1,280 research outputs found
Progressively communicating rich telemetry from autonomous underwater vehicles via relays
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution June 2012As analysis of imagery and environmental data plays a greater role in mission construction
and execution, there is an increasing need for autonomous marine vehicles
to transmit this data to the surface. Without access to the data acquired by a
vehicle, surface operators cannot fully understand the state of the mission. Communicating
imagery and high-resolution sensor readings to surface observers remains
a significant challenge – as a result, current telemetry from free-roaming
autonomous marine vehicles remains limited to ‘heartbeat’ status messages, with
minimal scientific data available until after recovery. Increasing the challenge, longdistance
communication may require relaying data across multiple acoustic hops
between vehicles, yet fixed infrastructure is not always appropriate or possible.
In this thesis I present an analysis of the unique considerations facing telemetry
systems for free-roaming Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) used in exploration.
These considerations include high-cost vehicle nodes with persistent storage
and significant computation capabilities, combined with human surface operators
monitoring each node. I then propose mechanisms for interactive, progressive
communication of data across multiple acoustic hops. These mechanisms include
wavelet-based embedded coding methods, and a novel image compression scheme
based on texture classification and synthesis. The specific characteristics of underwater
communication channels, including high latency, intermittent communication,
the lack of instantaneous end-to-end connectivity, and a broadcast medium,
inform these proposals. Human feedback is incorporated by allowing operators to
identify segments of data thatwarrant higher quality refinement, ensuring efficient
use of limited throughput. I then analyze the performance of these mechanisms
relative to current practices.
Finally, I present CAPTURE, a telemetry architecture that builds on this analysis.
CAPTURE draws on advances in compression and delay tolerant networking to
enable progressive transmission of scientific data, including imagery, across multiple acoustic hops. In concert with a physical layer, CAPTURE provides an endto-
end networking solution for communicating science data from autonomous marine
vehicles. Automatically selected imagery, sonar, and time-series sensor data
are progressively transmitted across multiple hops to surface operators. Human
operators can request arbitrarily high-quality refinement of any resource, up to an
error-free reconstruction. The components of this system are then demonstrated
through three field trials in diverse environments on SeaBED, OceanServer and
Bluefin AUVs, each in different software architectures.Thanks to the National Science Foundation, and the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for
their funding of my education and this work
Whether and Where to Code in the Wireless Relay Channel
The throughput benefits of random linear network codes have been studied
extensively for wirelined and wireless erasure networks. It is often assumed
that all nodes within a network perform coding operations. In
energy-constrained systems, however, coding subgraphs should be chosen to
control the number of coding nodes while maintaining throughput. In this paper,
we explore the strategic use of network coding in the wireless packet erasure
relay channel according to both throughput and energy metrics. In the relay
channel, a single source communicates to a single sink through the aid of a
half-duplex relay. The fluid flow model is used to describe the case where both
the source and the relay are coding, and Markov chain models are proposed to
describe packet evolution if only the source or only the relay is coding. In
addition to transmission energy, we take into account coding and reception
energies. We show that coding at the relay alone while operating in a rateless
fashion is neither throughput nor energy efficient. Given a set of system
parameters, our analysis determines the optimal amount of time the relay should
participate in the transmission, and where coding should be performed.Comment: 11 pages, 12 figures, to be published in the IEEE JSAC Special Issue
on Theories and Methods for Advanced Wireless Relay
Correlation-based Cross-layer Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks
Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are event based systems that rely on the collective effort of densely deployed sensor nodes continuously observing a physical phenomenon. The spatio-temporal correlation between the sensor observations and the cross-layer design advantages are significant and unique to the design of WSN. Due to the high density in the network topology, sensor observations are highly correlated in the space domain. Furthermore, the nature of the energy-radiating physical phenomenon constitutes the temporal correlation between each consecutive observation of a sensor node. This unique characteristic of WSN can be exploited through a cross-layer design of communication functionalities to improve energy efficiency of the network.
In this thesis, several key elements are investigated to capture and exploit the correlation in the WSN for the realization of advanced efficient communication protocols. A theoretical framework is developed to capture the spatial and temporal correlations in WSN and to enable the development of efficient communication protocols. Based on this framework, spatial Correlation-based Collaborative Medium Access Control (CC-MAC) protocol is described, which exploits the spatial correlation in the WSN in order to achieve efficient medium access. Furthermore, the cross-layer module (XLM), which melts common protocol layer functionalities into a cross-layer module for resource-constrained sensor nodes, is developed. The cross-layer analysis of error control in WSN is then presented to enable a comprehensive comparison of error control schemes for WSN. Finally, the cross-layer packet size optimization framework is described.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Ian F. Akyildiz; Committee Member: Douglas M. Blough; Committee Member: Mostafa Ammar; Committee Member: Raghupathy Sivakumar; Committee Member: Ye (Geoffrey) L
Energy Harvesting Wireless Communications: A Review of Recent Advances
This article summarizes recent contributions in the broad area of energy
harvesting wireless communications. In particular, we provide the current state
of the art for wireless networks composed of energy harvesting nodes, starting
from the information-theoretic performance limits to transmission scheduling
policies and resource allocation, medium access and networking issues. The
emerging related area of energy transfer for self-sustaining energy harvesting
wireless networks is considered in detail covering both energy cooperation
aspects and simultaneous energy and information transfer. Various potential
models with energy harvesting nodes at different network scales are reviewed as
well as models for energy consumption at the nodes.Comment: To appear in the IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communications
(Special Issue: Wireless Communications Powered by Energy Harvesting and
Wireless Energy Transfer
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