Innovations in earthquake risk reduction for resilience: Recent advances and challenges

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 (SFDRR) highlights the importance of scientific research, supporting the ‘availability and application of science and technology to decision making’ in disaster risk reduction (DRR). Science and technology can play a crucial role in the world’s ability to reduce casualties, physical damage, and interruption to critical infrastructure due to natural hazards and their complex interactions. The SFDRR encourages better access to technological innovations combined with increased DRR investments in developing cost-effective approaches and tackling global challenges. To this aim, it is essential to link multi- and interdisciplinary research and technological innovations with policy and engineering/DRR practice. To share knowledge and promote discussion on recent advances, challenges, and future directions on ‘Innovations in Earthquake Risk Reduction for Resilience’, a group of experts from academia and industry met in London, UK, in July 2019. The workshop focused on both cutting-edge ‘soft’ (e.g., novel modelling methods/frameworks, early warning systems, disaster financing and parametric insurance) and ‘hard’ (e.g., novel structural systems/devices for new structures and retrofitting of existing structures, sensors) risk-reduction strategies for the enhancement of structural and infrastructural earthquake safety and resilience. The workshop highlighted emerging trends and lessons from recent earthquake events and pinpointed critical issues for future research and policy interventions. This paper summarises some of the key aspects identified and discussed during the workshop to inform other researchers worldwide and extend the conversation to a broader audience, with the ultimate aim of driving change in how seismic risk is quantified and mitigated

Reliable load-balancing routing for resource-constrained wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are energy and resource constrained. Energy limitations make it advantageous to balance radio transmissions across multiple sensor nodes. Thus, load balanced routing is highly desirable and has motivated a significant volume of research. Multihop sensor network architecture can also provide greater coverage, but requires a highly reliable and adaptive routing scheme to accommodate frequent topology changes. Current reliability-oriented protocols degrade energy efficiency and increase network latency. This thesis develops and evaluates a novel solution to provide energy-efficient routing while enhancing packet delivery reliability. This solution, a reliable load-balancing routing (RLBR), makes four contributions in the area of reliability, resiliency and load balancing in support of the primary objective of network lifetime maximisation. The results are captured using real world testbeds as well as simulations. The first contribution uses sensor node emulation, at the instruction cycle level, to characterise the additional processing and computation overhead required by the routing scheme. The second contribution is based on real world testbeds which comprises two different TinyOS-enabled senor platforms under different scenarios. The third contribution extends and evaluates RLBR using large-scale simulations. It is shown that RLBR consumes less energy while reducing topology repair latency and supports various aggregation weights by redistributing packet relaying loads. It also shows a balanced energy usage and a significant lifetime gain. Finally, the forth contribution is a novel variable transmission power control scheme which is created based on the experience gained from prior practical and simulated studies. This power control scheme operates at the data link layer to dynamically reduce unnecessarily high transmission power while maintaining acceptable link reliability

INNOVATIONS in earthquake risk reduction for resilience: RECENT advances and challenges

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 (SFDRR) highlights the importance of scientific research, supporting the ‘availability and application of science and technology to decision making’ in disaster risk reduction (DRR). Science and technology can play a crucial role in the world’s ability to reduce casualties, physical damage, and interruption to critical infrastructure due to natural hazards and their complex interactions. The SFDRR encourages better access to technological innovations combined with increased DRR investments in developing cost-effective approaches and tackling global challenges. To this aim, it is essential to link multi- and interdisciplinary research and technological innovations with policy and engineering/DRR practice. To share knowledge and promote discussion on recent advances, challenges, and future directions on ‘Innovations in Earthquake Risk Reduction for Resilience’, a group of experts from academia and industry met in London, UK, in July 2019. The workshop focused on both cutting-edge ‘soft’ (e.g., novel modelling methods/frameworks, early warning systems, disaster financing and parametric insurance) and ‘hard’ (e.g., novel structural systems/devices for new structures and retrofitting of existing structures, sensors) risk-reduction strategies for the enhancement of structural and infrastructural earthquake safety and resilience. The workshop highlighted emerging trends and lessons from recent earthquake events and pinpointed critical issues for future research and policy interventions. This paper summarises some of the key aspects identified and discussed during the workshop to inform other researchers worldwide and extend the conversation to a broader audience, with the ultimate aim of driving change in how seismic risk is quantified and mitigated

Self-organization and management of wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a newly deployed networking technology consisting of multifunctional sensor nodes that are small in size and communicate over short distances. These sensor nodes are mainly in large numbers and are densely deployed either inside the phenomenon or very close to it. They can be used for various application areas (e.g. health, military, home). WSNs provide several advantages over traditional networks, such as large-scale deployment, highresolution sensed data, and application adaptive mechanisms. However, due to their unique characteristics (having dynamic topology, ad-hoc and unattended deployment, huge amount of data generation and traffic flow, limited bandwidth and energy), WSNs pose considerable challenges for network management and make application development nontrivial. Management of wireless sensor networks is extremely important in order to keep the whole network and application work properly and continuously. Despite the importance of sensor network management, there is no generalize solution available for managing and controlling these resource constrained WSNs. In network management of WSNs, energy-efficient network selforganization is one of the main challenging issues. Self-organization is the property which the sensor nodes must have to organize themselves to form the network. Selforganization of WSNs is challenging because of the tight constraints on the bandwidth and energy resources available in these networks. A self organized sensor network can be clustered or grouped into an easily manageable network. However, existing clustering schemes offer various limitations. For example, existing clustering schemes consume too much energy in cluster formation and re-formation. This thesis presents a novel cellular self-organizing hierarchical architecture for wireless sensor networks. The cellular architecture extends the network life time by efficiently utilizing nodes energy and support the scalability of the system. We have analyzed the performance of the architecture analytically and by simulations. The results obtained from simulation have shown that our cellular architecture is more energy efficient and achieves better energy consumption distribution. The cellular architecture is then mapped into a management framework to support the network management system for resource constraints WSNs. The management framework is self-managing and robust to changes in the network. It is application-co-operative and optimizes itself to support the unique requirements of each application. The management framework consists of three core functional areas i.e., configuration management, fault management, and mobility management. For configuration management, we have developed a re-configuration algorithm to support sensor networks to energy-efficiently re-form the network topology due to network dynamics i.e. node dying, node power on and off, new node joining the network and cells merging. In the area of fault management we have developed a new fault management mechanism to detect failing nodes and recover the connectivity in WSNs. For mobility management, we have developed a two phase sensor relocation solution: redundant mobile sensors are first identified and then relocated to the target location to deal with coverage holes. All the three functional areas have been evaluated and compared against existing solutions. Evaluation results show a significant improvement in terms of re-configuration, failure detection and recovery, and sensors relocation

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

Energy efficient wireless sensor network protocols for monitoring and prognostics of large scale systems

In this work, energy-efficient protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSN) with applications to prognostics are investigated. Both analytical methods and verification are shown for the proposed methods via either hardware experiments or simulation. This work is presented in five papers. Energy-efficiency methods for WSN include distributed algorithms for i) optimal routing, ii) adaptive scheduling, iii) adaptive transmission power and data-rate control --Abstract, page iv

Design of implicit routing protocols for large scale mobile wireless sensor networks

Strathclyde theses - ask staff. Thesis no. : T13189Most developments in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) routing protocols address static network scenarios. Schemes developed to manage mobility in other mobile networking implementations do not translate effectively to WSNs as the system design parameters are markedly different. Thus this research focuses on the issues of mobility and scalability in order to enable the full potential of WSNs to self-organise and co-operate and in so doing, meet the requirements of a rich mix of applications. In the goal of designing efficient, reliable routing protocols for large scale mobile WSN applications, this work lays the foundation by firstly presenting a strong case supported by extensive simulations, for the use of implicit connections. Then two novel implicit routing protocols - Virtual Grid Paging (VGP) and Virtual Zone Registration and Paging (VZRP) - that treat packet routing from node mobility and network scalability viewpoints are designed and analysed. Implicit routing exploits the connection availability and diversity in the underlying network to provide benefits such as fault tolerance, overhead control and improvement in QoS (Quality of Service) such as delay. Analysis and simulation results show that the proposed protocols guarantee significant improvement, delivering a more reliable, more efficient and better network performance compared with alternatives.Most developments in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) routing protocols address static network scenarios. Schemes developed to manage mobility in other mobile networking implementations do not translate effectively to WSNs as the system design parameters are markedly different. Thus this research focuses on the issues of mobility and scalability in order to enable the full potential of WSNs to self-organise and co-operate and in so doing, meet the requirements of a rich mix of applications. In the goal of designing efficient, reliable routing protocols for large scale mobile WSN applications, this work lays the foundation by firstly presenting a strong case supported by extensive simulations, for the use of implicit connections. Then two novel implicit routing protocols - Virtual Grid Paging (VGP) and Virtual Zone Registration and Paging (VZRP) - that treat packet routing from node mobility and network scalability viewpoints are designed and analysed. Implicit routing exploits the connection availability and diversity in the underlying network to provide benefits such as fault tolerance, overhead control and improvement in QoS (Quality of Service) such as delay. Analysis and simulation results show that the proposed protocols guarantee significant improvement, delivering a more reliable, more efficient and better network performance compared with alternatives

Energy Efficiency

This book is one of the most comprehensive and up-to-date books written on Energy Efficiency. The readers will learn about different technologies for energy efficiency policies and programs to reduce the amount of energy. The book provides some studies and specific sets of policies and programs that are implemented in order to maximize the potential for energy efficiency improvement. It contains unique insights from scientists with academic and industrial expertise in the field of energy efficiency collected in this multi-disciplinary forum

The Public Service Media and Public Service Internet Manifesto

This book presents the collectively authored Public Service Media and Public Service Internet Manifesto and accompanying materials.The Internet and the media landscape are broken. The dominant commercial Internet platforms endanger democracy. They have created a communications landscape overwhelmed by surveillance, advertising, fake news, hate speech, conspiracy theories, and algorithmic politics. Commercial Internet platforms have harmed citizens, users, everyday life, and society. Democracy and digital democracy require Public Service Media. A democracy-enhancing Internet requires Public Service Media becoming Public Service Internet platforms – an Internet of the public, by the public, and for the public; an Internet that advances instead of threatens democracy and the public sphere. The Public Service Internet is based on Internet platforms operated by a variety of Public Service Media, taking the public service remit into the digital age. The Public Service Internet provides opportunities for public debate, participation, and the advancement of social cohesion. Accompanying the Manifesto are materials that informed its creation: Christian Fuchs’ report of the results of the Public Service Media/Internet Survey, the written version of Graham Murdock’s online talk on public service media today, and a summary of an ecomitee.com discussion of the Manifesto’s foundations