213 research outputs found
Lightweight Synchronization Algorithm with Self-Calibration for Industrial LORA Sensor Networks
Wireless sensor and actuator networks are gaining momentum in the era of
Industrial Internet of Things IIoT. The usage of the close-loop data from
sensors in the manufacturing chain is extending the common monitoring scenario
of the Wireless Sensors Networks WSN where data were just logged. In this paper
we present an accurate timing synchronization for TDMA implemented on the state
of art IoT radio, such as LoRa, that is a good solution in industrial
environments for its high robustness. Experimental results show how it is
possible to modulate the drift correction and keep the synchronization error
within the requirements
Slotted ALOHA Overlay on LoRaWAN: a Distributed Synchronization Approach
LoRaWAN is one of the most promising standards for IoT applications.
Nevertheless, the high density of end-devices expected for each gateway, the
absence of an effective synchronization scheme between gateway and end-devices,
challenge the scalability of these networks. In this article, we propose to
regulate the communication of LoRaWAN networks using a Slotted-ALOHA (S-ALOHA)
instead of the classic ALOHA approach used by LoRa. The implementation is an
overlay on top of the standard LoRaWAN; thus no modification in pre-existing
LoRaWAN firmware and libraries is necessary. Our method is based on a novel
distributed synchronization service that is suitable for low-cost IoT
end-nodes. S-ALOHA supported by our synchronization service significantly
improves the performance of traditional LoRaWAN networks regarding packet loss
rate and network throughput.Comment: 4 pages, 8 figure
Energy aware optimization for low power radio technologies
The explosive growth of IoT is pushing the market towards cheap, very low power devices with a strong focus on miniaturization, for applications such as in-body sensors, personal health monitoring and microrobots. Proposing procedures for energy efficiency in IoT is a difficult task, as it is a rapidly growing market comprised of many and very diverse product categories using technologies that are not stable, evolving at a high pace. The research in this field proposes solutions that go from physical layer optimization up to the network layer, and the sensor network designer has to select the techniques that are best for its application specific architecture and radio technology used. This work is focused on exploring new techniques for enhancing the energy efficiency and user experience of IoT networks. We divide the proposed techniques in frame and chip level optimization techniques, respectively. While the frame level techniques are meant to improve the performance of existing radio technologies, the chip level techniques aim at replacing them with crystal-free architectures.
The identified frame level techniques are the use of preamble authentication and packet fragmentation, advisable for Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs), a technology that offers the lowest energy consumption per provided service, but is vulnerable in front of energy exhaustion attacks and does not perform well in dense networks. The use of authenticated preambles between the sensors and gateways becomes a defence mechanism against the battery draining intended by attackers. We show experimentally that this approach is able to reduce with 91% the effect of an exhaustion attack, increasing the device's lifetime from less than 0.24 years to 2.6 years. The experiments were conducted using Loadsensing sensor nodes, commercially used for critical infrastructure control and monitoring. Even if exemplified on LoRaWAN, the use of preamble authentication is extensible to any wireless protocol. The use of packet fragmentation despite the packet fits the frame, is shown to reduce the probability of collisions while the number of users in the duty-cycle restricted network increases. Using custom-made Matlab simulations, important goodput improvement was obtained with fragmentation, with higher impact in slower and denser networks. Using NS3 simulations, we showed that combining packet fragmentation with group NACK can increase the network reliability, while reducing the energy consumed for retransmissions, at the cost of adding small headers to each fragment. It is a strategy that proves to be effective in dense duty-cycle restricted networks only, where the headers overhead is negligible compared to the network traffic.
As a chip level technique, we consider using radios for communication that do not use external frequency references such as crystal oscillators. This would enable having all sensor's elements on a single piece of silicon, rendering it even ten times more energy efficient due to the compactness of the chip. The immediate consequence is the loss of communication accuracy and ability to easily switch communication channels. In this sense, we propose a sequence of frequency synchronization algorithms and phases that have to be respected by a crystal-free device so that it can be able to join a network by finding the beacon channel, synthesize all communication channels and then maintain their accuracy against temperature change. The proposed algorithms need no additional network overhead, as they are using the existing network signaling. The evaluation is made in simulations and experimentally on a prototype implementation of an IEEE802.15.4 crystal-free radio. While in simulations we are able to change to another communication channel with very good frequency accuracy, the results obtained experimentally show an initial accuracy slightly above 40ppm, which will be later corrected by the chip to be below 40 ppm.El crecimiento significativo de la IoT está empujando al mercado hacia el desarrollo de dispositivos de bajo coste, de muy bajo consumo energético y con un fuerte enfoque en la miniaturización, para aplicaciones que requieran sensores corporales, monitoreo de salud personal y micro-robots. La investigación en el campo de la eficiencia energética en la IoT propone soluciones que van desde la optimización de la capa física hasta la capa de red. Este trabajo se centra en explorar nuevas técnicas para mejorar la eficiencia energética y la experiencia del usuario de las redes IoT. Dividimos las técnicas propuestas en técnicas de optimización de nivel de trama de red y chip, respectivamente. Si bien las técnicas de nivel de trama están destinadas a mejorar el rendimiento de las tecnologías de radio existentes, las técnicas de nivel de chip tienen como objetivo reemplazarlas por arquitecturas que no requieren de cristales. Las técnicas de nivel de trama desarrolladas en este trabajo son el uso de autenticación de preámbulos y fragmentación de paquetes, aconsejables para redes LPWAN, una tecnología que ofrece un menor consumo de energía por servicio prestado, pero es vulnerable frente a los ataques de agotamiento de energía y no escalan frente la densificación. El uso de preámbulos autenticados entre los sensores y las pasarelas de enlace se convierte en un mecanismo de defensa contra el agotamiento del batería previsto por los atacantes. Demostramos experimentalmente que este enfoque puede reducir con un 91% el efecto de un ataque de agotamiento, aumentando la vida útil del dispositivo de menos de 0.24 años a 2.6 años. Los experimentos se llevaron a cabo utilizando nodos sensores de detección de carga, utilizados comercialmente para el control y monitoreo de infrastructura crítica. Aunque la técnica se ejemplifica en el estándar LoRaWAN, el uso de autenticación de preámbulo es extensible a cualquier protocolo inalámbrico. En esta tesis se muestra también que el uso de la fragmentación de paquetes a pesar de que el paquete se ajuste a la trama, reduce la probabilidad de colisiones mientras aumenta el número de usuarios en una red con restricciones de ciclos de transmisión. Mediante el uso de simulaciones en Matlab, se obtiene una mejora importante en el rendimiento de la red con la fragmentación, con un mayor impacto en redes más lentas y densas. Usando simulaciones NS3, demostramos que combinar la fragmentación de paquetes con el NACK en grupo se puede aumentar la confiabilidad de la red, al tiempo que se reduce la energía consumida para las retransmisiones, a costa de agregar pequeños encabezados a cada fragmento. Como técnica de nivel de chip, consideramos el uso de radios para la comunicación que no usan referencias de frecuencia externas como los osciladores basados en un cristal. Esto permitiría tener todos los elementos del sensor en una sola pieza de silicio, lo que lo hace incluso diez veces más eficiente energéticamente debido a la integración del chip. La consecuencia inmediata, en el uso de osciladores digitales en vez de cristales, es la pérdida de precisión de la comunicación y la capacidad de cambiar fácilmente los canales de comunicación. En este sentido, proponemos una secuencia de algoritmos y fases de sincronización de frecuencia que deben ser respetados por un dispositivo sin cristales para que pueda unirse a una red al encontrar el canal de baliza, sintetizar todos los canales de comunicación y luego mantener su precisión contra el cambio de temperatura. Los algoritmos propuestos no necesitan una sobrecarga de red adicional, ya que están utilizando la señalización de red existente. La evaluación se realiza en simulaciones y experimentalmente en una implementación prototipo de una radio sin cristal IEEE802.15.4. Los resultados obtenidos experimentalmente muestran una precisión inicial ligeramente superior a 40 ppm, que luego será corregida por el chip para que sea inferior a 40 ppm.Postprint (published version
Location-Enabled IoT (LE-IoT): A Survey of Positioning Techniques, Error Sources, and Mitigation
The Internet of Things (IoT) has started to empower the future of many
industrial and mass-market applications. Localization techniques are becoming
key to add location context to IoT data without human perception and
intervention. Meanwhile, the newly-emerged Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN)
technologies have advantages such as long-range, low power consumption, low
cost, massive connections, and the capability for communication in both indoor
and outdoor areas. These features make LPWAN signals strong candidates for
mass-market localization applications. However, there are various error sources
that have limited localization performance by using such IoT signals. This
paper reviews the IoT localization system through the following sequence: IoT
localization system review -- localization data sources -- localization
algorithms -- localization error sources and mitigation -- localization
performance evaluation. Compared to the related surveys, this paper has a more
comprehensive and state-of-the-art review on IoT localization methods, an
original review on IoT localization error sources and mitigation, an original
review on IoT localization performance evaluation, and a more comprehensive
review of IoT localization applications, opportunities, and challenges. Thus,
this survey provides comprehensive guidance for peers who are interested in
enabling localization ability in the existing IoT systems, using IoT systems
for localization, or integrating IoT signals with the existing localization
sensors
Ultra-low power IoT applications: from transducers to wireless protocols
This dissertation aims to explore Internet of Things (IoT) sensor nodes in various application scenarios with different design requirements. The research provides a comprehensive exploration of all the IoT layers composing an advanced device, from transducers to on-board processing, through low power hardware schemes and wireless protocols for wide area networks.
Nowadays, spreading and massive utilization of wireless sensor nodes pushes research and industries to overcome the main limitations of such constrained devices, aiming to make them easily deployable at a lower cost. Significant challenges involve the battery lifetime that directly affects the device operativity and the wireless communication bandwidth. Factors that commonly contrast the system scalability and the energy per bit, as well as the maximum coverage.
This thesis aims to serve as a reference and guideline document for future IoT projects, where results are structured following a conventional development pipeline. They usually consider communication standards and sensing as project requirements and low power operation as a necessity.
A detailed overview of five leading IoT wireless protocols, together with custom solutions to overcome the throughput limitations and decrease the power consumption, are some of the topic discussed. Low power hardware engineering in multiple applications is also introduced, especially focusing on improving the trade-off between energy, functionality, and on-board processing capabilities. To enhance these features and to provide a bottom-top overview of an IoT sensor node, an innovative and low-cost transducer for structural health monitoring is presented. Lastly, the high-performance computing at the extreme edge of the IoT framework is addressed, with special attention to image processing algorithms running on state of the art RISC-V architecture. As a specific deployment scenario, an OpenCV-based stack, together with a convolutional neural network, is assessed on the octa-core PULP SoC
Smart Home Technologies for Cognitive Assessment in Healthcare
With the term 'smart home' developers usually refer to a house, or more generally a residential environment, where a set of integrated sensors, devices and technologies provides the occupants with innovative functionalities and utilities which improve both the living comfort and the resource management of the building
GNSS-free outdoor localization techniques for resource-constrained IoT architectures : a literature review
Large-scale deployments of the Internet of Things (IoT) are adopted for performance
improvement and cost reduction in several application domains. The four main IoT application
domains covered throughout this article are smart cities, smart transportation, smart healthcare, and
smart manufacturing. To increase IoT applicability, data generated by the IoT devices need to be
time-stamped and spatially contextualized. LPWANs have become an attractive solution for outdoor
localization and received significant attention from the research community due to low-power,
low-cost, and long-range communication. In addition, its signals can be used for communication
and localization simultaneously. There are different proposed localization methods to obtain the
IoT relative location. Each category of these proposed methods has pros and cons that make them
useful for specific IoT systems. Nevertheless, there are some limitations in proposed localization
methods that need to be eliminated to meet the IoT ecosystem needs completely. This has motivated
this work and provided the following contributions: (1) definition of the main requirements and
limitations of outdoor localization techniques for the IoT ecosystem, (2) description of the most
relevant GNSS-free outdoor localization methods with a focus on LPWAN technologies, (3) survey
the most relevant methods used within the IoT ecosystem for improving GNSS-free localization
accuracy, and (4) discussion covering the open challenges and future directions within the field.
Some of the important open issues that have different requirements in different IoT systems include
energy consumption, security and privacy, accuracy, and scalability. This paper provides an overview
of research works that have been published between 2018 to July 2021 and made available through
the Google Scholar database.5311-8814-F0ED | Sara Maria da Cruz Maia de Oliveira PaivaN/
Irrigation planning system for agricultural soils
Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Engenharia Eletrónica Industrial e ComputadoresO objetivo principal desta dissertação é o desenvolvimento de um sistema de planeamento de regas
para a agricultura. Este projeto dá seguimento ao algoritmo desenvolvido em [1], capaz de criar um
plano de rega de acordo com informações relativas ao solo, colheita, tipo de irrigação, humidade do
solo e a previsão meteorológica de uma determinada localização.
O sistema desenvolvido é composto por uma aplicação web e uma rede de dispositivos eletrónicos
no campo. O sistema efetua todo o trabalho necessário, desde a aquisição de dados relativos à
humidade do solo até à exibição dos planos de rega ao agricultor.
A aplicação web utiliza a stack tecnológica MERN para fornecer uma interface ao utilizador, onde
é possível gerir os pontos de rega e campos agrícolas, observar previsões meteorológicas e visualizar
e obter atualizações relativas aos planos de rega, assim como alertar o agricultor através de noti ficações push quando condições alarmantes se verificam. Para além da interface com o utilizador,
esta também obtém informações meteorológicas, executa o algoritmo de planeamento e agrega os
dados de humidade do solo recolhidos pela rede de pontos de rega, através de um servidor CoAP.
A rede de dispositivos eletrónicos no campo está encarregue de recolher informação relativa à
humidade do solo e enviá-la para o servidor de hora a hora, recorrendo a diferentes tecnologias de
forma a proporcionar uma solução flexível de baixo custo, com duas possibilidades de configuração,
standalone e WSN, adequadas para diferentes cenários. A comunicação entre os dispositivos no
campo e o servidor é baseada no protocolo CoAP.
A configuração standalone é constituída por uma PCB, que combina um microntrolador low power
com um circuito de energy harvesting. A esta, são conectados um painel solar, um conversor step-up,
uma bateria Li-Po e um módulo de comunicações móveis (capaz de utilizar as tecnologias móveis
GPRS/UMTS e NB-IoT), assim como até seis sensores de humidade do solo.
A configuração WSN recorre à mesma PCB que a configuração standalone, utilizando um trans ceiver LoRa em vez do módulo de comunicações móveis. Esta comunica através da camada física
LoRa com um edge device baseado na plataforma Raspberry Pi, que encaminha os pacotes rece bidos pela rede LoRa através do protocolo CoAP para o servidor. A rede LoRa desenvolvida é capaz
de enviar mensagens downlink diárias e um data-rate adaptativo, que controla o link budget através
do spreading factor e da potência de transmissão, recebendo pacotes recorrendo a um esquema
adaptativo de seleção do spreading factor (ASFS) [2].The main objective of this dissertation is the development of an irrigation planning system for agri culture. This work builds upon the algorithm developed in [1], capable of creating an irrigation plan
according to soil, crop, irrigation, soil moisture and weather forecast of a given location.
The developed system is composed by a web application and a network of field electronic devices.
The system does all the necessary work, from the retrieval of the soil moisture data to the display of
irrigation prescription plans to the farmer.
The web application resorts to the MERN technological stack to provide an interface to the farmer,
where irrigation points and crop fields can be managed, forecasts observed and the irrigation plans
can be retrieved and updated, while also alerting the farmer through push notifications when danger ous conditions are verified. Besides the interface with the farmer, it also gathers weather information,
performs the irrigation planning and retrieves soil moisture data from the irrigation points through a
CoAP server.
The network of electronic devices is in charge of retrieving soil moisture information and sending
it to the server on an hourly basis, using different technologies to provide a flexible low-cost solution
with two different configurations, standalone and WSN, suitable to many different scenarios. The
communication between field devices and the server is based on CoAP protocol.
The standalone configuration consists of a PCB, where a low power microcontroller is paired with
an energy harvesting circuit. To it, a solar panel, a step-up converter, Li-Po battery and a cellular
communication module (capable of connectivity with both GPRS/UMTS and NB-IoT technologies)
are connected, along with up to six soil moisture sensors.
The WSN configuration makes use of the same PCB as the standalone configuration, using a LoRa
transceiver instead. It communicates through the LoRa physical layer to an edge device based on
the Raspberry Pi platform, which forwards the packets received from the LoRa network through CoAP
to the web server. The LoRa network developed is capable of daily downlink messages and adaptive
data-rate, where the link budget is controlled through the spreading factor and the transmission power,
receiving packets through an adaptive spreading factor selection (ASFS) scheme [2].Firstly, I would like to show my gratitude to my advisors for their guidance and support during this
project, and in particular to Professor Doctor Sérgio Lopes for the insightful discussions and dedication over the course of this work. I also would like to thank everyone involved in the research project
02/SAICT/2017-28247-FCT-TO-CHAIR, that supported the work developed in this dissertation
Recent Advances in Internet of Things Solutions for Early Warning Systems: A Review
none5noNatural disasters cause enormous damage and losses every year, both economic and in terms of human lives. It is essential to develop systems to predict disasters and to generate and disseminate timely warnings. Recently, technologies such as the Internet of Things solutions have been integrated into alert systems to provide an effective method to gather environmental data and produce alerts. This work reviews the literature regarding Internet of Things solutions in the field of Early Warning for different natural disasters: floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, and landslides. The aim of the paper is to describe the adopted IoT architectures, define the constraints and the requirements of an Early Warning system, and systematically determine which are the most used solutions in the four use cases examined. This review also highlights the main gaps in literature and provides suggestions to satisfy the requirements for each use case based on the articles and solutions reviewed, particularly stressing the advantages of integrating a Fog/Edge layer in the developed IoT architectures.openEsposito M.; Palma L.; Belli A.; Sabbatini L.; Pierleoni P.Esposito, M.; Palma, L.; Belli, A.; Sabbatini, L.; Pierleoni, P
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