadores (PDEEC) (especialidade em Informática Industrial e Sistemas Embebidos)The Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionizing the Internet of the future and the way new smart objects and people are being connected into the world. Its pervasive computing and communication technologies connect myriads of smart devices, presented at our everyday things and surrounding objects. Big players in the industry forecast, by 2020, around 50 billion of smart devices connected in a multitude of scenarios and heterogeneous applications, sharing data over a true worldwide network. This will represent a trillion dollar market that everyone wants to take a share. In a world where everything is being connected, device security and device interoperability are a paramount. From the sensor to the cloud, this triggers several technological issues towards connectivity, interoperability and security requirements on IoT devices. However, fulfilling such requirements is not straightforward. While the connectivity exposes the device to the Internet, which also raises several security issues, deploying a standardized communication stack on the endpoint device in the network edge, highly increases the data exchanged over the network. Moreover, handling such ever-growing amount of data on resource-constrained devices, truly affects the performance and the energy consumption. Addressing such issues requires new technological and architectural approaches to help find solutions to leverage an accelerated, secure and energy-aware IoT end-device communication. Throughout this thesis, the developed artifacts triggered the achievement of important findings that demonstrate: (1) how heterogeneous architectures are nowadays a perfect solution to deploy endpoint devices in scenarios where not only (heavy processing) application-specific operations are required, but also network-related capabilities are major concerns; (2) how accelerating network-related tasks result in a more efficient device resources utilization, which combining better performance and increased availability, contributed to an improved overall energy utilization; (3) how device and data security can benefit from modern heterogeneous architectures that rely on secure hardware platforms, which are also able to provide security-related acceleration hardware; (4) how a domain-specific language eases the co-design and customization of a secure and accelerated IoT endpoint device at the network edge.Internet of Things (IoT) é o conceito que está a revolucionar a Internet do futuro e a forma como coisas, processos e pessoas se conectam e se relacionam numa infraestrutura de rede global que interligará, num futuro próximo, um vasto número de dispositivos inteligentes e de utilização diária. Com uma grande aposta no mercado IoT por parte dos grandes líderes na industria, algumas visões otimistas preveem para 2020 mais de 50 mil milhões de dispositivos ligados na periferia da rede, partilhando grandes volumes de dados importantes através da Internet, representando um mercado multimilionário com imensas oportunidades de negócio. Num mundo interligado de dispositivos, a interoperabilidade e a segurança é uma preocupação crescente. Tal preocupação exige inúmeros esforços na exploração de novas soluções, quer a nível tecnológico quer a nível arquitetural, que visem impulsionar o desenvolvimento de dispositivos embebidos com maiores capacidades de desempenho, segurança e eficiência energética, não só apenas do dispositivo em si, mas também das camadas e protocolos de rede associados. Apesar da integração de pilhas de comunicação e de protocolos standard das camadas de rede solucionar problemas associados à conectividade e a interoperabilidade, adiciona a sobrecarga inerente dos protocolos de comunicação e do crescente volume de dados partilhados entre os dispositivos e a Internet, afetando severamente o desempenho e a disponibilidade do mesmo, refletindo-se num maior consumo energético global. As soluções apresentadas nesta tese permitiram obter resultados que demonstram: (1) a viabilidade de soluções heterogéneas no desenvolvimento de dispositivos IoT, onde não só tarefas inerentes à aplicação podem ser aceleradas, mas também tarefas relacionadas com a comunicação do dispositivo; (2) os benefícios da aceleração de tarefas e protocolos da pilha de rede, que se traduz num melhor desempenho do dispositivo e aumento da disponibilidade do mesmo, contribuindo para uma melhor eficiência energética; (3) que plataformas de hardware modernas oferecem mecanismos de segurança que podem ser utilizados não apenas em prol da segurança do dispositivo, mas também nas capacidades de comunicação do mesmo; (4) que o desenvolvimento de uma linguagem de domínio específico permite de forma mais eficaz e eficiente o desenvolvimento e configuração de dispositivos IoT inteligentes.This thesis was supported by a PhD scholarship from Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, SFRH/BD/90162/201

A Heterogeneous System Architecture for Low-Power Wireless Sensor Nodes in Compute-Intensive Distributed Applications

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) combine embedded sensing and processing capabilities with a wireless communication infrastructure, thus supporting distributed monitoring applications. WSNs have been investigated for more than three decades, and recent social and industrial developments such as home automation, or the Internet of Things, have increased the commercial relevance of this key technology. The communication bandwidth of the sensor nodes is limited by the transportation media and the restricted energy budget of the nodes. To still keep up with the ever increasing sensor count and sampling rates, the basic data acquisition and collection capabilities of WSNs have been extended with decentralized smart feature extraction and data aggregation algorithms. Energy-efficient processing elements are thus required to meet the ever-growing compute demands of the WSN motes within the available energy budget. The Hardware-Accelerated Low Power Mote (HaLoMote) is proposed and evaluated in this thesis to address the requirements of compute-intensive WSN applications. It is a heterogeneous system architecture, that combines a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) for hardware-accelerated data aggregation with an IEEE 802.15.4 based Radio Frequency System-on-Chip for the network management and the top-level control of the applications. To properly support Dynamic Power Management (DPM) on the HaLoMote, a Microsemi IGLOO FPGA with a non-volatile configuration storage was chosen for a prototype implementation, called Hardware-Accelerated Low Energy Wireless Embedded Sensor Node (HaLOEWEn). As for every multi-processor architecture, the inter-processor communication and coordination strongly influences the efficiency of the HaLoMote. Therefore, a generic communication framework is proposed in this thesis. It is tightly coupled with the DPM strategy of the HaLoMote, that supports fast transitions between active and idle modes. Low-power sleep periods can thus be scheduled within every sampling cycle, even for sampling rates of hundreds of hertz. In addition to the development of the heterogeneous system architecture, this thesis focuses on the energy consumption trade-off between wireless data transmission and in-sensor data aggregation. The HaLOEWEn is compared with typical software processors in terms of runtime and energy efficiency in the context of three monitoring applications. The building blocks of these applications comprise hardware-accelerated digital signal processing primitives, lossless data compression, a precise wireless time synchronization protocol, and a transceiver scheduling for contention free information flooding from multiple sources to all network nodes. Most of these concepts are applicable to similar distributed monitoring applications with in-sensor data aggregation. A Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) application is used for the system level evaluation of the HaLoMote concept. The Random Decrement Technique (RDT) is a particular SHM data aggregation algorithm, which determines the free-decay response of the monitored structure for subsequent modal identification. The hardware-accelerated RDT executed on a HaLOEWEn mote requires only 43 % of the energy that a recent ARM Cortex-M based microcontroller consumes for this algorithm. The functionality of the overall WSN-based SHM system is shown with a laboratory-scale demonstrator. Compared to reference data acquired by a wire-bound laboratory measurement system, the HaLOEWEn network can capture the structural information relevant for the SHM application with less than 1 % deviation

Verification and Performance Analysis of Time Base Coded Data Protocol

The recent improvements in implantable medical devices combined with advanced wireless sensor networks are set to revolutionize the health-care industry by providing real-time, low-cost health monitoring for the patients. A new-field called Implantable Wireless Body Sensor Networks (IWBSN) has become a hot research topic because of its energy constraints and complex design. The main components of IWBSN are the base-station and implantable sensor nodes. The most important challenge is designing the sensor nodes which has to stay inside the body for long time. A novel protocol called ``Time-Based Coded Data" (TBCD) was formed in an attempt to reduce the energy consumption in the sensor nodes. While validating TBCD protocol clock drift and wireless body channel were not considered. Clock drift causes the sensor nodes to go out of synchronisation in an inconsiderable period of time. The human tissues provides a high path loss to the wireless channel. This thesis proposes an error compensation method for both delay and clock drift. This helps the base-station and sensor nodes to stay synchronised for a longer period of time. The thesis also proposes a verification framework work which focusses on providing realistic situations to validate ultra low power IWBSNs. This framework enables to prove the functionality of TBCD protocol with delay and drift calculation and enables to find the optimum transmit power, sensitivity of the transceiver for TBCD protocol to work efficiently for an optimal distance between sensor nodes and the base-station. In addition, it has been proved that the life time of the battery of sensor nodes using TBCD protocol is greater when compared to the state-of-art protocols

Underground Mining Monitoring and Communication Systems based on ZigBee and GIS

ZigBee as a wireless sensor network (WSN) was developed for underground mine monitoring and communication systems. The radio wave attenuations between ZigBee nodes were investigated to measure underground communication distances. Various sensor node arrangements of ZigBee topologies were evaluated. A system integration of a WSN-assisted GIS for underground mining monitoring and communication from a surface office was proposed. The controllable and uncontrollable parameters of underground environments were assessed to establish a reliable ZigBee network