Coal based carbon dots: recent advances in synthesis, properties, and applications

Carbon dots are zero-dimensional carbon nanomaterials with quantum confinement effects and edge effects, which have aroused great interests in many disciplines such as energy, chemistry, materials, and environmental applications. They can be prepared by chemical oxidation, electrochemical synthesis, hydrothermal preparation, arc discharge, microwave synthesis, template method, and many other methods. However, the raw materials' high cost, the complexity and environmental-unfriendly fabrication process limit their large-scale production and commercialization. Herein, we review the latest developments of coal-based carbon dots about selecting coal-derived energy resources (bituminous coal, anthracite, lignite, coal tar, coke, etc.) the developments of synthesis processes, surface modification, and doping of carbon dots. The coal-based carbon dots exhibit the advantages of unique fluorescence, efficient catalysis, excellent water solubility, low toxicity, inexpensive, good biocompatibility, and other advantages, which hold the potentiality for a wide range of applications such as environmental pollutants sensing, catalyst preparation, chemical analysis, energy storage, and medical imaging technology. This review aims to provide a guidance of finding abundant and cost-effective precursors, green, simple and sustainable production processes to prepare coal-based carbon dots, and make further efforts to exploit the application of carbon dots in broader fields

Achieving Range-Free Localization Beyond Connectivity

Wireless sensor networks have been proposed for many location-dependent applications. In such applications, the requirement of low system cost prohibitsmany range-based methods for sensor node localization; on the other hand, range-free localization depending only on connectivity may underutilize the proximity information embedded in neighborhood sensing. In response to the above limitations, this paper presents a range-free approach to capturing a relative distancebetween1-hopneighboringnodesfromtheirneighborhood orderings that serve as unique high-dimensional location signatures for nodes in the network. With little overhead, the proposed design can be conveniently applied as a transparent supporting layer for many state-of-the-art connectivity-based localization solutions to achieve better positioningaccuracy. Weimplementedourdesignwiththree well-knownlocalizationalgorithmsandtesteditintwotypes ofoutdoortest-bedexperiments: an850-foot-longlinearnetwork with 54 MICAz motes, and a regular2D networkcovering an area of 10000 square feet with 49 motes. Results show that our design helps eliminate estimation ambiguity with sub-hop resolution, and reduces localization errors by as much as 35%. In addition, extensive simulations reveal an interestingfeature of robustnessfor our design underunevenly distributed radio propagation path loss, and confirm itseffectivenessforlarge-scalenetworks. Categories andSubject Descriptor

PSR: Practical Synchronous Rendezvous in Low-duty-cycle Wireless Networks

Low-duty-cycle radio operations have been proposed for wireless networks facing severe energy constraints. Despite energy savings, duty-cycling the radio creates transient-available wireless links, making communication rendezvous a challenging task under the practical issue of clock drift. To overcome limitations of prior work, this paper presents PSR, a practical design for synchronous rendezvous in low-duty-cycle wireless networks. The key idea behind PSR is to extract timing information naturally embedded in the pattern of radio duty-cycling, so that normal traffic in the network can be utilized as a “free” input for drift detection, which helps reduce (or even eliminate) the overhead of traditional time-stamp exchange with dedicated packets or bits. To prevent an overuse of such free information, leading to energy waste, an energy-driven adaptive mechanism is developed for clock calibration to balance between energy efficiency and rendezvous accuracy. PSR is evaluated with both test-bed experiments and extensive simulations, by augmenting and comparing with four different MAC protocols. Results show that PSR is practical and effective under different levels of traffic load, and can be fused with those MAC protocols to improve their energy efficiency without major change of the original designs

On-demand time synchronization with predictable accuracy

Abstract—Time synchronization remains as a challenging task in wireless sensor networks that face severe resource constraints. Unlike previous work’s aiming at pure clock accuracy, this paper proposes On-Demand Synchronization (ODS), a design to achieve efficient clock synchronization with customized performance. By carefully modeling the error uncertainty of skew detection and its propagation over time, ODS develops a novel uncertainty-driven mechanism to adaptively adjust each clock calibration interval individually rather than traditional periodic synchronization, for minimum communication overhead while satisfying the desired accuracy. Besides, ODS provides a nice feature of predictable accuracy, allowing nodes to acquire the useful information about real-time qualities of their synchronization. We implemented ODS on the MICAz mote platform, and evaluated it through testbed experiments with 33 nodes as well as simulations obeying real world conditions. Results show that ODS is practical, flexible, and quickly adapts to varying accuracy requirements and different traffic load in the network for improved system efficiency. I

Bubble Trace: Mobile Target Tracking under Insufficient Anchor Coverage

As an essential requirement for surveillance systems, target tracking has been studied extensively. Most of the tracking schemes are based on trilateration, which requires each point in the monitoring area to be covered by at least three anchors. However, due to the inadequate deployment of costly anchors and environment constraints, the target might not always be detected by three or more anchors simultaneously, resulting in intermittent localization failures and performance degradation. To address this issue, this paper proposes a tracking method called Bubble Trace (BT) for insufficient anchor coverage and asynchronous networks. By fully extracting the location information embedded in dual, single and zero anchor coverage, we develop a bidirectional bounding algorithm to offer the bubble-shaped regions that indicate the possible locations of the target. Moreover, instead of separately estimating each position point of the target, we construct the trace by finding a maximum-likelihood path in a graph. The design is evaluated through extensive simulation and a test-bed experiment with 20 MicaZ nodes. Results show that the proposed scheme improves the tracking accuracy without using additional hardware under insufficient anchor coverage