9,097 research outputs found
Estimation Diversity and Energy Efficiency in Distributed Sensing
Distributed estimation based on measurements from multiple wireless sensors
is investigated. It is assumed that a group of sensors observe the same
quantity in independent additive observation noises with possibly different
variances. The observations are transmitted using amplify-and-forward (analog)
transmissions over non-ideal fading wireless channels from the sensors to a
fusion center, where they are combined to generate an estimate of the observed
quantity. Assuming that the Best Linear Unbiased Estimator (BLUE) is used by
the fusion center, the equal-power transmission strategy is first discussed,
where the system performance is analyzed by introducing the concept of
estimation outage and estimation diversity, and it is shown that there is an
achievable diversity gain on the order of the number of sensors. The optimal
power allocation strategies are then considered for two cases: minimum
distortion under power constraints; and minimum power under distortion
constraints. In the first case, it is shown that by turning off bad sensors,
i.e., sensors with bad channels and bad observation quality, adaptive power
gain can be achieved without sacrificing diversity gain. Here, the adaptive
power gain is similar to the array gain achieved in Multiple-Input
Single-Output (MISO) multi-antenna systems when channel conditions are known to
the transmitter. In the second case, the sum power is minimized under
zero-outage estimation distortion constraint, and some related energy
efficiency issues in sensor networks are discussed.Comment: To appear at IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin
On Capacity of Active Relaying in Magnetic Induction based Wireless Underground Sensor Networks
Wireless underground sensor networks (WUSNs) present a variety of new
research challenges. Magnetic induction (MI) based transmission has been
proposed to overcome the very harsh propagation conditions in underground
communications in recent years. In this approach, induction coils are utilized
as antennas in the sensor nodes. This solution achieves longer transmission
ranges compared to the traditional electromagnetic (EM) waves based approach.
Furthermore, a passive relaying technique has been proposed in the literature
where additional resonant circuits are deployed between the nodes. However,
this solution is shown to provide only a limited performance improvement under
practical system design contraints. In this work, the potential of an active
relay device is investigated which may improve the performance of the system by
combining the benefits of the traditional wireless relaying and the MI based
signal transmission.Comment: This paper has been accepted for presentation at IEEE ICC 2015. It
has 6 pages, 5 figures (4 colored), and 17 reference
Data Transmission with Reduced Delay for Distributed Acoustic Sensors
This paper proposes a channel access control scheme fit to dense acoustic
sensor nodes in a sensor network. In the considered scenario, multiple acoustic
sensor nodes within communication range of a cluster head are grouped into
clusters. Acoustic sensor nodes in a cluster detect acoustic signals and
convert them into electric signals (packets). Detection by acoustic sensors can
be executed periodically or randomly and random detection by acoustic sensors
is event driven. As a result, each acoustic sensor generates their packets
(50bytes each) periodically or randomly over short time intervals
(400ms~4seconds) and transmits directly to a cluster head (coordinator node).
Our approach proposes to use a slotted carrier sense multiple access. All
acoustic sensor nodes in a cluster are allocated to time slots and the number
of allocated sensor nodes to each time slot is uniform. All sensor nodes
allocated to a time slot listen for packet transmission from the beginning of
the time slot for a duration proportional to their priority. The first node
that detect the channel to be free for its whole window is allowed to transmit.
The order of packet transmissions with the acoustic sensor nodes in the time
slot is autonomously adjusted according to the history of packet transmissions
in the time slot. In simulations, performances of the proposed scheme are
demonstrated by the comparisons with other low rate wireless channel access
schemes.Comment: Accepted to IJDSN, final preprinted versio
Channel Sounding for the Masses: Low Complexity GNU 802.11b Channel Impulse Response Estimation
New techniques in cross-layer wireless networks are building demand for
ubiquitous channel sounding, that is, the capability to measure channel impulse
response (CIR) with any standard wireless network and node. Towards that goal,
we present a software-defined IEEE 802.11b receiver and CIR estimation system
with little additional computational complexity compared to 802.11b reception
alone. The system implementation, using the universal software radio peripheral
(USRP) and GNU Radio, is described and compared to previous work. By overcoming
computational limitations and performing direct-sequence spread-spectrum
(DS-SS) matched filtering on the USRP, we enable high-quality yet inexpensive
CIR estimation. We validate the channel sounder and present a drive test
campaign which measures hundreds of channels between WiFi access points and an
in-vehicle receiver in urban and suburban areas
Decentralized Estimation over Orthogonal Multiple-access Fading Channels in Wireless Sensor Networks - Optimal and Suboptimal Estimators
Optimal and suboptimal decentralized estimators in wireless sensor networks
(WSNs) over orthogonal multiple-access fading channels are studied in this
paper. Considering multiple-bit quantization before digital transmission, we
develop maximum likelihood estimators (MLEs) with both known and unknown
channel state information (CSI). When training symbols are available, we derive
a MLE that is a special case of the MLE with unknown CSI. It implicitly uses
the training symbols to estimate the channel coefficients and exploits the
estimated CSI in an optimal way. To reduce the computational complexity, we
propose suboptimal estimators. These estimators exploit both signal and data
level redundant information to improve the estimation performance. The proposed
MLEs reduce to traditional fusion based or diversity based estimators when
communications or observations are perfect. By introducing a general message
function, the proposed estimators can be applied when various analog or digital
transmission schemes are used. The simulations show that the estimators using
digital communications with multiple-bit quantization outperform the estimator
using analog-and-forwarding transmission in fading channels. When considering
the total bandwidth and energy constraints, the MLE using multiple-bit
quantization is superior to that using binary quantization at medium and high
observation signal-to-noise ratio levels
Cooperative Authentication in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks
With the growing use of underwater acoustic communications (UWAC) for both
industrial and military operations, there is a need to ensure communication
security. A particular challenge is represented by underwater acoustic networks
(UWANs), which are often left unattended over long periods of time. Currently,
due to physical and performance limitations, UWAC packets rarely include
encryption, leaving the UWAN exposed to external attacks faking legitimate
messages. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for message authentication
in a UWAN setting. We begin by observing that, due to the strong spatial
dependency of the underwater acoustic channel, an attacker can attempt to mimic
the channel associated with the legitimate transmitter only for a small set of
receivers, typically just for a single one. Taking this into account, our
scheme relies on trusted nodes that independently help a sink node in the
authentication process. For each incoming packet, the sink fuses beliefs
evaluated by the trusted nodes to reach an authentication decision. These
beliefs are based on estimated statistical channel parameters, chosen to be the
most sensitive to the transmitter-receiver displacement. Our simulation results
show accurate identification of an attacker's packet. We also report results
from a sea experiment demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: Author version of paper accepted for publication in the IEEE
Transactions on Wireless Communication
The Sensing Capacity of Sensor Networks
This paper demonstrates fundamental limits of sensor networks for detection
problems where the number of hypotheses is exponentially large. Such problems
characterize many important applications including detection and classification
of targets in a geographical area using a network of sensors, and detecting
complex substances with a chemical sensor array. We refer to such applications
as largescale detection problems. Using the insight that these problems share
fundamental similarities with the problem of communicating over a noisy
channel, we define a quantity called the sensing capacity and lower bound it
for a number of sensor network models. The sensing capacity expression differs
significantly from the channel capacity due to the fact that a fixed sensor
configuration encodes all states of the environment. As a result, codewords are
dependent and non-identically distributed. The sensing capacity provides a
bound on the minimal number of sensors required to detect the state of an
environment to within a desired accuracy. The results differ significantly from
classical detection theory, and provide an ntriguing connection between sensor
networks and communications. In addition, we discuss the insight that sensing
capacity provides for the problem of sensor selection.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, November 200
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