Virtually Moving Base Stations for Energy Efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be improved by moving base stations (BSs), as this scheme evenly distributes the communication load in the network. However, physically moving BSs is complicated and costly. In this paper, we propose a new scheme: virtually moving the BSs. We deploy an excessive number of BSs and adaptively re-select a subset of active BSs so as to emulate the physical movement. Beyond achieving high energy-efficiency, this scheme obviates the difficulties associated with physically moving the BSs. The challenges are (i) that the energy efficiency of BSs should be considered as well, in addition to that of the sensor nodes and (ii) that the number of candidate subset of active BSs is exponential with the number of BSs. We show that scheduling the virtual movement of BSs is NP-hard. Then, we propose a polynomial-time algorithm that is guaranteed under mild conditions to achieve a lifetime longer than 62% of the optimal one. In practice, as verified through extensive numerical simulations, the lifetime achieved by the proposed algorithm is always very close to the optimum

Mobility: a double-edged sword for HSPA networks

This paper presents an empirical study on the performance of mobile High Speed Packet Access (HSPA, a 3.5G cellular standard) networks in Hong Kong via extensive field tests. Our study, from the viewpoint of end users, covers virtually all possible mobile scenarios in urban areas, including subways, trains, off-shore ferries and city buses. We have confirmed that mobility has largely negative impacts on the performance of HSPA networks, as fast-changing wireless environment causes serious service deterioration or even interruption. Meanwhile our field experiment results have shown unexpected new findings and thereby exposed new features of the mobile HSPA networks, which contradict commonly held views. We surprisingly find out that mobility can improve fairness of bandwidth sharing among users and traffic flows. Also the triggering and final results of handoffs in mobile HSPA networks are unpredictable and often inappropriate, thus calling for fast reacting fallover mechanisms. We have conducted in-depth research to furnish detailed analysis and explanations to what we have observed. We conclude that mobility is a double-edged sword for HSPA networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first public report on a large scale empirical study on the performance of commercial mobile HSPA networks

Goodbye, ALOHA!

©2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) to interconnect and Internet-connect everyday people, objects, and machines poses new challenges in the design of wireless communication networks. The design of medium access control (MAC) protocols has been traditionally an intense area of research due to their high impact on the overall performance of wireless communications. The majority of research activities in this field deal with different variations of protocols somehow based on ALOHA, either with or without listen before talk, i.e., carrier sensing multiple access. These protocols operate well under low traffic loads and low number of simultaneous devices. However, they suffer from congestion as the traffic load and the number of devices increase. For this reason, unless revisited, the MAC layer can become a bottleneck for the success of the IoT. In this paper, we provide an overview of the existing MAC solutions for the IoT, describing current limitations and envisioned challenges for the near future. Motivated by those, we identify a family of simple algorithms based on distributed queueing (DQ), which can operate for an infinite number of devices generating any traffic load and pattern. A description of the DQ mechanism is provided and most relevant existing studies of DQ applied in different scenarios are described in this paper. In addition, we provide a novel performance evaluation of DQ when applied for the IoT. Finally, a description of the very first demo of DQ for its use in the IoT is also included in this paper.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Design Aspects of An Energy-Efficient, Lightweight Medium Access Control Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

This document gives an overview of the most relevant design aspects of the lightweight medium access control (LMAC) protocol [16] for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). These aspects include selfconfiguring and localized operation of the protocol, time synchronization in multi-hop networks, network setup and strategies to reduce latency.\ud The main goal in designing a MAC protocol for WSNs is to minimize energy waste - due to collisions of messages and idle listening - , while limiting latency and loss of data throughput. It is shown that the LMAC protocol performs well on energy-efficiency and delivery ratio [19] and can\ud ensure a long-lived, self-configuring network of battery-powered wireless sensors.\ud The protocol is based upon scheduled access, in which each node periodically gets a time slot, during which it is allowed to transmit. The protocol does not depend on central managers to assign time slots to nodes.\ud WSNs are assumed to be multi-hop networks, which allows for spatial reuse of time slots, just like frequency reuse in GSM cells. In this document, we present a distributed algorithm that allows nodes to find unoccupied time slots, which can be used without causing collision or interference to other nodes. Each node takes one time slot in control to\ud carry out its data transmissions. Latency is affected by the actual choice of controlled time slot. We present time slot choosing strategies, which ensure a low latency for the most common data traffic in WSNs: reporting of sensor readings to central sinks

Adaptive Selection Problems in Networked Systems

Networked systems are composed of interconnected nodes that work collaboratively to maximize a given overall utility function. Typical examples of such systems are wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and participatory sensing systems: sensor nodes, either static or mobile, are deployed for monitoring a certain physical field. In these systems, there are a set of problems where we need to adaptively select a strategy to run the system, in order to enhance the efficiency of utilizing the resources available to the system. In particular, we study four adaptive selection problems as follows. We start by studying the problem of base-station (BS) selection in WSNs. Base stations are critical sensor nodes whose failures cause severe data losses. Deploying multiple fixed BSs improves the robustness, yet this scheme is not energy efficient because BSs have high energy consumptions. We propose a scheme that selects only one BS to be active at a time; other BSs are kept passive and act as regular sensor nodes. This scheme substantially reduces the energy supplies required by individual BSs. Then, we propose an algorithm for adaptively selecting the active BS so that the spatially and temporally varying energy resources are efficiently utilized. We also address implementation issues and apply the proposed algorithm on a real WSN. Field experiments have shown the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. We generalize the BS selection problem by considering both the energy efficiency of regular sensor nodes and that of BSs. In this scheme, a subset of active BSs (instead of only one) is adaptively selected and the routing of regular sensor nodes is adjusted accordingly. Because BSs have high fixed-energy consumptions and because the number of candidate subsets of active BSs is exponential with the number of BSs, this general BS selection problem is NP-hard. We propose a polynomial-time algorithm that is guaranteed, under mild conditions, to achieve a network lifetime at least 62% of the optimal one. Through extensive numerical simulations, we verify that the lifetime achieved by the proposed algorithm is always very close to the optimum. We then study the problem of scheduling the sparse-sensing patterns in WSNs. We observe that the traditional scheme of periodically taking sensing samples is not energy efficient. Instead, we propose to adaptively schedule when and where to activate sensors for sampling a physical field, such that the energy efficiency is enhanced and the sensing precision is maintained. The schedules are learnt from the temporal signal models derived from the collected measurements. Then, using the obtained signal models and the sparse sensing-measurements, the original signal can be effectively recovered. This proposed method requires minimal on-board computation, no inter-node communications and achieves an appealing reconstruction performance. With experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate significant improvements over both traditional sensing schemes and the state-of-the-art sparse-sensing schemes, particularly when the measured data is characterized by a strong temporal correlation. In the last part of the thesis, we discuss the sparse-sensing framework by exploiting the spatial correlations rather than the temporal correlations among the captured measurements. In this framework, application-specific utility functions can be employed. By adaptively selecting a small subset of active sensors for sensing, a certain utility is guaranteed and the efficiency of the sensing system is enhanced. We apply this framework both in static WSNs and participatory sensing systems where sensors move in an uncoordinated manner. Through extensive simulations, we show that our proposed algorithm enhances the resource efficiency