Coexistence and interference mitigation for WPANs and WLANs from traditional approaches to deep learning: a review

More and more devices, such as Bluetooth and IEEE 802.15.4 devices forming Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) and IEEE 802.11 devices constituting Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), share the 2.4 GHz Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) band in the realm of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Cities. However, the coexistence of these devices could pose a real challenge—co-channel interference that would severely compromise network performances. Although the coexistence issues has been partially discussed elsewhere in some articles, there is no single review that fully summarises and compares recent research outcomes and challenges of IEEE 802.15.4 networks, Bluetooth and WLANs together. In this work, we revisit and provide a comprehensive review on the coexistence and interference mitigation for those three types of networks. We summarize the strengths and weaknesses of the current methodologies, analysis and simulation models in terms of numerous important metrics such as the packet reception ratio, latency, scalability and energy efficiency. We discover that although Bluetooth and IEEE 802.15.4 networks are both WPANs, they show quite different performances in the presence of WLANs. IEEE 802.15.4 networks are adversely impacted by WLANs, whereas WLANs are interfered by Bluetooth. When IEEE 802.15.4 networks and Bluetooth co-locate, they are unlikely to harm each other. Finally, we also discuss the future research trends and challenges especially Deep-Learning and Reinforcement-Learning-based approaches to detecting and mitigating the co-channel interference caused by WPANs and WLANs

Innovative energy-efficient wireless sensor network applications and MAC sub-layer protocols employing RTS-CTS with packet concatenation

of energy-efficiency as well as the number of available applications. As a consequence there are challenges that need to be tackled for the future generation of WSNs. The research work from this Ph.D. thesis has involved the actual development of innovative WSN applications contributing to different research projects. In the Smart-Clothing project contributions have been given in the development of a Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) to monitor the foetal movements of a pregnant woman in the last four weeks of pregnancy. The creation of an automatic wireless measurement system for remotely monitoring concrete structures was an contribution for the INSYSM project. This was accomplished by using an IEEE 802.15.4 network enabling for remotely monitoring the temperature and humidity within civil engineering structures. In the framework of the PROENEGY-WSN project contributions have been given in the identification the spectrum opportunities for Radio Frequency (RF) energy harvesting through power density measurements from 350 MHz to 3 GHz. The design of the circuits to harvest RF energy and the requirements needed for creating a WBAN with electromagnetic energy harvesting and Cognitive Radio (CR) capabilities have also been addressed. A performance evaluation of the state-of-the art of the hardware WSN platforms has also been addressed. This is explained by the fact that, even by using optimized Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols, if the WSNs platforms do not allow for minimizing the energy consumption in the idle and sleeping states, energy efficiency and long network lifetime will not be achieved. The research also involved the development of new innovative mechanisms that tries and solves overhead, one of the fundamental reasons for the IEEE 802.15.4 standard MAC inefficiency. In particular, this Ph.D. thesis proposes an IEEE 802.15.4 MAC layer performance enhancement by employing RTS/CTS combined with packet concatenation. The results have shown that the use of the RTS/CTS mechanism improves channel efficiency by decreasing the deferral time before transmitting a data packet. In addition, the Sensor Block Acknowledgment MAC (SBACK-MAC) protocol has been proposed that allows the aggregation of several acknowledgment responses in one special Block Acknowledgment (BACK) Response packet. Two different solutions are considered. The first one considers the SBACK-MAC protocol in the presence of BACK Request (concatenation) while the second one considers the SBACK-MAC in the absence of BACK Request (piggyback). The proposed solutions address a distributed scenario with single-destination and single-rate frame aggregation. The throughput and delay performance is mathematically derived under both ideal conditions (a channel environment with no transmission errors) and non ideal conditions (a channel environment with transmission errors). An analytical model is proposed, capable of taking into account the retransmission delays and the maximum number of backoff stages. The simulation results successfully validate our analytical model. For more than 7 TX (aggregated packets) all the MAC sub-layer protocols employing RTS/CTS with packet concatenation allows for the optimization of channel use in WSNs, v8-48 % improvement in the maximum average throughput and minimum average delay, and decrease energy consumption

Cooperative positioning studies based on WLANs

Location information and location-based service have gained importance in recent years because, based on their concept, a new business market has been opened which encompass emergency services, security, monitoring, tracking, logistics, etc. Nowadays, the most developed positioning systems, namely the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), are meant for outdoor use. In order to integrate outdoor and indoor localization in the same mobile application, several lines of research have been created for the purpose of investigating the possibility of wireless network technologies and of overcoming the challenges faced by GNSS in performing localization and navigation in indoor environments. The benefit in using wireless networks is that they provide a minimally invasive solution which is based on software algorithms that can be implemented and executed in the Mobile Station (MS) or in a Location Server connected to the network. This thesis focuses on the development of localization approaches based on Received Signal Strength (RSS) and applied in WLANs. Such approaches demonstrated in recent research advances that RSS-based localization algorithms are the simplest existing approaches due to the fact that the RSSs are most accessible existing measurements. RSS measurements can be used with two main algorithms, which are addressed in this thesis: Fingerprinting method (FP) and Pathloss method (PL). These two methods can be applied in both cooperative and non-cooperative algorithms. Such algorithms are evaluated here in terms of Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) for both simulated and real-field data

Energy-aware medium access control protocols for wireless sensors network applications

The main purpose of this thesis was to investigate energy efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols designed to extend the lifetime of a wireless sensor network application, such as tracking, environment monitoring, home security, patient monitoring, e.g., foetal monitoring in the last weeks of pregnancy. From the perspective of communication protocols, energy efficiency is one of the most important issues, and can be addressed at each layer of the protocol stack; however, our research only focuses on the medium access control (MAC) layer. An energy efficient MAC protocol was designed based on modifications and optimisations for a synchronized power saving Sensor MAC (SMAC) protocol, which has three important components: periodic listen and sleep, collision and overhearing avoidance and message passing. The Sensor Block Acknowledgement (SBACK) MAC protocol is proposed, which combines contention-based, scheduling-based and block acknowledgement-based schemes to achieve energy efficiency. In SBACK, the use of ACK control packets is reduced since it will not have an ACK packet for every DATA packet sent; instead, one special packet called Block ACK Response will be used at the end of the transmission of all data packets. This packet informs the sender of how many packets were received by the receiver, reducing the number of ACK control packets we intended to reduce the power consumption for the nodes. Hence more useful data packets can be transmitted. A comparison study between SBACK and SMAC protocol is also performed. Considering 0% of packet losses, SBACK decreases the energy consumption when directly compared with S-MAC, we will have always a decrease of energy consumption. Three different transceivers will be used and considering a packet loss of 10% we will have a decrease of energy consumption between 10% and 0.1% depending on the transceiver. When there are no retransmissions of packets, SBACK only achieve worst performance when the number of fragments is less than 12, after that the decrease of average delay increases with the increase of the fragments sent. When 10% of the packets need retransmission only for the TR1000 transceiver worst results occurs in terms of energy waste, all other transceivers (CC2420 and AT86RF230) achieve better results. In terms of delay if we need to retransmit more than 10 packets the SBACK protocol always achieves better performance when comparing with the other MAC protocols that uses ACK

Effective Scheduling Algorithms for Cross-Interference Mitigation in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Wireless networks are making life easier, smarter and more convenient. However, the well-known Carrier-sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) mechanism is powerless when dealing with Cross-Technology Interference (CTI) between Wi-Fi and Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Network (LR-WPAN), because of asymmetric transmission power, incompatible Clear Channel Assessment (CCA) and different timing parameters. Plenty of studies have shown that WiFi always has a higher priority to access the wireless medium and even block LR-WPAN transmission in the worst case. Our experiments confirm this point and conclude that Wi-Fi can interrupt LR-WPAN severely even block LR-WPAN traffic, while the interference from LR-WPAN to Wi-Fi is negligible. Different from other studies, this thesis presents a novel centralized scheduling mechanism in the time domain to harmonize coexistence of Wi-Fi and LR-WPAN, also refer to as time-slot based scheduling mechanism. The mechanism is achieved by introducing a new command frame, named Access Notification (AN), into the IEEE802.15.4 Medium Access Control (MAC) layer. Based on this mechanism, a static time-slot based scheduling algorithm is designed and evaluated on both real hardware-based system and NS-3 simulator. The result shows the algorithm improves LR-WPAN Packet Loss Rate (PLR) significantly but at the cost of reducing Wi-Fi throughput. In order to maximize performance, based on slot-based congestion indicator (CI) that is proposed and defined to tell whether an allocated time slot is adequate for data transmission or not, we further design an adaptive time-slot based scheduling algorithm. The evaluation shows that the adaptive algorithm covers the shortage of the static algorithm and offers a distinct improvement on LR-WPAN Packet Transmission Rate (PTR)

An efficient multichannel wireless sensor networks MAC protocol based on IEEE 802.11 distributed co-ordinated function.

This research aimed to create new knowledge and pioneer a path in the area relating to future trends in the WSN, by resolving some of the issues at the MAC layer in Wireless Sensor Networks. This work introduced a Multi-channel Distributed Coordinated Function (MC-DCF) which takes advantage of multi-channel assignment. The backoff algorithm of the IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) was modified to invoke channel switching, based on threshold criteria in order to improve the overall throughput for wireless sensor networks. This work commenced by surveying different protocols: contention-based MAC protocols, transport layer protocols, cross-layered design and multichannel multi-radio assignments. A number of existing protocols were analysed, each attempting to resolve one or more problems faced by the current layers. The 802.15.4 performed very poorly at high data rate and at long range. Therefore 802.15.4 is not suitable for sensor multimedia or surveillance system with streaming data for future multichannel multi-radio systems. A survey on 802.11 DCF - which was designed mainly for wireless networks –supports and confirm that it has a power saving mechanism which is used to synchronise nodes. However it uses a random back-off mechanism that cannot provide deterministic upper bounds on channel access delay and as such cannot support real-time traffic. The weaknesses identified by surveying this protocol form the backbone of this thesis The overall aim for this thesis was to introduce multichannel with single radio as a new paradigm for IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordinated Function (DCF) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that is used in a wide range of applications, from military application, environmental monitoring, medical care, smart buildings and other industry and to extend WSNs with multimedia capability which sense for instance sounds or motion, video sensor which capture video events of interest. Traditionally WSNs do not need high data rate and throughput, since events are normally captured periodically. With the paradigm shift in technology, multimedia streaming has become more demanding than data sensing applications as such the need for high data rate protocol for WSN which is an emerging technology in this area. The IEEE 802.11 can support data rates up to 54Mbps and 802.11 DCF was designed specifically for use in wireless networks. This thesis focused on designing an algorithm that applied multichannel to IEEE 802.11 DCF back-off algorithm to reduce the waiting time of a node and increase throughput when attempting to access the medium. Data collection in WSN tends to suffer from heavy congestion especially nodes nearer to the sink node. Therefore, this thesis proposes a contention based MAC protocol to address this problem from the inspiration of the 802.11 DCF backoff algorithm resulting from a comparison of IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15.4 for Future Green Multichannel Multi-radio Wireless Sensor Networks

Real-time wireless networks for industrial control systems

The next generation of industrial systems (Industry 4.0) will dramatically transform manyproductive sectors, integrating emerging concepts such as Internet of Things, artificialintelligence, big data, cloud robotics and virtual reality, to name a few. Most of thesetechnologies heavily rely on the availability of communication networks able to offernearly–istantaneous, secure and reliable data transfer. In the industrial sector, these tasks are nowadays mainly accomplished by wired networks, that combine the speed ofoptical fiber media with collision–free switching technology. However, driven by the pervasive deployment of mobile devices for personal com-munications in the last years, more and more industrial applications require wireless connectivity, which can bring enormous advantages in terms of cost reduction and flex-ibility. Designing timely, reliable and deterministic industrial wireless networks is a complicated task, due to the nature of the wireless channel, intrinsically error–prone andshared among all the devices transmitting on the same frequency band. In this thesis, several solutions to enhance the performance of wireless networks employed in industrial control applications are proposed. The presented approaches differ in terms of achieved performance and target applications, but they are all characterized by an improvement over existing industrial wireless solutions in terms of timeliness, reliability and determinism. When possible, an experimental validation of the designed solutions is provided. The obtained results prove that significant performance improvements are already possible, often using commercially available devices and preserving compliance to existing standards. Future research efforts, combined with the availability of new chipsets and standards, could lead to a world where wireless links effectively replace most of the existing cables in industrial environments, as it is already the case in the consumer market

MAC/PHY Co-Design of CSMA Wireless Networks Using Software Radios.

In the past decade, CSMA-based protocols have spawned numerous network standards (e.g., the WiFi family), and played a key role in improving the ubiquity of wireless networks. However, the rapid evolution of CSMA brings unprecedented challenges, especially the coexistence of different network architectures and communications devices. Meanwhile, many intrinsic limitations of CSMA have been the main obstacle to the performance of its derivatives, such as ZigBee, WiFi, and mesh networks. Most of these problems are observed to root in the abstract interface of the CSMA MAC and PHY layers --- the MAC simply abstracts the advancement of PHY technologies as a change of data rate. Hence, the benefits of new PHY technologies are either not fully exploited, or they even may harm the performance of existing network protocols due to poor interoperability. In this dissertation, we show that a joint design of the MAC/PHY layers can achieve a substantially higher level of capacity, interoperability and energy efficiency than the weakly coupled MAC/PHY design in the current CSMA wireless networks. In the proposed MAC/PHY co-design, the PHY layer exposes more states and capabilities to the MAC, and the MAC performs intelligent adaptation to and control over the PHY layer. We leverage the reconfigurability of software radios to design smart signal processing algorithms that meet the challenge of making PHY capabilities usable by the MAC layer. With the approach of MAC/PHY co-design, we have revisited the primitive operations of CSMA (collision avoidance, carrier signaling, carrier sensing, spectrum access and transmitter cooperation), and overcome its limitations in relay and broadcast applications, coexistence of heterogeneous networks, energy efficiency, coexistence of different spectrum widths, and scalability for MIMO networks. We have validated the feasibility and performance of our design using extensive analysis, simulation and testbed implementation.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95944/1/xyzhang_1.pd

On a Joint Physical Layer and Medium Access Control Sublayer Design for Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks and Applications

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are distributed networks comprising small sensing devices equipped with a processor, memory, power source, and often with the capability for short range wireless communication. These networks are used in various applications, and have created interest in WSN research and commercial uses, including industrial, scientific, household, military, medical and environmental domains. These initiatives have also been stimulated by the finalisation of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, which defines the medium access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) for low-rate wireless personal area networks (LR-WPAN). Future applications may require large WSNs consisting of huge numbers of inexpensive wireless sensor nodes with limited resources (energy, bandwidth), operating in harsh environmental conditions. WSNs must perform reliably despite novel resource constraints including limited bandwidth, channel errors, and nodes that have limited operating energy. Improving resource utilisation and quality-of-service (QoS), in terms of reliable connectivity and energy efficiency, are major challenges in WSNs. Hence, the development of new WSN applications with severe resource constraints will require innovative solutions to overcome the above issues as well as improving the robustness of network components, and developing sustainable and cost effective implementation models. The main purpose of this research is to investigate methods for improving the performance of WSNs to maintain reliable network connectivity, scalability and energy efficiency. The study focuses on the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC/PHY layers and the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) based networks. First, transmission power control (TPC) is investigated in multi and single-hop WSNs using typical hardware platform parameters via simulation and numerical analysis. A novel approach to testing TPC at the physical layer is developed, and results show that contrary to what has been reported from previous studies, in multi-hop networks TPC does not save energy. Next, the network initialization/self-configuration phase is addressed through investigation of the 802.15.4 MAC beacon interval setting and the number of associating nodes, in terms of association delay with the coordinator. The results raise doubt whether that the association energy consumption will outweigh the benefit of duty cycle power management for larger beacon intervals as the number of associating nodes increases. The third main contribution of this thesis is a new cross layer (PHY-MAC) design to improve network energy efficiency, reliability and scalability by minimising packet collisions due to hidden nodes. This is undertaken in response to findings in this thesis on the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC performance in the presence of hidden nodes. Specifically, simulation results show that it is the random backoff exponent that is of paramount importance for resolving collisions and not the number of times the channel is sensed before transmitting. However, the random backoff is ineffective in the presence of hidden nodes. The proposed design uses a new algorithm to increase the sensing coverage area, and therefore greatly reduces the chance of packet collisions due to hidden nodes. Moreover, the design uses a new dynamic transmission power control (TPC) to further reduce energy consumption and interference. The above proposed changes can smoothly coexist with the legacy 802.15.4 CSMA/CA. Finally, an improved two dimensional discrete time Markov chain model is proposed to capture the performance of the slotted 802.15.4 CSMA/CA. This model rectifies minor issues apparent in previous studies. The relationship derived for the successful transmission probability, throughput and average energy consumption, will provide better performance predictions. It will also offer greater insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the MAC operation, and possible enhancement opportunities. Overall, the work presented in this thesis provides several significant insights into WSN performance improvements with both existing protocols and newly designed protocols. Finally, some of the numerous challenges for future research are described