On The Continuous Coverage Problem for a Swarm of UAVs

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be used to provide wireless network and remote surveillance coverage for disaster-affected areas. During such a situation, the UAVs need to return periodically to a charging station for recharging, due to their limited battery capacity. We study the problem of minimizing the number of UAVs required for a continuous coverage of a given area, given the recharging requirement. We prove that this problem is NP-complete. Due to its intractability, we study partitioning the coverage graph into cycles that start at the charging station. We first characterize the minimum number of UAVs to cover such a cycle based on the charging time, the traveling time, and the number of subareas to be covered by the cycle. Based on this analysis, we then develop an efficient algorithm, the cycles with limited energy algorithm. The straightforward method to continuously cover a given area is to split it into N subareas and cover it by N cycles using N additional UAVs. Our simulation results examine the importance of critical system parameters: the energy capacity of the UAVs, the number of subareas in the covered area, and the UAV charging and traveling times.We demonstrate that the cycles with limited energy algorithm requires 69%-94% fewer additional UAVs relative to the straightforward method, as the energy capacity of the UAVs is increased, and 67%-71% fewer additional UAVs, as the number of subareas is increased.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

Dynamic resource allocation for opportunistic software-defined IoT networks: stochastic optimization framework

Several wireless technologies have recently emerged to enable efficient and scalable internet-of-things (IoT) networking. Cognitive radio (CR) technology, enabled by software-defined radios, is considered one of the main IoT-enabling technologies that can provide opportunistic wireless access to a large number of connected IoT devices. An important challenge in this domain is how to dynamically enable IoT transmissions while achieving efficient spectrum usage with a minimum total power consumption under interference and traffic demand uncertainty. Toward this end, we propose a dynamic bandwidth/channel/power allocation algorithm that aims at maximizing the overall network’s throughput while selecting the set of power resulting in the minimum total transmission power. This problem can be formulated as a two-stage binary linear stochastic programming. Because the interference over different channels is a continuous random variable and noting that the interference statistics are highly correlated, a suboptimal sampling solution is proposed. Our proposed algorithm is an adaptive algorithm that is to be periodically conducted over time to consider the changes of the channel and interference conditions. Numerical results indicate that our proposed algorithm significantly increases the number of simultaneous IoT transmissions compared to a typical algorithm, and hence, the achieved throughput is improved

Spectrum Assignment in Hardware-Constrained Cognitive Radio IoT Networks Under Varying Channel-Quality Conditions

[EN] The integration of cognitive radio (CR) technology with the future Internet-of-Things (IoT) architecture is expected to allow effective massive IoT deployment by providing huge spectrum opportunities to the IoT devices. Several communication protocols have been proposed for the CR networks while ignoring the adjacent channel interference (ACI) problem by assuming sharp filters at the transmit and receive chains of each CR device. However, in practice, such an assumption is not feasible for low-cost hardware-constrained CR-capable IoT (CR-IoT) devices. Specifically, when a large number of CR-IoT devices are operating in the same vicinity, guard-band channels (GBs) are needed to mitigate the ACI problem, introducing GB adds constraints on the efficient use of spectrum and protocol design. In this paper, we develop a channel assignment mechanism for the hardware-constrained CR-IoT networks under time-varying channel conditions with GB-awareness. The objective of our assignment is to serve the largest possible number of CR-IoT devices by assigning the least number of idle channels to each device subject to rate demand and interference constraints. The proposed channel assignment in this paper is conducted on a per-block basis for the contending CR-IoT devices while considering the time-varying channel conditions for each CRIoT transmission over each idle channel, such that spectrum efficiency is improved. Specifically, our channel assignment problem is formulated as a binary linear programming problem, which is NP-hard. Thus, we propose a polynomial-time solution using a sequential fixing algorithm that achieves a suboptimal solution. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed assignment provides significant increase in the number of served IoT devices over existing assignment mechanisms.This work was supported in part by the QR Global Challenges Research Fund, Staffordshire University, Staffordshire, U.K.Salameh, HAB.; Al-Masri, S.; Benkhelifa, E.; Lloret, J. (2019). Spectrum Assignment in Hardware-Constrained Cognitive Radio IoT Networks Under Varying Channel-Quality Conditions. IEEE Access. 7:42816-42825. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2901902S4281642825

An End-to-End Early Warning System Based on Wireless Sensor Network for Gas Leakage Detection in Industrial Facilities

Existing Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG)-detectionsystems are ad-hoc and designed as stand-alone nodes. Thispaper, however, presents an integrated end-to-end Wireless SensorNetwork (WSN) system that integrates hardware and software forearly-warning gas-leakage detection and monitoring applications;fully utilizing the Internet-of-thing (IoT) functionalities andcapabilities in WSNs at the network level such that networkperformance is improved. The proposed system can operate insingle-hop and multi-hop modes depending on the surround-ing radio frequency (RF) environment and network topology.Specifically, we design a per-deployed WSN system for LPG-gas detection/monitoring in residential areas and factories thatcollects, analyzes and forwards the collected information over awireless channel to the monitoring center to take the appropriateaction. To achieve a reliable communication and data delivery, weimplement an efficient communication protocol that organizes thedata exchanges between the different nodes in the network. Theproposed WSN system is deployed and experimentally tested.The data acquired from the various experiments is used toexamine the reliable operation of the implemented system interms of robustness and data-delivery reliability. Robust andreliable performance is demonstrated with packet loss rate as lowas5%. The experimental results also indicate that the proposedsystem can promptly detect gas-leakage within50ms and provideaccurate gas concentration measurements with97%accuracy

Spectrum Assignment in Hardware-constrained Cognitive Radio IoT Networks under Varying Channel-quality Conditions

ABSTRACT The integration of cognitive radio (CR) technology with future Internet-of-Things (IoT) architectures is expected to allow effective massive IoT deployment by providing huge spectrum opportunities to IoT devices. Several communication protocols have been proposed for CR networks while ignoring the adjacent channel interference (ACI) problem by assuming sharp filters at the transmit and receive chains of each CR device. However, in practice, such an assumption is not feasible for low-cost hardware-constrained CR-capable IoT (CR-IoT) devices. Specifically, when large number of CR-IoT devices are operating in the same vicinity, guardband channels (GBs) are needed to mitigate the ACI problem. Introducing GB constraint spectrum efficiency and protocol design. In this paper, we develop a channel assignment mechanism for hardware-constrained CR-IoT networks under time-varying channel conditions with GB-awareness. The objective of our assignment is to serve the largest possible number of CR-IoT devices by assigning the least number of idle channels to each device subject to rate demand and interference constraints. The proposed channel assignment in this paper is conducted on a per-block basis for the contending CR-IoT devices while considering the time-varying channel conditions for each CRIoT transmission over each idle channel such that spectrum efficiency is improved. Specifically, our channel assignment problem is formulated as a binary linear programming (BLP) problem, which is NP hard. Thus, we propose a polynomial-time solution using a sequential fixing algorithm that achieves a suboptimal solution. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed assignment provides significant increase in the number of served IoT devices over existing assignment mechanisms

Enhancing Reliability in Federated mmWave Networks: A Practical and Scalable Solution using Radar-Aided Dynamic Blockage Recognition

This article introduces a new method to improve the dependability of millimeter-wave (mmWave) and terahertz (THz) network services in dynamic outdoor environments. In these settings, line-of-sight (LoS) connections are easily interrupted by moving obstacles like humans and vehicles. The proposed approach, coined as Radar-aided Dynamic blockage Recognition (RaDaR), leverages radar measurements and federated learning (FL) to train a dual-output neural network (NN) model capable of simultaneously predicting blockage status and time. This enables determining the optimal point for proactive handover (PHO) or beam switching, thereby reducing the latency introduced by 5G new radio procedures and ensuring high quality of experience (QoE). The framework employs radar sensors to monitor and track objects movement, generating range-angle and range-velocity maps that are useful for scene analysis and predictions. Moreover, FL provides additional benefits such as privacy protection, scalability, and knowledge sharing. The framework is assessed using an extensive real-world dataset comprising mmWave channel information and radar data. The evaluation results show that RaDaR substantially enhances network reliability, achieving an average success rate of 94% for PHO compared to existing reactive HO procedures that lack proactive blockage prediction. Additionally, RaDaR maintains a superior QoE by ensuring sustained high throughput levels and minimising PHO latency