Distributed Localization Algorithms for Wireless Sensor Networks: From Design Methodology to Experimental Validation

Recent advances in the technology of wireless electronic devices have made possible to build ad–hoc Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) using inexpensive nodes, consisting of low–power processors, a modest amount of memory, and simple wireless transceivers. Over the last years, many novel applications have been envisaged for distributed WSNs in the area of monitoring, communication, and control. Sensing and controlling the environment by using many embedded devices forming a WSN often require the measured physical parameters to be associated with the position of the sensing device. As a consequence, one of the key enabling and indispensable services in WSNs is localization (i.e., positioning). Moreover, the design of various components of the protocol stack (e.g., routing and Medium Access Control, MAC, algorithms) might take advantage of nodes’ location, thus resulting in WSNs with improved performance. However, typical protocol design methodologies have shown signiï¬cant limitations when applied to the ï¬eld of embedded systems, like WSNs. As a matter of fact, the layered nature of typical design approaches limits their practical usefulness for the design of WSNs, where any vertical information (like, e.g., the actual node’s position) should be efï¬ciently shared in such resource constrained devices. Among the proposed solutions to address this problem, we believe that the Platform–Based Design (PBD) approach Sangiovanni-Vincentelli (2002), which is a relatively new methodology for the design of embedded systems, is a very promising paradigm for the efï¬cient design of WSNs

The CASPER user-centric approach for advanced service provisioning in mobile networks

Abstract This paper presents an overview of the project CASPER, 1 a 4-year Marie Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE) project running between 2016 and 2020, describing its objectives, approach, architecture, tools and key achievements. CASPER combines academic and industrial forces towards leveraging the expected benefits of Quality of Experience (QoE) exploitation in future networks. In order to achieve that, a QoE orchestrator has been proposed which implements the basic functionalities of QoE monitoring, estimation and management. With means of simulation and testbed emulation, CASPER has managed to develop a proprietary SDN Controller, which implements QoE-based traffic rerouting for the challenging scenario of HTTP adaptive video streaming, leading to more stable and higher QoE scores compared to a state-of-the-art SDN Controller implementation

Entity Localization and Tracking: A Sensor Fusion-based Mechanism in WSNs

International audienceKnowing exactly where a mobile entity is and monitoring its trajectory in real-time has recently attracted a lot of interests from both academia and industrial communities, due to the large number of applications it enables; nevertheless, it is nowadays one of the most challenging problems from scientific and technological standpoints. In this work we propose a tracking system based on the fusion of position estimations provided by different sources, that are combined together to get a final estimation that aims at providing improved accuracy with respect to those generated by each system individually. In particular, exploiting the availability of a Wireless Sensor Network as an infrastructure, a mobile entity equipped with an inertial system first gets the position estimation using both a Kalman Filter and a fully distributed positioning algorithm (the Enhanced Steepest Descent, we recently proposed), then combines the results using the Simple Convex Combination algorithm. Simulation results clearly show good performance in terms of the final accuracy achieved. Finally, the proposed technique is validated against real data taken from an inertial sensor provided by THALES ITALIA

Demo: Automatic Personal Identification System for Security in Critical Services: A Case Study

ISBN: 978-1-4503-0718-5International audienceThe demonstration proposal moves from the capabilities of a wireless biometric badge [4], which integrates a localization and tracking service along with an automatic personal identification mechanism, to show how a full system architecture is devised to enable the control of physical accesses to restricted areas. The system leverages on the availability of a novel IEEE 802.15.4/Zigbee Cluster Tree network model, on enhanced security levels and on the respect of all the users' privacy issues

Response time analysis of slotted WiDOM in noisy wireless channels

International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA 2015), Industrial Communication Technologies and Systems, Luxembourg, Luxembourg.Timely delivery of critical traffic is a major challenge in industrial applications. The Wireless Dominance (WiDOM) medium access control protocol offers a very large number of priority levels to suit time sensitive application requirements. In particular, assuming that its overhead is properly modeled, WiDOM enables an accurate evaluation of the network response time in the wireless domain, through the power of the schedulability analysis, based on non-preemptive and staticpriority scheduling. Recent research proposed a new version of WiDOM (dubbed Slotted WiDOM), which offers a lower overhead as compared to the original version. In this paper, we propose a new schedulability analysis for Slotted WiDOM and extend it to handle message streams with release jitter. In order to provide a more accurate timing analysis, the effect of transmission faults must be taken into account. Therefore, in our novel analysis we consider the case where messages are transmitted in a realistic wireless channel, affected by noise and interference. Evaluation is performed on a real test-bed and the results from experiments provide a firm validation of our findings

EMMON - EMbedded MONitoring

Despite the steady increase in experimental deployments, most of research work on WSNs has focused only on communication protocols and algorithms, with a clear lack of effective, feasible and usable system architectures, integrated in a modular platform able to address both functional and non–functional requirements. In this paper, we outline EMMON [1], a full WSN-based system architecture for large–scale, dense and real–time embedded monitoring [3] applications. EMMON provides a hierarchical communication architecture together with integrated middleware and command and control software. Then, EM-Set, the EMMON engineering toolset will be presented. EM-Set includes a network deployment planning, worst–case analysis and dimensioning, protocol simulation and automatic remote programming and hardware testing tools. This toolset was crucial for the development of EMMON which was designed to use standard commercially available technologies, while maintaining as much flexibility as possible to meet specific applications requirements. Finally, the EMMON architecture has been validated through extensive simulation and experimental evaluation, including a 300+ nodes testbed

EMMON: a system architecture for large- scale, dense and real-time WSNs

In spite of the significant amount of scientific work in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), there is a clear lack of effective, feasible and usable WSN system architectures that address both functional and non-functional requirements in an integrated fashion. This poster abstract outlines the EMMON system architecture for large-scale, dense, real-time embedded monitoring. EMMON relies on a hierarchical network architecture together with integrated middleware and command&control mechanisms. It has been designed to use standard commercially– available technologies, while maintaining as much flexibility as possible to meet specific applications’ requirements. The EMMON WSN architecture has been validated through extensive simulation and experimental evaluation, including through a 300+ node test-bed, the largest WSN test-bed in Europe to dat

Locating Zigbee Devices in a Cluster-Tree Wireless Sensor Network: an ESD-based Integrated Solution

Abstract—Recent advances in the technology of wireless electronic devices have made possible to build ad-hoc Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) using inexpensive nodes consisting of low power processors, a modest amount of memory and simple wireless transceivers. Over the last years, many novel applications have been envisaged for distributed WSNs in the area of monitoring, communication and control. One of the key enabling and indispensable services in WSNs is localization (i.e., positioning), given that the availability of nodes ’ location may represent the fundamental support for various protocols (e.g., routing) and applications (e.g., habitat monitoring). Furthermore, WSNs are now being increasingly used for real-time applications having stringent Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements, such as timeliness and reliability. Towards this end, Zigbee/IEEE 802.15.4 and the Cluster-Tree model are considered among the most promising candidates. Building from (i) our proposed Enhanced Steepest Descent (ESD) algorithm to solve positioning of nodes in a fully distributed fashion, (ii) the mechanism to evaluate at run-time the site-specific parameters for the correct operation of the ESD (i.e., RSSI-based ranging) and (iii) the recent availability of Zigbee/IEEE 802.15.4 implementations over TinyOS, the main output of this paper is to outline how a positioning service can be fully integrated into a communication protocol stack. Keywords-positioning service; communication protocol; Zig-Bee/IEEE 802.15.4; system integration. I