Application priority framework for fixed mobile converged communication networks

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The current prospects in wired and wireless access networks, it is becoming increasingly important to address potential convergence in order to offer integrated broadband services. These systems will need to offer higher data transmission capacities and long battery life, which is the catalyst for an everincreasing variety of air interface technologies targeting local area to wide area connectivity. Current integrated industrial networks do not offer application aware context delivery and enhanced services for optimised networks. Application aware services provide value-added functionality to business applications by capturing, integrating, and consolidating intelligence about users and their endpoint devices from various points in the network. This thesis mainly intends to resolve the issues related to ubiquitous application aware service, fair allocation of radio access, reduced energy consumption and improved capacity. A technique that measures and evaluates the data rate demand to reduce application response time and queuing delay for multi radio interfaces is proposed. The technique overcomes the challenges of network integration, requiring no user intervention, saving battery life and selecting the radio access connection for the application requested by the end user. This study is split in two parts. The first contribution identifies some constraints of the services towards the application layer in terms of e.g. data rate and signal strength. The objectives are achieved by application controlled handover (ACH) mechanism in order to maintain acceptable data rate for real-time application services. It also looks into the impact of the radio link on the application and identifies elements and parameters like wireless link quality and handover that will influence the application type. It also identifies some enhanced traditional mechanisms such as distance controlled multihop and mesh topology required in order to support energy efficient multimedia applications. The second contribution unfolds an intelligent application priority assignment mechanism (IAPAM) for medical applications using wireless sensor networks. IAPAM proposes and evaluates a technique based on prioritising multiple virtual queues for the critical nature of medical data to improve instant transmission. Various mobility patterns (directed, controlled and random waypoint) has been investigated and compared by simulating IAPAM enabled mobile BWSN. The following topics have been studied, modelled, simulated and discussed in this thesis: 1. Application Controlled Handover (ACH) for multi radios over fibre 2. Power Controlled Scheme for mesh multi radios over fibre using ACH 3. IAPAM for Biomedical Wireless Sensor Networks (BWSN) and impact of mobility over IAPAM enabled BWSN. Extensive simulation studies are performed to analyze and to evaluate the proposed techniques. Simulation results demonstrate significant improvements in multi radios over fibre performance in terms of application response delay and power consumption by upto 75% and 15 % respectively, reduction in traffic loss by upto 53% and reduction in delay for real time application by more than 25% in some cases

An Analysis of Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) of Ultra Wideband(UWB) and IEEE 802.11A Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) Employing Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM)

Military communications require the rapid deployment of mobile, high-bandwidth systems. These systems must provide anytime, anywhere capabilities with minimal interference to existing military, private, and commercial communications. Ultra Wideband (UWB) technology is being advanced as the next generation radio technology and has the potential to revolutionize indoor wireless communications. The ability of UWB to mitigate multipath fading, provide high-throughput data rates (e.g., greater than 100 Mbps), provide excellent signal penetration (e.g., through walls), and low implementation costs makes it an ideal technology for a wide range of private and public sector applications. Preliminary UWB studies conducted by The Institute for Telecommunications Science (ITS) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have discovered that potential exists for harmful interference to occur. While these studies have provided initial performance estimates, the interference effects of UWB transmissions on coexisting spectral users are largely unknown. This research characterizes the electromagnetic interference (EMI) effects of UWB on the throughput performance of an IEEE 802.11a ad-hoc network. Radiated measurements in an anechoic chamber investigate interference performance using three modulation schemes (BPSK, BPPM, and OOK) and four pulse repetition frequencies over two Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure (U-NII) channels. Results indicate that OOK and BPPM can degrade throughput performance by up to 20% at lower pulse repetition frequencies (PRFs) in lower U-NII channels. Minimal performance degradation (less than one percent) due to interference was observed for BPSK at the lower PRFs and higher U-NII channels

Wireless Technologies for IoT in Smart Cities

[EN] As cities continue to grow, numerous initiatives for Smart Cities are being conducted. The concept of Smart City encompasses several concepts being governance, economy, management, infrastructure, technology and people. This means that a Smart City can have different communication needs. Wireless technologies such as WiFi, ZigBee, Bluetooth, WiMax, 4G or LTE (Long Term Evolution) have presented themselves as solutions to the communication needs of Smart City initiatives. However, as most of them employ unlicensed bands, interference and coexistence problems are increasing. In this paper, the wireless technologies available nowadays for IoT (Internet of Things) in Smart Cities are presented. Our contribution is a review of wireless technologies, their comparison and the problems that difficult coexistence among them. In order to do so, the characteristics and adequacy of wireless technologies to each domain are considered. The problems derived of over-crowded unlicensed spectrum and coexistence difficulties among each technology are discussed as well. Finally, power consumption concerns are addressed.García-García, L.; Jimenez, JM.; Abdullah, MTA.; Lloret, J. (2018). Wireless Technologies for IoT in Smart Cities. Network Protocols and Algorithms. 10(1):23-64. doi:10.5296/npa.v10i1.12798S236410

Distributed multi-hop reservation scheme for wireless personal area ultra-wideband networks

Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology is a promising technology for multimedia applications in wireless personal area networks (WPANs) that supports very high data rates with lower power transmission for short range communication. The limitation of coverage radius of UWB network necessitates for multihop transmissions. Unfortunately, as the number of hops increases, the quality of service (QoS) degrades rapidly in multihop network. The main goal of this research is to develop and enhance multihop transmission that ensures QoS of real time traffic through the proposed distributed multihop reservation (DMR) scheme. The DMR scheme consists of two modules; distributed multihop reservation protocol (DMRP) and path selection. DMRP incorporates resource reservation, routing and connection setup that are extended on the existing WiMedia Media Access Control protocol (MAC). On the other hand, the path selection determines the optimal path that makes up the multihop route. The path selection selects nodes based on the highest Signal to Interference and Noise Ratio (SINR). The performance of DMR scheme has been verified based on the performance of the video traffic transmission. The main metrics of QoS are measured in terms of Peak Signal- to- Noise ratio (PSNR), End-to-End (E2E) delay, and throughput. The results show that DMRP compared to Multiple Resources Reservation Scheme (MRRS) in six (6) hops transmission has enhanced the average PSNR by 16.5%, reduced the average E2E delay by 14.9% and has increased the throughput by 11.1%. The DMR scheme which is the inclusion of path selection in DMRP has been compared to Link Quality Multihop Relay (LQMR). DMR scheme has improved the video quality transmission by 17.5%, reduced the average E2E delay by 18.6% and enhanced the average throughput by 20.3%. The QoS of six (6) hops transmission employing DMR scheme is almost sustained compared to two hops transmission with the QoS experiencing only slight degradation of about 2.0%. This is a considerable achievement as it is well known that as the number of hops increases the QoS in multihop transmission degrades very rapidly. Thus DMR scheme has shown to significantly improve the performance of real time traffic on UWB multihop network. In general, DMR can be applied to any WPAN network that exploit multihop transmission

Wireless multimedia sensor network technology: a survey

Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) is comprised of small embedded video motes capable of extracting the surrounding environmental information, locally processing it and then wirelessly transmitting it to parent node or sink. It is comprised of video sensor, digital signal processing unit and digital radio interface. In this paper we have surveyed existing WMSN hardware and communicationprotocol layer technologies for achieving or fulfilling the objectives of WMSN. We have also listed the various technical challenges posed by this technology while discussing the communication protocol layer technologies. Sensor networking capabilities are urgently required for some of our most important scientific and societal problems like understanding the international carbon budget, monitoring water resources, monitoring vehicle emissions and safeguarding public health. This is a daunting research challenge requiring distributed sensor systems operating in complex environments while providing assurance of reliable and accurate sensing

Overhead and Segmentation Mismatch Effect on Bluetooth WPAN Performance

Currently, Bluetooth is the most widely used technology for Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPAN). Quality-of-Service (QoS) support is critical to ensure bandwidth maximization for mobile applications based on this WPAN technology. The overhead introduced by the different layers of Bluetooth protocol may have a serious impact on WPAN performance. However, most studies of Bluetooth performance neglect this overhead and assume that data are directly transmitted over L2CAP (Logical Link Control and Adaptation Protocol) or even HCI (Host Controller Interface) layers. In fact, this option is not feasible in most Bluetooth applications, as they integrate actual devices that implement a particular Bluetooth profile, usually SPP (Serial Port Profile). The use of profiles cannot be disregarded as they guarantee the interoperability between devices from different vendors. The aim of this paper is to characterise the performance of a Bluetooth WPAN (specifically the end-to-end delay and the throughput) when profiles are utilised. This study takes into account the overhead added by the protocols taking part in the transmission of user data. This paper also explores the effect of segmentation mismatch that may appear when the maximum size for data in each layer of the architecture is different. The analysis has been focused on SPP and PAN (Personal Area Networks) profiles. In the case of the PAN profile, the study concludes that the network performance decreases for user data sizes greater than 1,472 bytes, since the excessive overhead added by the network layer is increased by the IP (Internet Proto-col) fragmentation. In the case of SPP, an inappropriate choice of the maximum data unit at RFCOMM (Radio Frequency Communication for Serial Cable Emulation Protocol based on ETSI TS 07.10) and L2CAP layers can also heavily affect the transmission delay