HopScotch - a low-power renewable energy base station network for rural broadband access

The provision of adequate broadband access to communities in sparsely populated rural areas has in the past been severely restricted. In this paper, we present a wireless broadband access test bed running in the Scottish Highlands and Islands which is based on a relay network of low-power base stations. Base stations are powered by a combination of renewable sources creating a low cost and scalable solution suitable for community ownership. The use of the 5~GHz bands allows the network to offer large data rates and the testing of ultra high frequency ``white space'' bands allow expansive coverage whilst reducing the number of base stations or required transmission power. We argue that the reliance on renewable power and the intelligent use of frequency bands makes this approach an economic green radio technology which can address the problem of rural broadband access

Diseño de una red full mesh para zonas no interconectadas (ZNI)

In Colombia, in spite of technological and social advances, NIZ still exists in the national power grid; in adition that, in the third quarter of 2018, Internet penetration in the country was only 62%. In addition, it is institutionally found that the Mining and Energy Planning Unit -UPME- (by its acronym in Spanish) and the Institute of Planning and Promotion of Energy Solutions for the NIZ -IPSE- (by its acronym in Spanish) both entities attached to the Ministry of Mines and Energy, had to redirect their functions in order to identify, promote, foster, develop and implement effective energy solutions. The above motivated the present investigation -whose results are described in this paper - with the fundamental objective of mitigating two shortcomings: electrical interconnection and internet connection in villages and municipalities of NIZ located in Caquetá department. Consequently, a full mesh network connected to Internet is designed and simulated at one of its points, together with a photovoltaic system to supply these electrical energy nodes. The measurement results of the parameters on the nodes allow the proper selection of high throughput radio links, providing Internet access for training purposes, education and trade opening, in rural NIZ.En Colombia, a pesar de los avances tecnológicos y sociales, aún existen ZNI a la red eléctrica nacional; a esto se adiciona que, en el tercer trimestre del año 2018, la penetración del internet en el país fue de apenas del 62%. Además, institucionalmente se encuentra que la Unidad de Planeación Minero Energética –UPME- y el Instituto de Planificación y Promoción de Soluciones Energéticas para las ZNI –IPSE- ambas entidades adscritas al Ministerio de Minas y Energía, debieron reorientar sus funciones con el objeto de identificar, promover, fomentar, desarrollar e implementar soluciones energéticas efectivas. Lo anterior motivó la presente investigación -cuyos resultados se describen en este artículo- con el objetivo fundamental de mitigar dos falencias: interconexión eléctrica y conexión a internet en veredas y cabeceras municipales de ZNI ubicadas en el departamento de Caquetá. En consecuencia, se diseña y simula una red full mesh conectada a internet en uno de sus puntos, junto con un sistema fotovoltaico para abastecer estos nodos de energía eléctrica. Los resultados de la medición de los parámetros sobre los nodos permiten seleccionar adecuadamente radio enlaces de alto throughput, proporcionando acceso a internet para propósitos de capacitación, educación y apertura de comercio, en ZNI rurales

Future strategic plan analysis for integrating distributed renewable generation to smart grid through wireless sensor network: Malaysia prospect

AbstractIntegration of Distributed Renewable Generation (DRG) to the future Smart Grid (SG) is one of the important considerations that is highly prioritized in the SG development roadmap by most of the countries including Malaysia. The plausible way of this integration is the enhancement of information and bidirectional communication infrastructure for energy monitoring and controlling facilities. However, urgency of data delivery through maintaining critical time condition is not crucial in these facilities. In this paper, we have surveyed state-of-the-art protocols for different Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) with the aim of realizing communication infrastructure for DRG in Malaysia. Based on the analytical results from surveys, data communication for DRG should be efficient, flexible, reliable, cost effective, and secured. To meet this achievement, IEEE802.15.4 supported ZigBee PRO protocol together with sensors and embedded system is shown as Wireless Sensor (WS) for DRG bidirectional network with prospect of attaining data monitoring facilities. The prospect towards utilizing ZigBee PRO protocol can be a cost effective option for full integration of intelligent DRG and small scale Building-Integrated Photovoltaic (BIPV)/Feed-in-Tariff (FiT) under SG roadmap (Phase4: 2016–2017) conducted by Malaysia national utility company, Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB). Moreover, we have provided a direction to utilize the effectiveness of ZigBee-WS network with the existing optical communication backbone for data importing from the end DRG site to the TNB control center. A comparative study is carried out among developing countries on recent trends of SG progress which reveals that some common projects like smart metering and DRG integration are on priority

Resource Management in Green Wireless Communication Networks

The development of wireless technologies has been stimulated by the ever increasing network capacity and the diversity of users' quality of service (QoS) requirements. It is widely anticipated that next-generation wireless networks should be capable of integrating wireless networks with various network architectures and wireless access technologies to provide diverse high-quality ubiquitous wireless accesses for users. However, the existing wireless network architecture may not be able to satisfy explosive wireless access request. Moreover, with the increasing awareness of environmental protection, significant growth of energy consumption caused by the massive traffic demand consequently raises the carbon emission footprint. The emerging of green energy technologies, e.g., solar panel and wind turbine, has provided a promising methodology to sustain operations and management of next-generation wireless networks by powering wireless network devices with eco-friendly green energy. In this thesis, we propose a sustainable wireless network solution as the prototype of next-generation wireless networks to fulfill various QoS requirements of users with harvested energy from natural environments. The sustainable wireless solution aims at establishing multi-tier heterogeneous green wireless communication networks to integrate different wireless services and utilizing green energy supplies to sustain the network operations and management. The solution consists of three steps, 1) establishing conventional green wireless networks, 2) building multi-tier green wireless networks, and 3) allocating and balancing network resources. In the first step, we focus on cost-effectively establishing single-tier green wireless networks to satisfy users' basic QoS requirements by designing efficient network planning algorithm. We formulate the minimum green macro cell BS deployment problem as an optimization problem, which aims at placing the minimum number of BSs to fulfill the basic QoS requirements by harvested energy. A preference level is defined as the guidance for efficient algorithm design to solve the minimum green macro cell BSs deployment problem. After that, we propose a heuristic algorithm, called two-phase constrained green BS placement (TCGBP) algorithm, based on Voronoi diagram. The TCGBP algorithm jointly considers the rate adaptation and power allocation to solve the formulated optimization problem. The performance is verified by extensive simulations, which demonstrate that the TCGBP algorithm can achieve the optimal solution with significantly reduced time complexity. In the second step, we aim at efficiently constructing multi-tier green heterogeneous networks to fulfill high-end QoS requirements of users by placing green small cell BSs. We formulate the green small cell BS deployment and sub-carrier allocation problem as a mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problem, which targets at deploying the minimum number of green small cell BSs as relay nodes to further improve network capacities and provide high-quality QoS wireless services with harvested energy under the cost constraint. We propose the sub-carrier and traffic over rate (STR) metric to evaluate the contribution of deployed green small cell BSs in both energy and throughput aspects. Based on the metric, two algorithms are designed, namely joint relay node placement and sub-carrier allocation with top-down/bottom-up (RNP-SA-t/b) algorithms. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithms provide simple yet efficient solutions and offer important guidelines on network planning and resource management in two-tier heterogeneous green wireless networks. In the last step, we intend to allocate limited network resources to guarantee the balance of charging and discharging processes. Different from network planning based on statistical historical data, the design of resource allocation algorithm generally concerns relatively short-term resources management, and thus it is essential to accurately estimate the instantaneous energy charging and discharging rates of green wireless network devices. Specifically, we investigate the energy trading issues in green wireless networks, and try to maximize the profits of all cells by determining the optimal price and quantity in each energy trading transaction. Finally, we apply a two-stage leader-follower Stackelberg game to formulate the energy trading problem. By using back induction to obtain the optimal price and quantity of traded energy, we propose an optimal algorithm, called optimal profits energy trading (OPET) algorithm. Our analysis and simulation results demonstrate the optimality performance of OPET algorithm. We believe that our research results in this dissertation can provide insightful guidance in the design of next-generation wireless communication networks with green energy. The algorithms developed in the dissertation offer practical and efficient solutions to build and optimize multi-tier heterogeneous green wireless communication networks

Throughput Maximization in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks

The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) swarms in civilian applications such as surveillance, agriculture, search and rescue, and border patrol is becoming popular. UAVs have also found use as mobile or portable base stations. In these applications, communication requirements for UAVs are generally stricter as compared to conventional aircrafts. Hence, there needs to be an efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol that ensures UAVs experience low channel access delays and high throughput. Some challenges when designing UAVs MAC protocols include interference and rapidly changing channel states, which require a UAV to adapt its data rate to ensure data transmission success. Other challenges include Quality of Service (QoS) requirements and multiple contending UAVs that result in collisions and channel access delays. To this end, this thesis aims to utilize Multi-Packet Reception (MPR) technology. In particular, it considers nodes that are equipped with a Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) radio, and thereby, allowing them to receive multiple transmissions simultaneously. A key problem is to identify a suitable a Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) transmission schedule that allows UAVs to transmit successfully and frequently. Moreover, in order for SIC to operate, there must be a sufficient difference in received power. However, in practice, due to the location and orientation of nodes, the received power of simultaneously transmitting nodes may cause SIC decoding to fail at a receiver. Consequently, a key problem concerns the placement and orientation of UAVs to ensure there is diversity in received signal strength at a receiving node. Lastly, interference between UAVs serving as base station is a critical issue. In particular, their respective location may have excessive interference or cause interference to other UAVs; all of which have an impact on the schedule used by these UAVs to serve their respective users

Assessing the Performance of a Particle Swarm Optimization Mobility Algorithm in a Hybrid Wi-Fi/LoRa Flying Ad Hoc Network

Research on Flying Ad-Hoc Networks (FANETs) has increased due to the availability of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and the electronic components that control and connect them. Many applications, such as 3D mapping, construction inspection, or emergency response operations could benefit from an application and adaptation of swarm intelligence-based deployments of multiple UAVs. Such groups of cooperating UAVs, through the use of local rules, could be seen as network nodes establishing an ad-hoc network for communication purposes. One FANET application is to provide communication coverage over an area where communication infrastructure is unavailable. A crucial part of a FANET implementation is computing the optimal position of UAVs to provide connectivity with ground nodes while maximizing geographic span. To achieve optimal positioning of FANET nodes, an adaptation of the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is proposed. A 3D mobility model is defined by adapting the original PSO algorithm and combining it with a fixed-trajectory initial flight. A Long Range (LoRa) mesh network is used for air-to-air communication, while a Wi-Fi network provides air-to-ground communication to several ground nodes with unknown positions. The optimization problem has two objectives: maximizing coverage to ground nodes and maintaining an end-to-end communication path to a control station, through the UAV mesh. The results show that the hybrid mobility approach performs similarly to the fixed trajectory flight regarding coverage, and outperforms fixed trajectory and PSO-only algorithms in both path maintenance and overall network efficiency, while using fewer UAVs

On-Site and External Energy Harvesting in Underground Wireless

Energy efficiency is vital for uninterrupted long-term operation of wireless underground communication nodes in the field of decision agriculture. In this paper, energy harvesting and wireless power transfer techniques are discussed with applications in underground wireless communications (UWC). Various external wireless power transfer techniques are explored. Moreover, key energy harvesting technologies are presented that utilize available energy sources in the field such as vibration, solar, and wind. In this regard, the Electromagnetic(EM)- and Magnetic Induction(MI)-based approaches are explained. Furthermore, the vibration-based energy harvesting models are reviewed as well. These energy harvesting approaches lead to design of an efficient wireless underground communication system to power underground nodes for prolonged field operation in decision agriculture