5,324 research outputs found
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
Wireless industrial monitoring and control networks: the journey so far and the road ahead
While traditional wired communication technologies have played a crucial role in industrial monitoring and control networks over the past few decades, they are increasingly proving to be inadequate to meet the highly dynamic and stringent demands of today’s industrial applications, primarily due to the very rigid nature of wired infrastructures. Wireless technology, however, through its increased pervasiveness, has the potential to revolutionize the industry, not only by mitigating the problems faced by wired solutions, but also by introducing a completely new class of applications. While present day wireless technologies made some preliminary inroads in the monitoring domain, they still have severe limitations especially when real-time, reliable distributed control operations are concerned. This article provides the reader with an overview of existing wireless technologies commonly used in the monitoring and control industry. It highlights the pros and cons of each technology and assesses the degree to which each technology is able to meet the stringent demands of industrial monitoring and control networks. Additionally, it summarizes mechanisms proposed by academia, especially serving critical applications by addressing the real-time and reliability requirements of industrial process automation. The article also describes certain key research problems from the physical layer communication for sensor networks and the wireless networking perspective that have yet to be addressed to allow the successful use of wireless technologies in industrial monitoring and control networks
Coverage Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks: Review and Future Directions
The coverage problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be generally
defined as a measure of how effectively a network field is monitored by its
sensor nodes. This problem has attracted a lot of interest over the years and
as a result, many coverage protocols were proposed. In this survey, we first
propose a taxonomy for classifying coverage protocols in WSNs. Then, we
classify the coverage protocols into three categories (i.e. coverage aware
deployment protocols, sleep scheduling protocols for flat networks, and
cluster-based sleep scheduling protocols) based on the network stage where the
coverage is optimized. For each category, relevant protocols are thoroughly
reviewed and classified based on the adopted coverage techniques. Finally, we
discuss open issues (and recommend future directions to resolve them)
associated with the design of realistic coverage protocols. Issues such as
realistic sensing models, realistic energy consumption models, realistic
connectivity models and sensor localization are covered
Improving energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks through scheduling and routing
This paper is about the wireless sensor network in environmental monitoring
applications. A Wireless Sensor Network consists of many sensor nodes and a
base station. The number and type of sensor nodes and the design protocols for
any wireless sensor network is application specific. The sensor data in this
application may be light intensity, temperature, pressure, humidity and their
variations .Clustering and routing are the two areas which are given more
attention in this paper.Comment: 7 Pages, 2 Figures and 1 Tabl
Wireless Power Transfer and Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks
In a rechargeable wireless sensor network, the data packets are generated by
sensor nodes at a specific data rate, and transmitted to a base station.
Moreover, the base station transfers power to the nodes by using Wireless Power
Transfer (WPT) to extend their battery life. However, inadequately scheduling
WPT and data collection causes some of the nodes to drain their battery and
have their data buffer overflow, while the other nodes waste their harvested
energy, which is more than they need to transmit their packets. In this paper,
we investigate a novel optimal scheduling strategy, called EHMDP, aiming to
minimize data packet loss from a network of sensor nodes in terms of the nodes'
energy consumption and data queue state information. The scheduling problem is
first formulated by a centralized MDP model, assuming that the complete states
of each node are well known by the base station. This presents the upper bound
of the data that can be collected in a rechargeable wireless sensor network.
Next, we relax the assumption of the availability of full state information so
that the data transmission and WPT can be semi-decentralized. The simulation
results show that, in terms of network throughput and packet loss rate, the
proposed algorithm significantly improves the network performance.Comment: 30 pages, 8 figures, accepted to IEEE Transactions on Vehicular
Technolog
Towards Optimal Distributed Node Scheduling in a Multihop Wireless Network through Local Voting
In a multihop wireless network, it is crucial but challenging to schedule
transmissions in an efficient and fair manner. In this paper, a novel
distributed node scheduling algorithm, called Local Voting, is proposed. This
algorithm tries to semi-equalize the load (defined as the ratio of the queue
length over the number of allocated slots) through slot reallocation based on
local information exchange. The algorithm stems from the finding that the
shortest delivery time or delay is obtained when the load is semi-equalized
throughout the network. In addition, we prove that, with Local Voting, the
network system converges asymptotically towards the optimal scheduling.
Moreover, through extensive simulations, the performance of Local Voting is
further investigated in comparison with several representative scheduling
algorithms from the literature. Simulation results show that the proposed
algorithm achieves better performance than the other distributed algorithms in
terms of average delay, maximum delay, and fairness. Despite being distributed,
the performance of Local Voting is also found to be very close to a centralized
algorithm that is deemed to have the optimal performance
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