Improving practical sensitivity of energy optimized wake-up receivers: proof of concept in 65nm CMOS

We present a high performance low-power digital base-band architecture, specially designed for an energy optimized duty-cycled wake-up receiver scheme. Based on a careful wake-up beacon design, a structured wake-up beacon detection technique leads to an architecture that compensates for the implementation loss of a low-power wake-up receiver front-end at low energy and area costs. Design parameters are selected by energy optimization and the architecture is easily scalable to support various network sizes. Fabricated in 65nm CMOS, the digital base-band consumes 0.9uW (V_DD=0.37V) in sub-threshold operation at 250kbps, with appropriate 97% wake-up beacon detection and 0.04% false alarm probabilities. The circuit is fully functional at a minimum V_DD of 0.23V at f_max=5kHz and 0.018uW power consumption. Based on these results we show that our digital base-band can be used as a companion to compensate for front-end implementation losses resulting from the limited wake-up receiver power budget at a negligible cost. This implies an improvement of the practical sensitivity of the wake-up receiver, compared to what is traditionally reported.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Sensors Journa

Energy efficient random sleep-awake schedule design

This letter presents a simple model for determining energy efficient random sleep-awake schedules. Random sleepawake schedules are more appropriate for sensor networks, where the time of occurrence of an event being monitored, e.g., the detection of an intruder, is unknown a priori, and the coordination among nodes is costly. We model the random sleepawake schedule as a two state Markov process, and maximize the probability of the transmission of sensed data by a given deadline. Our results indicate that for a given duty cycle, the optimal policy is to have infrequent transitions between sleep and awake modes, if the average number of packets sent is greater than the mean number of slots the node is awake

Selecting source image sensor nodes based on 2-hop information to improve image transmissions to mobile robot sinks in search \& rescue operations

We consider Robot-assisted Search $\&$ Rescue operations enhanced with some fixed image sensor nodes capable of capturing and sending visual information to a robot sink. In order to increase the performance of image transfer from image sensor nodes to the robot sinks we propose a 2-hop neighborhood information-based cover set selection to determine the most relevant image sensor nodes to activate. Then, in order to be consistent with our proposed approach, a multi-path extension of Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (called T-GPSR) wherein routing decisions are also based on 2-hop neighborhood information is proposed. Simulation results show that our proposal reduces packet losses, enabling fast packet delivery and higher visual quality of received images at the robot sink

Duty-cycled Wake-up Schemes for Ultra-low Power Wireless Communications

In sensor network applications with low traffic intensity, idle channel listening is one of the main sources of energy waste.The use of a dedicated low-power wake-up receiver (WRx) which utilizes duty-cycled channel listening can significantlyreduce idle listening energy cost. In this thesis such a scheme is introduced and it is called DCW-MAC, an acronym forduty-cycled wake-up receiver based medium access control.We develop the concept in several steps, starting with an investigation into the properties of these schemes under idealizedconditions. This analysis show that DCW-MAC has the potential to significantly reduce energy costs, compared to twoestablished reference schemes based only on low-power wake up receivers or duty-cycled listening. Findings motivatefurther investigations and more detailed analysis of energy consumption. We do this in two separate steps, first concentratingon the energy required to transmit wake-up beacons and later include all energy costs in the analysis. The more completeanalysis makes it possible to optimize wake-up beacons and other DCW-MAC parameters, such as sleep and listen intervals,for minimal energy consumption. This shows how characteristics of the wake-up receiver influence how much, and if, energycan be saved and what the resulting average communication delays are. Being an analysis based on closed form expressions,rather than simulations, we can derive and verify good approximations of optimal energy consumption and resulting averagedelays, making it possible to quickly evaluate how a different wake-up receiver characteristic influences what is possible toachieve in different scenarios.In addition to the direct optimizations of the DCW-MAC scheme, we also provide a proof-of-concept in 65 nm CMOS,showing that the digital base-band needed to implement DCW-MAC has negligible energy consumption compared to manylow-power analog front-ends in literature. We also propose a a simple frame-work for comparing the relative merits ofanalog front-ends for wake-up receivers, where we use the experiences gained about DCW-MAC energy consumption toprovide a simple relation between wake-up receiver/analog front-end properties and energy consumption for wide ranges ofscenario parameters. Using this tool it is possible to compare analog front-ends used in duty-cycled wake-up schemes, evenif they are originally designed for different scenarios.In all, the thesis presents a new wake-up receiver scheme for low-power wireless sensor networks and provide a comprehensiveanalysis of many of its important properties

Predictive Duty Cycle Adaptation for Wireless Camera Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) typically employ dynamic duty cycle schemes to efficiently handle different patterns of communication traffic in the network. However, existing duty cycling approaches are not suitable for event-driven WSN, in particular, camera-based networks designed to track humans and objects. A characteristic feature of such networks is the spatially-correlated bursty traffic that occurs in the vicinity of potentially highly mobile objects. In this paper, we propose a concept of indirect sensing in the MAC layer of a wireless camera network and an active duty cycle adaptation scheme based on Kalman filter that continuously predicts and updates the location of the object that triggers bursty communication traffic in the network. This prediction allows the camera nodes to alter their communication protocol parameters prior to the actual increase in the communication traffic. Our simulations demonstrate that our active adaptation strategy outperforms TMAC not only in terms of energy efficiency and communication latency, but also in terms of TIBPEA, a QoS metric for event-driven WSN

Energy efficient scheduling and allocation of tasks in sensor cloud

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a class of ad hoc networks that has capability of self-organizing, in-network data processing, and unattended environment monitoring. Sensor-cloud is a cloud of heterogeneous WSNs. It is attractive as it can change the computation paradigm of wireless sensor networks. In Sensor-Cloud, to gain profit from underutilized WSNs, multiple WSN owners collaborate to provide a cloud service. Sensor Cloud users can simply rent the sensing services which eliminates the cost of ownership, enabling the usage of large scale sensor networks become affordable. The nature of Sensor-Cloud enables resource sharing and allows virtual sensors to be scaled up or down. It abstracts different platforms hence giving the impression of a homogeneous network. Further in multi-application environment, users of different applications may require data based on different needs. Hence scheduling scheme in WSNs is required which serves maximum users of various applications. We have proposed a scheduling scheme suitable for the multiple applications in Sensor Cloud. Scheduling scheme is based on TDMA which considers fine granularity of tasks. The performance evaluation shows the better response time, throughput and overall energy consumption as compared to the base case we developed. On the other hand, to minimize the energy consumption in WSN, we design an allocation scheme. In Sensor Cloud, we consider sparsely and densely deployed WSNs working together. Also, in a WSN there might be sparsely and densely deployed zones. Based on spatial correlation and with the help of Voronoi diagram, we turn on minimum number of sensors hence increasing WSN lifetime and covering almost 100 percent area. The performance evaluation of allocation scheme shows energy efficiency by selecting fewer nodes in comparison to other work --Abstract, page iv

On Link Estimation in Dense RPL Deployments

The Internet of Things vision foresees billions of devices to connect the physical world to the digital world. Sensing applications such as structural health monitoring, surveillance or smart buildings employ multi-hop wireless networks with high density to attain sufficient area coverage. Such applications need networking stacks and routing protocols that can scale with network size and density while remaining energy-efficient and lightweight. To this end, the IETF RoLL working group has designed the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). This paper discusses the problems of link quality estimation and neighbor management policies when it comes to handling high densities. We implement and evaluate different neighbor management policies and link probing techniques in Contiki’s RPL implementation. We report on our experience with a 100-node testbed with average 40-degree density. We show the sensitivity of high density routing with respect to cache sizes and routing metric initialization. Finally, we devise guidelines for design and implementation of density-scalable routing protocols

A Light-Weight Opportunistic Forwarding Protocol with Optimized Preamble Length for Low-Duty-Cycle Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, sensed information is expected to be reliably and timely delivered to a sink in an ad-hoc way. However, it is challenging to achieve this goal because of the highly dynamic topology induced from asynchronous duty cycles and temporally and spatially varying link quality among nodes. Currently some opportunistic forwarding protocols have been proposed to address the challenge. However, they involve complicated mechanisms to determine the best forwarder at each hop, which incurs heavy overheads for the resource-constrained nodes. In this paper, we propose a light-weight opportunistic forwarding (LWOF) scheme. Different from other recently proposed opportunistic forwarding schemes, LWOF employs neither historical network information nor a contention process to select a forwarder prior to data transmissions. It confines forwarding candidates to an optimized area, and takes advantage of the preamble in low-power-listening (LPL) MAC protocols and dual-channel communication to forward a packet to a unique downstream node towards the sink with a high probability, without making a forwarding decision prior to data transmission. Under LWOF, we optimize LPL MAC protocol to have a shortened preamble (LWMAC), based on a theoretical analysis on the relationship among preamble length, delivery probability at each hop, node density and sleep duration. Simulation results show that LWOF, along with LWMAC, can achieve relatively good performance in terms of delivery reliability and latency, as a receiver-based opportunistic forwarding protocol, while reducing energy consumption per packet by at least twice