Optimal Compression and Transmission Rate Control for Node-Lifetime Maximization

We consider a system that is composed of an energy constrained sensor node and a sink node, and devise optimal data compression and transmission policies with an objective to prolong the lifetime of the sensor node. While applying compression before transmission reduces the energy consumption of transmitting the sensed data, blindly applying too much compression may even exceed the cost of transmitting raw data, thereby losing its purpose. Hence, it is important to investigate the trade-off between data compression and transmission energy costs. In this paper, we study the joint optimal compression-transmission design in three scenarios which differ in terms of the available channel information at the sensor node, and cover a wide range of practical situations. We formulate and solve joint optimization problems aiming to maximize the lifetime of the sensor node whilst satisfying specific delay and bit error rate (BER) constraints. Our results show that a jointly optimized compression-transmission policy achieves significantly longer lifetime (90% to 2000%) as compared to optimizing transmission only without compression. Importantly, this performance advantage is most profound when the delay constraint is stringent, which demonstrates its suitability for low latency communication in future wireless networks.Comment: accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communicaiton

Timely and Efficient Information Delivery in Real-Time Industrial IoT Networks

Enabling real-time communication in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks is crucial to support autonomous, self-organized and re-configurable industrial automation for Industry 4.0 and the forthcoming Industry 5.0. In this paper, we consider a SIC-assisted real-time IIoT network, in which sensor nodes generate reports according to an event-generation probability that is specific for the monitored phenomena. The reports are delivered over a block-fading channel to a common Access Point (AP) in slotted ALOHA fashion, which leverages the imbalances in the received powers among the contending users and applies successive interference cancellation (SIC) to decode user packets from the collisions. We provide an extensive analytical treatment of the setup, deriving the Age of Information (AoI), throughput and deadline violation probability, when the AP has access to both the perfect as well as the imperfect channel-state information. We show that adopting SIC improves all the performance parameters with respect to the standard slotted ALOHA, as well as to an age-dependent access method. The analytical results agree with the simulation based ones, demonstrating that investing in the SIC capability at the receiver enables this simple access method to support timely and efficient information delivery in IIoT networks

Data Collection and Information Freshness in Energy Harvesting Networks

An Internet of Things (IoT) network consists of multiple devices with sensor(s), and one or more access points or gateways. These devices monitor and sample targets, such as valuable assets, before transmitting their samples to an access point or the cloud for storage or/and analysis. A critical issue is that devices have limited energy, which constrains their operational lifetime. To this end, researchers have proposed various solutions to extend the lifetime of devices. A popular solution involves optimizing the duty cycle of devices; equivalently, the ratio of their active and inactive/sleep time. Another solution is to employ energy harvesting technologies. Specifically, devices rely on one or more energy sources such as wind, solar or Radio Frequency (RF) signals to power their operations. Apart from energy, another fundamental problem is the limited spectrum shared by devices. This means they must take turns to transmit to a gateway. Equivalently, they need a transmission schedule that determines when they transmit their samples to a gateway. To this end, this thesis addresses three novel device/sensor selection problems. It first aims to determine the best devices to transmit in each time slot in an RF Energy-Harvesting Wireless Sensor Network (EH-WSN) in order to maximize throughput or sum-rate. Briefly, a Hybrid Access Point (HAP) is responsible for charging devices via downlink RF energy transfer. After that, the HAP selects a subset of devices to transmit their data. A key challenge is that the HAP has neither channel state information nor energy level information of device. In this respect, this thesis outlines two centralized algorithms that are based on cross-entropy optimization and Gibbs sampling. Next, this thesis considers information freshness when selecting devices, where the HAP aims to minimize the average Age of Information (AoI) of samples from devices. Specifically, the HAP must select devices to sample and transmit frequently. Further, it must select devices without channel state information. To this end, this thesis outlines a decentralized Q-learning algorithm that allows the HAP to select devices according to their AoI. Lastly, this thesis considers targets with time-varying states. As before, the aim is to determine the best set of devices to be active in each frame in order to monitor targets. However, the aim is to optimize a novel metric called the age of incorrect information. Further, devices cooperate with one another to monitor target(s). To choose the best set of devices and minimize the said metric, this thesis proposes two decentralized algorithms, i.e., a decentralized Q-learning algorithm and a novel state space free learning algorithm. Different from the decentralized Q-learning algorithm, the state space free learning algorithm does not require devices to store Q-tables, which record the expected reward of actions taken by devices

Optimizing the Age of Information in RIS-aided SWIPT Networks

In this letter, a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) network is investigated. To quantify the freshness of the data packets at the information receiver, the age of information (AoI) is considered. To minimize the sum AoI of the information users while ensuring that the power transferred to energy harvesting users is greater than the demanded value, we formulate a scheduling scheme, and a joint transmit beamforming and phase shift optimization at the base station (BS) and RIS, respectively. The alternating optimization (AO) algorithm is proposed to handle the coupling between active beamforming and passive RIS phase shifts, and the successive convex approximation (SCA) algorithm is utilized to tackle the non-convexity of the formulated problems. The improvement in terms of AoI provided by the proposed algorithm and the trade-off between the age of information and energy harvesting is quantified by the numerical simulation results

Data Collection in Two-Tier IoT Networks with Radio Frequency (RF) Energy Harvesting Devices and Tags

The Internet of things (IoT) is expected to connect physical objects and end-users using technologies such as wireless sensor networks and radio frequency identification (RFID). In addition, it will employ a wireless multi-hop backhaul to transfer data collected by a myriad of devices to users or applications such as digital twins operating in a Metaverse. A critical issue is that the number of packets collected and transferred to the Internet is bounded by limited network resources such as bandwidth and energy. In this respect, IoT networks have adopted technologies such as time division multiple access (TDMA), signal interference cancellation (SIC) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) in order to increase network capacity. Another fundamental issue is energy. To this end, researchers have exploited radio frequency (RF) energy-harvesting technologies to prolong the lifetime of energy constrained sensors and smart devices. Specifically, devices with RF energy harvesting capabilities can rely on ambient RF sources such as access points, television towers, and base stations. Further, an operator may deploy dedicated power beacons that serve as RF-energy sources. Apart from that, in order to reduce energy consumption, devices can adopt ambient backscattering communication technologies. Advantageously, backscattering allows devices to communicate using negligible amount of energy by modulating ambient RF signals. To address the aforementioned issues, this thesis first considers data collection in a two-tier MIMO ambient RF energy-harvesting network. The first tier consists of routers with MIMO capability and a set of source-destination pairs/flows. The second tier consists of energy harvesting devices that rely on RF transmissions from routers for energy supply. The problem is to determine a minimum-length TDMA link schedule that satisfies the traffic demand of source-destination pairs and energy demand of energy harvesting devices. It formulates the problem as a linear program (LP), and outlines a heuristic to construct transmission sets that are then used by the said LP. In addition, it outlines a new routing metric that considers the energy demand of energy harvesting devices to cope with routing requirements of IoT networks. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm on average achieves 31.25% shorter schedules as compared to competing schemes. In addition, the said routing metric results in link schedules that are at most 24.75% longer than those computed by the LP

Massive MIMO for Internet of Things (IoT) Connectivity

Massive MIMO is considered to be one of the key technologies in the emerging 5G systems, but also a concept applicable to other wireless systems. Exploiting the large number of degrees of freedom (DoFs) of massive MIMO essential for achieving high spectral efficiency, high data rates and extreme spatial multiplexing of densely distributed users. On the one hand, the benefits of applying massive MIMO for broadband communication are well known and there has been a large body of research on designing communication schemes to support high rates. On the other hand, using massive MIMO for Internet-of-Things (IoT) is still a developing topic, as IoT connectivity has requirements and constraints that are significantly different from the broadband connections. In this paper we investigate the applicability of massive MIMO to IoT connectivity. Specifically, we treat the two generic types of IoT connections envisioned in 5G: massive machine-type communication (mMTC) and ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC). This paper fills this important gap by identifying the opportunities and challenges in exploiting massive MIMO for IoT connectivity. We provide insights into the trade-offs that emerge when massive MIMO is applied to mMTC or URLLC and present a number of suitable communication schemes. The discussion continues to the questions of network slicing of the wireless resources and the use of massive MIMO to simultaneously support IoT connections with very heterogeneous requirements. The main conclusion is that massive MIMO can bring benefits to the scenarios with IoT connectivity, but it requires tight integration of the physical-layer techniques with the protocol design.Comment: Submitted for publicatio