RF Energy Harvesting Wireless Communication: RF Environment, Device Hardware and Practical Issues

Radio frequency (RF) based wireless power transfer provides an attractive solution to extend the lifetime of power-constrained wireless sensor networks. Through harvesting RF energy from surrounding environments or dedicated energy sources, low-power wireless devices can be self-sustaining and environment-friendly. These features make the RF energy harvesting wireless communication (RF-EHWC) technique attractive to a wide range of applications. The objective of this article is to investigate the latest research activities on the practical RF-EHWC design. The distribution of RF energy in the real environment, the hardware design of RF-EHWC devices and the practical issues in the implementation of RF-EHWC networks are discussed. At the end of this article, we introduce several interesting applications that exploit the RF-EHWC technology to provide smart healthcare services for animals, wirelessly charge the wearable devices, and implement 5G-assisted RF-EHWC

Early forest fire detection by vision-enabled wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks constitute a powerful technology particularly suitable for environmental monitoring. With regard to wildfires, they enable low-cost fine-grained surveillance of hazardous locations like wildland-urban interfaces. This paper presents work developed during the last 4 years targeting a vision-enabled wireless sensor network node for the reliable, early on-site detection of forest fires. The tasks carried out ranged from devising a robust vision algorithm for smoke detection to the design and physical implementation of a power-efficient smart imager tailored to the characteristics of such an algorithm. By integrating this smart imager with a commercial wireless platform, we endowed the resulting system with vision capabilities and radio communication. Numerous tests were arranged in different natural scenarios in order to progressively tune all the parameters involved in the autonomous operation of this prototype node. The last test carried out, involving the prescribed burning of a 95 x 20-m shrub plot, confirmed the high degree of reliability of our approach in terms of both successful early detection and a very low false-alarm rate. Journal compilationMinisterio de Ciencia e Innovación TEC2009-11812, IPT-2011-1625-430000Office of Naval Research (USA) N000141110312Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico e Industrial IPC-2011100

Flexible quality of service model for wireless body area sensor networks

Wireless body area sensor networks (WBASNs) are becoming an increasingly significant breakthrough technology for smart healthcare systems, enabling improved clinical decision-making in daily medical care. Recently, radio frequency (RF) ultra-wideband (UWB) technology has developed substantially for physiological signal monitoring due to its advantages such as low power consumption, high transmission data rate, and miniature antenna size. Applications of future ubiquitous healthcare systems offer the prospect of collecting human vital signs, early detection of abnormal medical conditions, real-time healthcare data transmission and remote telemedicine support. However, due to the technical constraints of sensor batteries, the supply of power is a major bottleneck for healthcare system design. Moreover, medium access control (MAC) needs to support reliable transmission links that allow sensors to transmit data safely and stably. In this letter, we provide a flexible quality of service (QoS) model for ad-hoc networks that can support fast data transmission, adaptive schedule MAC control, and energy efficient ubiquitous WBASN networks. Results show that the proposed multi-hop communication ad-hoc network model can balance information packet collisions and power consumption. Additionally, wireless communications link in WBASNs can effectively overcome multi-user interference and offer high transmission data rates for healthcare systems

Path Quality Estimator for 802.15.4e TSCH Fast Deployment Tool

[EN] This paper introduces a novel quality estimator that uses different metrics to decide the best path towards the root in Wireless Sensor Networks. The different metrics are assessed at medium access control layer (MAC), under the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, and are used at network layer, enhancing the best path selection process done by the routing protocol, and at the application layer, enabling visual quality indicators in the nodes. This quality function is used during deployment stage; ensuring nodes are located optimally and nimbly. This mechanism will help WSN¿s adoption in Industrial Internet of Things applications.This work is supported by IVACE (Insituto Valenciano de Competitividad Empresarial) through FEDER funding (exp. IMDEEA/2017/103).Vera-Pérez, J.; Todoli Ferrandis, D.; Santonja Climent, S.; Silvestre-Blanes, J.; Sempere Paya, VM. (2018). Path Quality Estimator for 802.15.4e TSCH Fast Deployment Tool. Telfor Journal (Online). 10(1):2-7. https://doi.org/10.5937/telfor1801002VS27101O. Gaddour, A. Koubâa, S. Chaudhry, M. Tezeghdanti, R. Chaari and M. Abid, 'Simulation and Performance Evaluation of DAG Construction with RPL,' in IEEE Third International Conference on Communications and Networking (ComNet), pp. 1-8, 2012.;IETF, 'RFC 6552 - Objective Function Zero for the Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL),' 2012.;IETF, 'RFC 6719 - The Minimum Rank with Hysteresis Objective Function,' 2012.;N. Pradeska, Widyawan, W. Najib and S. S. Kusumawardani, 'Performance Analysis of Objective Function MRHOF and OF0 in Routing Protocol RPL IPv6 Over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN),' in 8th International Conference on Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ICITEE), Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 2016.;P. O. Kamgueu, E. Nataf, T. D. Ndié and O. Festor, 'Energy-based routing metric for RPL,' Doctoral dissertation, INRIA, 2013.;H.-S. Kim, J. Paek and S. Bahk, 'QU-RPL: Queue utilization based RPL for load balancing in large scale industrial applications,' in 12th Annual IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication and Networking (SECON), Seattle, WA, USA, 2015.;P. Gonizzi, R. Monica and G. Ferrari, 'Design and evaluation of a delay-efficient RPL routing metric,' in 9th International Wireless Communication and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC), Sardinia, Italy, 2013.;IETF, 'RFC 6551 - Routing Metrics Used for Path Calculation in Low-Power and Lossy Networks,' 2012.;N. Baccour, A. Koubâa, L. Mottola, M. A. Zúñiga, H. Youssef, C. A. Boano and M. Alves, 'Radio link quality estimation in wireless sensor networks: A survey,' ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN), vol. 8 (4), 2012.;P. Karkazis, H. C. Leligou, L. Sarakis, T. Zahariadis, P. Trakadas, T. H. Velivassaki and C. Capsalis, 'Design of primary and composite routing metrics for RPL-compliant Wireless Sensor Networks,' in International Conference on Telecommunications and Multimedia (TEMU), Chania, Greece, 2012.;N. Baccour, A. Koubâa, H. Youssef, M. B. Jamâa, D. d. Rosário, M. Alves and L. B. Becker, 'F-LQE: A Fuzzy Link Quality Estimator for Wireless Sensor Networks,' in European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks (EWSN), Coimbra, Portugal, 2010.;S. Rekik, N. Baccour, M. Jmaiel and K. Drira, 'Holistic link quality estimation-based routing metric for RPL networks in smart grids,' in IEEE 27th Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor, and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC), Valencia, Spain, 2016.;O. Gaddour, A. Koubaa, N. Baccour and M. Abid, 'OF-FL: QoSaware fuzzy logic objective function for the RPL routing protocol,' in 12th International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc, and Wireless Networks (WiOpt), Hammamet, Tunisia, 2014.;IETF, 'RFC 8180 - Minimal IPv6 over TSCH Mode of IEEE 802.15.4e (6TiSCH) Configuration,' 2017.;M. G. Amor, A. Koubâa, E. Tovar and M. Khalgui, 'Cyber-OF: An Adaptative Cyber-Physical Objective Function for Smart Cities Applications,' in 28th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS), Toulouse, France, 2016.;J. Vera-Pérez, D. Todolí-Ferrandis, J. Silvestre-Blanes, S. SantonjaCliment and V. Sempere-Paya, 'Path quality estimator for wireless sensor networks fast deployment tool,' 2017 25th Telecommunication Forum (TELFOR), Belgrade, 2017, pp. 1-4.

Electronically-switched Directional Antennas for Low-power Wireless Networks: A Prototype-driven Evaluation

We study the benefits of electronically-switched directional antennas in low-power wireless networks. This antenna technology may improve energy efficiency by increasing the communication range and by alleviating contention in directions other than the destination, but in principle requires a dedicated network stack. Unlike most existing works, we start by characterizing a real-world antenna prototype, and apply this to an existing low-power wireless stack, which we adapt with minimal changes. Our results show that: i) the combination of a low-cost directional antenna and a conventional network stack already brings significant performance improvements, e.g., nearly halving the radio-on time per delivered packet; ii) the margin of improvement available to alternative clean-slate protocol designs is similarly large and concentrated in the control rather than the data plane; iii) by artificially modifying our antenna's link-layer model, we can point at further potential benefits opened by different antenna designs

PluralisMAC: a generic multi-MAC framework for heterogeneous, multiservice wireless networks, applied to smart containers

Developing energy-efficient MAC protocols for lightweight wireless systems has been a challenging task for decades because of the specific requirements of various applications and the varying environments in which wireless systems are deployed. Many MAC protocols for wireless networks have been proposed, often custom-made for a specific application. It is clear that one MAC does not fit all the requirements. So, how should a MAC layer deal with an application that has several modes (each with different requirements) or with the deployment of another application during the lifetime of the system? Especially in a mobile wireless system, like Smart Monitoring of Containers, we cannot know in advance the application state (empty container versus stuffed container). Dynamic switching between different energy-efficient MAC strategies is needed. Our architecture, called PluralisMAC, contains a generic multi-MAC framework and a generic neighbour monitoring and filtering framework. To validate the real-world feasibility of our architecture, we have implemented it in TinyOS and have done experiments on the TMote Sky nodes in the w-iLab.t testbed. Experimental results show that dynamic switching between MAC strategies is possible with minimal receive chain overhead, while meeting the various application requirements (reliability and low-energy consumption)

A Survey on Communication Networks for Electric System Automation

Published in Computer Networks 50 (2006) 877–897, an Elsevier journal. The definitive version of this publication is available from Science Direct. Digital Object Identifier:10.1016/j.comnet.2006.01.005In today’s competitive electric utility marketplace, reliable and real-time information become the key factor for reliable delivery of power to the end-users, profitability of the electric utility and customer satisfaction. The operational and commercial demands of electric utilities require a high-performance data communication network that supports both existing functionalities and future operational requirements. In this respect, since such a communication network constitutes the core of the electric system automation applications, the design of a cost-effective and reliable network architecture is crucial. In this paper, the opportunities and challenges of a hybrid network architecture are discussed for electric system automation. More specifically, Internet based Virtual Private Networks, power line communications, satellite communications and wireless communications (wireless sensor networks, WiMAX and wireless mesh networks) are described in detail. The motivation of this paper is to provide a better understanding of the hybrid network architecture that can provide heterogeneous electric system automation application requirements. In this regard, our aim is to present a structured framework for electric utilities who plan to utilize new communication technologies for automation and hence, to make the decision making process more effective and direct.This work was supported by NEETRAC under Project #04-157

Supporting Cyber-Physical Systems with Wireless Sensor Networks: An Outlook of Software and Services

Sensing, communication, computation and control technologies are the essential building blocks of a cyber-physical system (CPS). Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a way to support CPS as they provide fine-grained spatial-temporal sensing, communication and computation at a low premium of cost and power. In this article, we explore the fundamental concepts guiding the design and implementation of WSNs. We report the latest developments in WSN software and services for meeting existing requirements and newer demands; particularly in the areas of: operating system, simulator and emulator, programming abstraction, virtualization, IP-based communication and security, time and location, and network monitoring and management. We also reflect on the ongoing efforts in providing dependable assurances for WSN-driven CPS. Finally, we report on its applicability with a case-study on smart buildings

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