Efficient Power Management based on Application Timing Semantics for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper proposes Efficient Sleep Scheduling based on Application Timing (ESSAT), a novel power manage-ment scheme that aggressively exploits the timing seman-tics of wireless sensor network applications. We present three ESSAT protocols each of which integrates (1) a light-weight traffic shaper that actively shapes the workload inside the network to achieve predictable timing proper-ties over multiple hops, and (2) a local scheduling algorithm that wakes up nodes just-in-time based on the tim-ing properties of shaped workloads. Our ESSAT protocols have several distinguishing features. First, they can save significant energy with minimal delay penalties. Second, they do not maintain TDMA schedules or communication backbones; as such, they are highly efficient and suitable for resource constrained sensor platforms. Moreover, the protocols are robust in highly dynamic network environ-ments, i.e., they can handle variable multi-hop communication delays and aggregate workloads involving multiple queries, and can adapt to varying workload and network topologies. Our simulations showed that DTS-SS, an ES-SAT protocol, achieved an average node duty cycle 38-87% lower than SPAN, and query latencies 36-98% lower than PSM and SYNC

Towards Real-time Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are poised to change the way computer systems interact with the physical world. We plan on entrusting sensor systems to collect medical data from patients, monitor the safety of our infrastructure, and control manufacturing processes in our factories. To date, the focus of the sensor network community has been on developing best-effort services. This approach is insufficient for many applications since it does not enable developers to determine if a system\u27s requirements in terms of communication latency, bandwidth utilization, reliability, or energy consumption are met. The focus of this thesis is to develop real-time network support for such critical applications. The first part of the thesis focuses on developing a power management solution for the radio subsystem which addresses both the problem of idle-listening and power control. In contrast to traditional power management solutions which focus solely on reducing energy consumption, the distinguishing feature of our approach is that it achieves both energy efficiency and real-time communication. A solution to the idle-listening problem is proposed in Energy Efficient Sleep Scheduling based on Application Semantics: ESSAT). The novelty of ESSAT lies in that it takes advantage of the common features of data collection applications to determine when to turn on and off a node\u27s radio without affecting real-time performance. A solution to the power control problem is proposed in Real-time Power Aware-Routing: RPAR). RPAR tunes the transmission power for each packet based on its deadline such that energy is saved without missing packet deadlines. The main theoretical contribution of this thesis is the development of novel transmission scheduling techniques optimized for data collection applications. This work bridges the gap between wireless sensor networks and real-time scheduling theory, which have traditionally been applied to processor scheduling. The proposed approach has significant advantages over existing design methodologies:: 1) it provides predictable performance allowing for the performance of a system to be estimated upon its deployment,: 2) it is possible to detect and handle overload conditions through simple rate control mechanisms, and: 3) it easily accommodates workload changes. I developed this framework under a realistic interference model by coordinating the activities at the MAC, link, and routing layers. The last component of this thesis focuses on the development of a real-time patient monitoring system for general hospital units. The system is designed to facilitate the detection of clinical deterioration, which is a key factor in saving lives and reducing healthcare costs. Since patients in general hospital wards are often ambulatory, a key challenge is to achieve high reliability even in the presence of mobility. To support patient mobility, I developed the Dynamic Relay Association Protocol -- a simple and effective mechanism for dynamically discovering the right relays for forwarding patient data -- and a Radio Mapping Tool -- a practical tool for ensuring network coverage in 802.15.4 networks. We show that it is feasible to use low-power and low-cost wireless sensor networks for clinical monitoring through an in-depth clinical study. The study was performed in a step-down cardiac care unit at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. This is the first long-term study of such a patient monitoring system

Resource management algorithms for real-time wireless sensor networks with applications in cyber-physical systems

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are playing a key role in the efficient operation of Cyber Physical Systems (CPS). They provide cost efficient solutions to current and future CPS re- quirements such as real-time structural awareness, faster event localization, cost reduction due to condition based maintenance rather than periodic maintenance, increased opportunities for real-time preventive or corrective control action and fine grained diagnostic analysis. However, there are several critical challenges in the real world applicability of WSN. The low power, low data rate characteristics of WSNs coupled with constraints such as application specified latency and wireless interference present challenges to their efficient integration in CPSs. The existing state of the art solutions lack methods to address these challenges that impediment the easy integration of WSN in CPS. This dissertation develops efficient resource management algorithms enabling WSNs to perform reliable, real-time, cost efficient monitoring. This research addresses three important problems in resource management in the presence of different constraints such as latency, precedence and wireless interference constraints. Additionally, the dissertation proposes a solution to deploy WSNs based real-time monitoring of critical infrastructure such as electrical overhead transmission lines. Firstly, design and analysis of an energy-aware scheduling algorithm encompassing both computation and communication subsystems in the presence of deadline, precedence and in- terference constraints is presented. The energy-delay tradeoff presented by the energy saving technologies such as Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVS) and Dynamic modulation Scaling (DMS) is studied and methods to leverage it by way of efficient schedule construction is proposed. Performance results show that the proposed polynomial-time heuristic scheduling algorithm offers comparable energy savings to that of the analytically derived optimal solution. Secondly, design, analysis and evaluation of adaptive online algorithms leveraging run- time variations is presented. Specifically, two widely used medium access control schemes are considered and online algorithms are proposed for each. For one, temporal correlation in sensor measurements is exploited and three heuristics with varying complexities are proposed to perform energy minimization using DMS. For another, an adaptive algorithm is proposed addressing channel and load conditions at a node by influencing the selection of either low energy or low delay transmission option. In both cases, the simulation results show that the proposed schemes provide much better energy savings as compared to the existing algorithms. The third component presents design and evaluation of a WSN based framework to mon- itor a CPS namely, electrical overhead transmission line infrastructure. The cost optimized hybrid hierarchical network architecture is composed of a combination of wired, wireless and cellular technologies. The proposed formulation is generic and addresses constraints such as bandwidth and latency; and real world scenarios such as asymmetric sensor data generation, unreliable wireless link behavior, non-uniform cellular coverage and is suitable for cost minimized incremental future deployment. In conclusion, this dissertation addresses several challenging research questions in the area of resource management in WSNs and their applicability in future CPSs through associated algorithms and analyses. The proposed research opens up new avenues for future research such as energy management through network coding and fault diagnosis for reliable monitoring

Performance assessment of real-time data management on wireless sensor networks

Technological advances in recent years have allowed the maturity of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), which aim at performing environmental monitoring and data collection. This sort of network is composed of hundreds, thousands or probably even millions of tiny smart computers known as wireless sensor nodes, which may be battery powered, equipped with sensors, a radio transceiver, a Central Processing Unit (CPU) and some memory. However due to the small size and the requirements of low-cost nodes, these sensor node resources such as processing power, storage and especially energy are very limited. Once the sensors perform their measurements from the environment, the problem of data storing and querying arises. In fact, the sensors have restricted storage capacity and the on-going interaction between sensors and environment results huge amounts of data. Techniques for data storage and query in WSN can be based on either external storage or local storage. The external storage, called warehousing approach, is a centralized system on which the data gathered by the sensors are periodically sent to a central database server where user queries are processed. The local storage, in the other hand called distributed approach, exploits the capabilities of sensors calculation and the sensors act as local databases. The data is stored in a central database server and in the devices themselves, enabling one to query both. The WSNs are used in a wide variety of applications, which may perform certain operations on collected sensor data. However, for certain applications, such as real-time applications, the sensor data must closely reflect the current state of the targeted environment. However, the environment changes constantly and the data is collected in discreet moments of time. As such, the collected data has a temporal validity, and as time advances, it becomes less accurate, until it does not reflect the state of the environment any longer. Thus, these applications must query and analyze the data in a bounded time in order to make decisions and to react efficiently, such as industrial automation, aviation, sensors network, and so on. In this context, the design of efficient real-time data management solutions is necessary to deal with both time constraints and energy consumption. This thesis studies the real-time data management techniques for WSNs. It particularly it focuses on the study of the challenges in handling real-time data storage and query for WSNs and on the efficient real-time data management solutions for WSNs. First, the main specifications of real-time data management are identified and the available real-time data management solutions for WSNs in the literature are presented. Secondly, in order to provide an energy-efficient real-time data management solution, the techniques used to manage data and queries in WSNs based on the distributed paradigm are deeply studied. In fact, many research works argue that the distributed approach is the most energy-efficient way of managing data and queries in WSNs, instead of performing the warehousing. In addition, this approach can provide quasi real-time query processing because the most current data will be retrieved from the network. Thirdly, based on these two studies and considering the complexity of developing, testing, and debugging this kind of complex system, a model for a simulation framework of the real-time databases management on WSN that uses a distributed approach and its implementation are proposed. This will help to explore various solutions of real-time database techniques on WSNs before deployment for economizing money and time. Moreover, one may improve the proposed model by adding the simulation of protocols or place part of this simulator on another available simulator. For validating the model, a case study considering real-time constraints as well as energy constraints is discussed. Fourth, a new architecture that combines statistical modeling techniques with the distributed approach and a query processing algorithm to optimize the real-time user query processing are proposed. This combination allows performing a query processing algorithm based on admission control that uses the error tolerance and the probabilistic confidence interval as admission parameters. The experiments based on real world data sets as well as synthetic data sets demonstrate that the proposed solution optimizes the real-time query processing to save more energy while meeting low latency.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologi

Data Gathering with Tour Length-Constrained

In this paper, given a single mobile element and a time deadline, we investigate the problem of designing the mobile element tour to visit subset of nodes, such that the length of this tour is bounded by the time deadline and the communication cost between nodes outside and inside the tour is minimized. The nodes that the mobile element tour visits, works as cache points that store the data of the other nodes. Several algorithms in the literature have tackled this problem by separating two phases; the construction of the mobile element tour from the computation of the forwarding trees to the cache points. In this paper, we propose algorithmic solutions that alternate between these phases and iteratively improves the outcome of each phase based on the result of the other. We compare the resulting performance of our solutions with that of previous work

Rapid Convergecast on Commodity Hardware: Performance Limits and Optimal Policies

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Reliable load-balancing routing for resource-constrained wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are energy and resource constrained. Energy limitations make it advantageous to balance radio transmissions across multiple sensor nodes. Thus, load balanced routing is highly desirable and has motivated a significant volume of research. Multihop sensor network architecture can also provide greater coverage, but requires a highly reliable and adaptive routing scheme to accommodate frequent topology changes. Current reliability-oriented protocols degrade energy efficiency and increase network latency. This thesis develops and evaluates a novel solution to provide energy-efficient routing while enhancing packet delivery reliability. This solution, a reliable load-balancing routing (RLBR), makes four contributions in the area of reliability, resiliency and load balancing in support of the primary objective of network lifetime maximisation. The results are captured using real world testbeds as well as simulations. The first contribution uses sensor node emulation, at the instruction cycle level, to characterise the additional processing and computation overhead required by the routing scheme. The second contribution is based on real world testbeds which comprises two different TinyOS-enabled senor platforms under different scenarios. The third contribution extends and evaluates RLBR using large-scale simulations. It is shown that RLBR consumes less energy while reducing topology repair latency and supports various aggregation weights by redistributing packet relaying loads. It also shows a balanced energy usage and a significant lifetime gain. Finally, the forth contribution is a novel variable transmission power control scheme which is created based on the experience gained from prior practical and simulated studies. This power control scheme operates at the data link layer to dynamically reduce unnecessarily high transmission power while maintaining acceptable link reliability

Contribution to the publish/subscribe communication model for the development of ubiquitous services in wireless sensor networks

Advances in wireless technologies and the rapid development of integrated electronics have made wireless sensor networks (WSN) one of the key technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT). Thanks to the ability of these networks to measure the physical phenomena of their environment, process and communicate this information using wireless technologies, they have excelled in the development of applications that respond or adapt to the context of a user, as is the case of ubiquitous environments such as smart cities, industrial automation, e-health among others. In addition, the IoT has opened the possibility that intelligent objects or devices are also capable of exchanging status information, conditions and capacity in order to interact with each other, in the same way that human beings have done through systems based on presence. These systems require information of an event in real time to react in a timely manner to the conditions or context of the user or device. These applications open new challenges in the management of WSN resources, since these networks operate in environments that are generally prone to packet loss and consist of generally small nodes with limited resources in memory, processing, bandwidth and power. The main objective of this thesis is the development of several mechanisms that allow the adaptation of the Publish/Subscribe protocols to the characteristics and limitations of the WSN for the provision of ubiquitous services in the context of the IoT. In addition, QoS support is supplied through mechanisms that provide reliability and timeliness in the delivery of packets and data aggregation techniques are applied to be efficient in the power consumption and the WSN bandwidth. Our research proposes an architecture to provide a presence service for WSN based on a Publish/ Subscribe model distributed and focused on mechanisms such as the aggregation of data and the publication of messages on demand to achieve energy efficiency and bandwidth. All these mechanisms have been applied in the design of a system called PASH aimed at home control based on the concept of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). The reliability provided by Publish/Subscribe protocols in WSN is of great importance in the design of applications that require receiving a message to react on time or in real time to an event. Initially, we focused our study on increasing the proportion of packet delivery (PDR) in the destination node through the improvement of reliability mechanisms. We evaluated the reliability mechanism of the MQTT-SN protocol and several proposed mechanisms of the CoAP protocol. From this evaluation, we propose a new and simple adaptive retransmission mechanism to respond to packet loss in the most appropriate way. Finally, we consider that applications such as: e-health, critical infrastructure control and monitoring, among others, must meet different QoS requirements, such as reliability and timeliness for each type of message received. In addition, data aggregation techniques play an important role in WSN to reduce power consumption and bandwidth. In this thesis, we propose a mechanism that provides the application with three different levels of QoS: we provide an improvement of our previous relay mechanism for reliability, we include the data aggregation in our reliability mechanism and we provide a timeliness mechanism in the delivery of packets.Els avenços en les tecnologies sense fils i al ràpid desenvolupament de l'electrònica integrada, ha convertit les xarxes de sensors sense fils (WSN) en una de les tecnologies claus de l'Internet de les Coses (Iot). Gràcies a la capacitat que tenen aquestes xarxes de mesurar els fenòmens físics del seu entorn, processar i comunicar aquesta informació utilitzant tecnologies sense fils, s'han destacat en el desenvolupament d'aplicacions que responguin o s'adaptin al context d'un usuari, com és el cas dels entorns ubics com a ciutats intel·ligents, automatització industrial, salut electrònica entre d'altres. A més, el IOT ha obert la possibilitat que els objectes o dispositius intel·ligents també siguin capaços d'intercanviar informació d'estat, condicions i capacitat per tal d'interactuar entre si, de la mateixa manera que els éssers humans ho han fet a través de sistemes basats en presència. Aquests sistemes requereixen informació d'un esdeveniment en temps real per reaccionar de manera oportuna a les condicions o al context de l'usuari o dispositiu. Aquestes aplicacions obren nous desafiaments en l'administració dels recursos de WSN, ja que aquestes xarxes operen en entorns que generalment són propensos a la pèrdua de paquets i consten de nodes generalment petits amb recursos limitats en memòria, processament, ample de banda i alimentació. El principal objectiu d'aquesta tesi és el desenvolupament de diversos mecanismes que permetin l'adequació dels protocols d'Publish / Subscribe a les característiques i limitacions de la WSN per a la provisió de serveis ubics en el context de la IOT. A més, es brinda suport de QoS a través de mecanismes que proporcionen fiabilitat i puntualitat en el lliurament de paquets i s'apliquen tècniques d'agregació de dades per a ser eficients en el consum d'energia i l'ample de banda de la WSN. La nostra investigació proposa una arquitectura per a proporcionar un servei de presència per WSN basat en un model de Publish / Subscribe distribuït i centrat en mecanismes com ara l'agregació de dades i la publicació de missatges en demanda per aconseguir eficiència en l'energia i l'ample de banda . Tots aquests mecanismes han estat aplicats en el disseny d'un sistema anomenat Pash dirigit al control de la llar basat en el concepte de Vida Assistida (AAL). La fiabilitat proporcionada pels protocols de Publish / Subscribe WSN és de gran importància en el disseny d'aplicacions que requereixen rebre un missatge per reaccionar a temps o en temps real davant un esdeveniment. Inicialment enfoquem el nostre estudi en augmentar la proporció de lliurament de paquets (PDR) en el node de destinació a través de la millora dels mecanismes de fiabilitat. Avaluem el mecanisme de fiabilitat del protocol MQTT-SN i diversos mecanismes proposats del protocol COAP. A partir d'aquesta avaluació, proposem un nou i senzill mecanisme de retransmissió adaptable per respondre a la pèrdua de paquets de la manera més adequada. Finalment, considerem que les aplicacions com: salut electrònica, control d'infraestructura crítica i monitoratge, entre d'altres, han de complir diferents requisits de QoS, com la fiabilitat i la puntualitat per a cada tipus de missatge rebut. A més, les tècniques d'agregació de dades tenen un paper important en WSN per reduir el consum d'energia i l'ample de banda. En aquesta tesi, proposem un mecanisme que proporciona a la aplicació tres nivells de QoS diferents: proporcionem una millora del nostre mecanisme de retransmissió anterior per a la fiabilitat, incloem l'agregació de dades en el nostre mecanisme de fiabilitat i proporcionem un mecanisme de puntualitat en el lliurament de paquets.Postprint (published version