Sensor Networks for Maritime Deployment: Modeling and Simulation

Simulation is widely used in Wireless Sensor Networks to assess the feasibility and performance of design decisions before the deployment, assisting the development of optimal solutions or trade-offs. In this paper, we address the particular case of a sensor network deployed at sea, where hundreds or thousands of sensing nodes drift with the stream and organise into a network capable of transmitting results to a remote station. A new simulator was built to address the particularities of the wireless models required to correctly understand the application scenario. The models provide realistic channel simulation, along with additive interference from other sources, where all transmissions are considered independently. The receiver decides which transmission was first and what is the level of noise from the environment and contending nodes. Network algorithms were implemented and compared using different network sizes and parameters. Results show that algorithms are sensitive to deployment conditions and respond differently to each set of environmental parameters

An Online Approach to Dynamic Channel Access and Transmission Scheduling

Making judicious channel access and transmission scheduling decisions is essential for improving performance as well as energy and spectral efficiency in multichannel wireless systems. This problem has been a subject of extensive study in the past decade, and the resulting dynamic and opportunistic channel access schemes can bring potentially significant improvement over traditional schemes. However, a common and severe limitation of these dynamic schemes is that they almost always require some form of a priori knowledge of the channel statistics. A natural remedy is a learning framework, which has also been extensively studied in the same context, but a typical learning algorithm in this literature seeks only the best static policy, with performance measured by weak regret, rather than learning a good dynamic channel access policy. There is thus a clear disconnect between what an optimal channel access policy can achieve with known channel statistics that actively exploits temporal, spatial and spectral diversity, and what a typical existing learning algorithm aims for, which is the static use of a single channel devoid of diversity gain. In this paper we bridge this gap by designing learning algorithms that track known optimal or sub-optimal dynamic channel access and transmission scheduling policies, thereby yielding performance measured by a form of strong regret, the accumulated difference between the reward returned by an optimal solution when a priori information is available and that by our online algorithm. We do so in the context of two specific algorithms that appeared in [1] and [2], respectively, the former for a multiuser single-channel setting and the latter for a single-user multichannel setting. In both cases we show that our algorithms achieve sub-linear regret uniform in time and outperforms the standard weak-regret learning algorithms.Comment: 10 pages, to appear in MobiHoc 201

On the Outage Probability of the Full-Duplex Interference-Limited Relay Channel

In this paper, we study the performance, in terms of the asymptotic error probability, of a user which communicates with a destination with the aid of a full-duplex in-band relay. We consider that the network is interference-limited, and interfering users are distributed as a Poisson point process. In this case, the asymptotic error probability is upper bounded by the outage probability (OP). We investigate the outage behavior for well-known cooperative schemes, namely, decode-and-forward (DF) and compress-and-forward (CF) considering fading and path loss. For DF we determine the exact OP and develop upper bounds which are tight in typical operating conditions. Also, we find the correlation coefficient between source and relay signals which minimizes the OP when the density of interferers is small. For CF, the achievable rates are determined by the spatial correlation of the interferences, and a straightforward analysis isn't possible. To handle this issue, we show the rate with correlated noises is at most one bit worse than with uncorrelated noises, and thus find an upper bound on the performance of CF. These results are useful to evaluate the performance and to optimize relaying schemes in the context of full-duplex wireless networks.Comment: 30 pages, 4 figures. Final version. To appear in IEEE JSAC Special Issue on Full-duplex Wireless Communications and Networks, 201