737 research outputs found
Integrated Satellite-terrestrial networks for IoT: LoRaWAN as a Flying Gateway
When the Internet of Things (IoT) was introduced, it causes an immense change in
human life. Recently, different IoT emerging use cases, which will involve an even higher
number of connected devices aimed at collecting and sending data with different purposes
and over different application scenarios, such as smart city, smart factory, and smart
agriculture. In some cases, the terrestrial infrastructure is not enough to guarantee the
typical performance indicators due to its design and intrinsic limitations. Coverage is
an example, where the terrestrial infrastructure is not able to cover certain areas such
as remote and rural areas. Flying technologies, such as communication satellites and
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), can contribute to overcome the limitations of the
terrestrial infrastructure, offering wider coverage, higher resilience and availability, and
improving user\u2019s Quality of Experience (QoE). IoT can benefit from the UAVs and satellite
integration in many ways, also beyond the coverage extension and the increase of the
available bandwidth that these objects can offer. This thesis proposes the integration
of both IoT and UAVs to guarantee the increased coverage in hard to reach and out of
coverage areas. Its core focus addresses the development of the IoT flying gateway and
data mule and testing both approaches to show their feasibility.
The first approach for the integration of IoT and UAV results in the implementing of
LoRa flying gateway with the aim of increasing the IoT communication protocols\u2019
coverage area to reach remote and rural areas. This flying gateway examines the
feasibility for extending the coverage in a remote area and transmitting the data to the IoT cloud in real-time. Moreover, it considers the presence of a satellite between the
gateway and the final destination for areas with no Internet connectivity and
communication means such as WiFi, Ethernet, 4G, or LTE. The experimental results
have shown that deploying a LoRa gateway on board a flying drone is an ideal option
for the extension of the IoT network coverage in rural and remote areas.
The second approach for the integration of the aforementioned technologies is the
deployment of IoT data mule concept for LoRa networks. The difference here is the
storage of the data on board of the gateway and not transmitting the data to the IoT
cloud in real time. The aim of this approach is to receive the data from the LoRa
sensors installed in a remote area, store them in the gateway up until this flying
gateway is connected to the Internet. The experimental results have shown the
feasibility of our flying data mule in terms of signal quality, data delivery, power
consumption and gateway status.
The third approach considers the security aspect in LoRa networks. The possible
physical attacks that can be performed on any LoRa device can be performed once its
location is revealed. Position estimation was carried out using one of the LoRa signal
features: RSSI. The values of RSSI are fed to the Trilateration localization algorithm to
estimate the device\u2019s position. Different outdoor tests were done with and without the
drone, and the results have shown that RSSI is a low cost option for position estimation
that can result in a slight error due to different environmental conditions that affect
the signal quality.
In conclusion, by adopting both IoT technology and UAV, this thesis advances the
development of flying LoRa gateway and LoRa data mule for the aim of increasing the
coverage of LoRa networks to reach rural and remote areas. Moreover, this research
could be considered as the first step towards the development of high quality and
performance LoRa flying gateway to be tested and used in massive LoRa IoT networks
in rural and remote areas
Supporting UAVs with Edge Computing: A Review of Opportunities and Challenges
Over the last years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have seen significant
advancements in sensor capabilities and computational abilities, allowing for
efficient autonomous navigation and visual tracking applications. However, the
demand for computationally complex tasks has increased faster than advances in
battery technology. This opens up possibilities for improvements using edge
computing. In edge computing, edge servers can achieve lower latency responses
compared to traditional cloud servers through strategic geographic deployments.
Furthermore, these servers can maintain superior computational performance
compared to UAVs, as they are not limited by battery constraints. Combining
these technologies by aiding UAVs with edge servers, research finds measurable
improvements in task completion speed, energy efficiency, and reliability
across multiple applications and industries. This systematic literature review
aims to analyze the current state of research and collect, select, and extract
the key areas where UAV activities can be supported and improved through edge
computing
Drone Base Station Trajectory Management for Optimal Scheduling in LTE-Based Sparse Delay-Sensitive M2M Networks
Providing connectivity in areas out of reach of the cellular infrastructure is a very active area of research. This connectivity is particularly needed in case of the deployment of machine type communication devices (MTCDs) for critical purposes such as homeland security. In such applications, MTCDs are deployed in areas that are hard to reach using regular communications infrastructure while the collected data is timely critical. Drone-supported communications constitute a new trend in complementing the reach of the terrestrial communication infrastructure. In this study, drones are used as base stations to provide real-time communication services to gather critical data out of a group of MTCDs that are sparsely deployed in a marine environment. Studying different communication technologies as LTE, WiFi, LPWAN and Free-Space Optical communication (FSOC) incorporated with the drone communications was important in the first phase of this research to identify the best candidate for addressing this need. We have determined the cellular technology, and particularly LTE, to be the most suitable candidate to support such applications. In this case, an LTE base station would be mounted on the drone which will help communicate with the different MTCDs to transmit their data to the network backhaul. We then formulate the problem model mathematically and devise the trajectory planning and scheduling algorithm that decides the drone path and the resulting scheduling. Based on this formulation, we decided to compare between an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) based technique that optimizes the drone movement among the sparsely-deployed MTCDs and a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based solution that achieves the same purpose. This optimization is based on minimizing the energy cost of the drone movement while ensuring the data transmission deadline missing is minimized. We present the results of several simulation experiments that validate the different performance aspects of the technique
A Prospective Look: Key Enabling Technologies, Applications and Open Research Topics in 6G Networks
The fifth generation (5G) mobile networks are envisaged to enable a plethora
of breakthrough advancements in wireless technologies, providing support of a
diverse set of services over a single platform. While the deployment of 5G
systems is scaling up globally, it is time to look ahead for beyond 5G systems.
This is driven by the emerging societal trends, calling for fully automated
systems and intelligent services supported by extended reality and haptics
communications. To accommodate the stringent requirements of their prospective
applications, which are data-driven and defined by extremely low-latency,
ultra-reliable, fast and seamless wireless connectivity, research initiatives
are currently focusing on a progressive roadmap towards the sixth generation
(6G) networks. In this article, we shed light on some of the major enabling
technologies for 6G, which are expected to revolutionize the fundamental
architectures of cellular networks and provide multiple homogeneous artificial
intelligence-empowered services, including distributed communications, control,
computing, sensing, and energy, from its core to its end nodes. Particularly,
this paper aims to answer several 6G framework related questions: What are the
driving forces for the development of 6G? How will the enabling technologies of
6G differ from those in 5G? What kind of applications and interactions will
they support which would not be supported by 5G? We address these questions by
presenting a profound study of the 6G vision and outlining five of its
disruptive technologies, i.e., terahertz communications, programmable
metasurfaces, drone-based communications, backscatter communications and
tactile internet, as well as their potential applications. Then, by leveraging
the state-of-the-art literature surveyed for each technology, we discuss their
requirements, key challenges, and open research problems
A prospective look: key enabling technologies, applications and open research topics in 6G networks
The fifth generation (5G) mobile networks are envisaged to enable a plethora of breakthrough advancements in wireless technologies, providing support of a diverse set of services over a single platform. While the deployment of 5G systems is scaling up globally, it is time to look ahead for beyond 5G systems. This is mainly driven by the emerging societal trends, calling for fully automated systems and intelligent services supported by extended reality and haptics communications. To accommodate the stringent requirements of their prospective applications, which are data-driven and defined by extremely low-latency, ultra-reliable, fast and seamless wireless connectivity, research initiatives are currently focusing on a progressive roadmap towards the sixth generation (6G) networks, which are expected to bring transformative changes to this premise. In this article, we shed light on some of the major enabling technologies for 6G, which are expected to revolutionize the fundamental architectures of cellular networks and provide multiple homogeneous artificial intelligence-empowered services, including distributed communications, control, computing, sensing, and energy, from its core to its end nodes. In particular, the present paper aims to answer several 6G framework related questions: What are the driving forces for the development of 6G? How will the enabling technologies of 6G differ from those in 5G? What kind of applications and interactions will they support which would not be supported by 5G? We address these questions by presenting a comprehensive study of the 6G vision and outlining seven of its disruptive technologies, i.e., mmWave communications, terahertz communications, optical wireless communications, programmable metasurfaces, drone-based communications, backscatter communications and tactile internet, as well as their potential applications. Then, by leveraging the state-of-the-art literature surveyed for each technology, we discuss the associated requirements, key challenges, and open research problems. These discussions are thereafter used to open up the horizon for future research directions
A drone-based networked system and methods for combating coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by a newly discovered coronavirus. It is similar to influenza viruses and raises concerns through alarming levels of spread and severity resulting in an ongoing pandemic worldwide. Within eight months (by August 2020), it infected 24.0 million persons worldwide and over 824 thousand have died. Drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are very helpful in handling the COVID-19 pandemic. This work investigates the drone-based systems, COVID-19 pandemic situations, and proposes an architecture for handling pandemic situations in different scenarios using real-time and simulation-based scenarios. The proposed architecture uses wearable sensors to record the observations in Body Area Networks (BANs) in a push-pull data fetching mechanism. The proposed architecture is found to be useful in remote and highly congested pandemic areas where either the wireless or Internet connectivity is a major issue or chances of COVID-19 spreading are high. It collects and stores the substantial amount of data in a stipulated period and helps to take appropriate action as and when required. In real-time drone-based healthcare system implementation for COVID-19 operations, it is observed that a large area can be covered for sanitization, thermal image collection, and patient identification within a short period (2 KMs within 10 min approx.) through aerial route. In the simulation, the same statistics are observed with an addition of collision-resistant strategies working successfully for indoor and outdoor healthcare operations. Further, open challenges are identified and promising research directions are highlighted
- …