Recent Advances in Smart Communication Protocols and Algorithms

This Special Issue includes the selected papers from the third International Workshop on Smart Communication Protocols & Algorithms (SCPA 2013), that took place in Budapest, Hungary, in June 9, 2013. This Workshop was organized in conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on Communications. This paper explains the work included in the best 6 papers of the workshop.Lloret, J. (2013). Recent Advances in Smart Communication Protocols and Algorithms. Recent Advances in Communications and Networking Technology. 2(2):63-64. doi:10.2174/221508110202131221213711S63642

Group-based protocol and mobility model for VANETs to offer internet access

Some public transport vehicles embed devices that allow passengers to connect to Internet while traveling. These vehicles are true mobile Internet access zones inside public paths. These zones could be used by other vehicles moving close to them in order to have Internet access. At the same time, other vehicles in the influence area could be used as relay nodes which would increase this access area. In this paper, we present a group-based protocol and mobility model for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) where each public transport vehicle forms a group of vehicles. They can access and allow access to Internet though the public transport vehicle. Each vehicle is moving inside the group and can leave and join any group at will, while all groups are moving. First, we will show the algorithm and protocol to achieve our purpose. Then, we will study the probability of having Internet access in order to demonstrate that it is a feasible proposal. Finally, we simulate a study case based on real values in order to obtain the performance of our proposal in terms of several network parameters such as the number of hops per route, the network traffic, the page response time, network delay, network load and so on. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Lloret, J.; Cánovas Solbes, A.; Catala Monzo, A.; García Pineda, M. (2013). Group-based protocol and mobility model for VANETs to offer internet access. Journal of Network and Computer Applications. 36(3):1027-1038. doi:10.1016/j.jnca.2012.02.009S1027103836

Mitigation of mutual interference in IEEE 802.15.4-based wireless body sensor networks deployed in e-health monitoring systems

[EN] One of the main issues experienced in wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) is the destructive impacts of "mutual interference" caused by neighboring WBSNs on each other's performance. Research communities have proposed several approaches to mitigate the impacts of mutual interference on the reliability of data transmission and sensor's energy consumption. However, the proposed approaches came with a number of limitations, such as significant modification of the standard protocol or imposing a high level of complexity. In this paper, a range of schemes are proposed, and their performances are evaluated in the presence of mutual interference experienced in a dynamic environment.More specifically, we consider a situation where a large number of people (each individual covered with a number of sensors to fetch the human vital sign) are gathered at a sport centre to enjoy an event. In such a dynamic environment, people would highly likely experience mutual interference which would destructively impact on WBSN's performances and eventually would result in an unreliable medical outcome. A simulation study is conducted in which a set of schemes proposed that indicates a gradual improvement of WBSN's performances in terms of reliability of data transmission and sensor's energy consumption. Our obtained results show that the frequency-adaptation strategy combined with phase-adaptation approach significantly improves the performance of WBSNs in the presence of mutual interference in a dynamic environment. Moreover, an experimental study is carried out to examine the feasibility of implementing the predominant scheme on real-world sensor devices and to further support the outcome of the simulation study.Moravejosharieh, AH.; Lloret, J. (2020). Mitigation of mutual interference in IEEE 802.15.4-based wireless body sensor networks deployed in e-health monitoring systems. Wireless Networks. 26(4):2857-2874. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-019-02211-32857287426

Physical Sensors for Precision Aquaculture: A Review

(c) 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this[EN] Aquaculture is presented as a sustainable method to provide fish, although in reality, it is far from being sustainable. Its negative impacts on the environment can be prevented and corrected by the use of sensors, developing precision aquaculture. Sensors are widely used in terrestrial applications, but in underwater environments, their use is constrained by a variety of issues. The aim of this paper is to describe the state-of-the-art of the underwater sensors for water quality monitoring. First, the requirements and challenges of underwater sensors for aquaculture monitoring are discussed in detail. The main challenges are the need of a waterproof isolation or the need to avoid corrosion and biofouling, among others. Second, there are some advantages compared with the terrestrial applications, such as no need of minimized systems or the fact that such systems only require low accuracy. Subsequently, we evaluated the different options available to sense each variable, related to the needs of the aquaculture sensors. For temperature monitoring, thermistors, thermocouples or RTC seem to offer similar advantages. In contrast, for dissolved oxygen monitoring, the optical method seems to be the best option. For turbidity, optical methods are the most employed ones, while for conductivity measurements, the inductive coils are a promising option.This work was supported by the pre-doctoral student grant "Ayudas para contratos predoctorales de Formacion del Profesorado Universitario FPU (Convocatoria 2014)" with reference: FPU14/02953 by the Ministerio de Educacion, Cultura y Deporte.Parra-Boronat, L.; Lloret Mauri, G.; Lloret, J.; Rodilla, M. (2018). Physical Sensors for Precision Aquaculture: A Review. IEEE Sensors Journal. 18(10):3915-3923. https://doi.org/10.1109/JSEN.2018.2817158S39153923181

A Hardware-Efficient and Reconfigurable UFMC Transmitter Architecture With its FPGA Prototype

[EN] Universal-filtered multicarrier (UFMC) is one of the potential candidates for 5G multicarrier waveforms due to its several attractive features such as suppressed out-of-band radiation to the nearby sub-band. However, the hardware realization of UFMC systems is limited by a large number of arithmetic units for inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) and pulse shaping filters. In this letter, we propose an architecture that presents a refreshing approach toward designing a low-complexity architecture for the baseband UFMC transmitter with Dolph-Chebyshev filter. Compared to the read-only-memory (ROM)-based state-of-the-art, the proposed architecture requires less number of ROM locations and has the flexibility to externally select the inverse discrete Fourier transform (IDFT)-size, number of sub-bands, and number of subcarriers in a sub-band. Moreover, we implement the proposed architecture on a commercially available Virtex-5 field-programmable gate array (FPGA) device for testing and analyzing the baseband UFMC signal. Finally, the XILINX post-route results are found comparable with MATLAB simulations.Kumar, V.; Mukherjee, M.; Lloret, J. (2020). A Hardware-Efficient and Reconfigurable UFMC Transmitter Architecture With its FPGA Prototype. IEEE Embedded Systems Letters. 12(4):109-112. https://doi.org/10.1109/LES.2019.296185010911212

A Secure and Low-Energy Zone-based Wireless Sensor Networks Routing Protocol for Pollution Monitoring

[EN] Sensor networks can be used in many sorts of environments. The increase of pollution and carbon footprint are nowadays an important environmental problem. The use of sensors and sensor networks can help to make an early detection in order to mitigate their effect over the medium. The deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) requires high-energy efficiency and secures mechanisms to ensure the data veracity. Moreover, when WSNs are deployed in harsh environments, it is very difficult to recharge or replace the sensor's batteries. For this reason, the increase of network lifetime is highly desired. WSNs also work in unattended environments, which is vulnerable to different sort of attacks. Therefore, both energy efficiency and security must be considered in the development of routing protocols for WSNs. In this paper, we present a novel Secure and Low-energy Zone-based Routing Protocol (SeLeZoR) where the nodes of the WSN are split into zones and each zone is separated into clusters. Each cluster is controlled by a cluster head. Firstly, the information is securely sent to the zone-head using a secret key; then, the zone-head sends the data to the base station using the secure and energy efficient mechanism. This paper demonstrates that SeLeZoR achieves better energy efficiency and security levels than existing routing protocols for WSNs.Mehmood, A.; Lloret, J.; Sendra, S. (2016). A Secure and Low-Energy Zone-based Wireless Sensor Networks Routing Protocol for Pollution Monitoring. Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing. 16(17):2869-2883. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcm.2734S286928831617Sendra S Deployment of efficient wireless sensor nodes for monitoring in rural, indoor and underwater environments 2013Javaid, N., Qureshi, T. N., Khan, A. H., Iqbal, A., Akhtar, E., & Ishfaq, M. (2013). EDDEEC: Enhanced Developed Distributed Energy-efficient Clustering for Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks. Procedia Computer Science, 19, 914-919. doi:10.1016/j.procs.2013.06.125Garcia, M., Sendra, S., Lloret, J., & Canovas, A. (2011). Saving energy and improving communications using cooperative group-based Wireless Sensor Networks. Telecommunication Systems, 52(4), 2489-2502. doi:10.1007/s11235-011-9568-3Garcia, M., Lloret, J., Sendra, S., & Rodrigues, J. J. P. C. (2011). Taking Cooperative Decisions in Group-Based Wireless Sensor Networks. Cooperative Design, Visualization, and Engineering, 61-65. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-23734-8_9Garcia, M., & Lloret, J. (2009). A Cooperative Group-Based Sensor Network for Environmental Monitoring. 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Big Data Classification and Internet of Things in Healthcare

[EN] Every single day, a massive amount of data is generated by different medical data sources. Processing this wealth of data is indeed a daunting task, and it forces us to adopt smart and scalable computational strategies, including machine intelligence, big data analytics, and data classification. The authors can use the Big Data analysis for effective decision making in healthcare domain using the existing machine learning algorithms with some modification to it. The fundamental purpose of this article is to summarize the role of Big Data analysis in healthcare, and to provide a comprehensive analysis of the various techniques involved in mining big data. This article provides an overview of Big Data, applicability of it in healthcare, some of the work in progress and a future works. Therefore, in this article, the use of machine learning techniques is proposed for real-time diabetic patient data analysis from IoT devices and gatewaysRghioui, A.; Lloret, J.; Oumnad, A. (2020). Big Data Classification and Internet of Things in Healthcare. International Journal of E-Health and Medical Communications. 11(2):20-37. https://doi.org/10.4018/IJEHMC.2020040102203711

Reconfigurable Architecture of UFMC Transmitter for 5G and Its FPGA Prototype

[EN] A universal-filtered multicarrier (UFMC) system that is a generalization of filtered orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) and filter-bank-based multicarrier is being considered as a potential candidate for fifth-generation due to its robustness against intercarrier interference as in cyclic-prefix-based OFDM systems. However, real-time hardware realization of multicarrier systems is limited by a large number of arithmetic units for inverse fast Fourier transform and pulse-shaping filters. In this paper, we aim to propose a low-complexity and reconfigurable architecture for a baseband UFMC transmitter. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed architecture is the first reconfigurable architecture that has the flexibility to choose the number of subcarriers in a subband without any change in hardware resources. In addition, the proposed architecture selects the filter from a group of filters with a single selection line. Moreover, we use a commercially available field-programmable gate array device for real-time testing and analyzing the baseband UFMC signal. From the extensive experiments, we study the occupied bandwidth, main-lobe power, and sidelobe power of the baseband signal with different filters in real-time scenarios. Finally, we measure the quantization error in baseband signal generation for the proposed UFMC transmitter architecture and find comparable with the error bound.Kumar, V.; Mukherjee, M.; Lloret, J. (2020). Reconfigurable Architecture of UFMC Transmitter for 5G and Its FPGA Prototype. IEEE Systems Journal. 14(1):28-38. https://doi.org/10.1109/JSYST.2019.2923549S283814