A study of the RF characteristics for wireless sensor deployment in building environment

In this paper, The radio Frequency (RF) Monitoring and Measurement of the Environmental Research Institute (ERI) located in Cork city will be monitored and analyzed in both the Zigbee (2.44 GHz) and the industrial, scientific and medical (ISM 433 MHz). The main objective of this survey is to confirm what the noise and interferences threat signals exist in these bands. It was agreed that the surveys would be carried out in 5 different rooms and areas that are candidates for the Wireless Sensors deployments. Based on the carried on study, A Zigbee standard Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) will be developed employing a number of motes for sensing number of signals like temperature, light and humidity beside the RSSI and battery voltage monitoring. Such system will be used later on to control and improve indoor building climate at reduced costs, remove the need for cabling and both installation and operational costs are significantly reduced.

Design of miniaturized wireless sensor mote and actuator for building monitoring and control

In this paper, a wireless sensor network mote hardware design and implementation are introduced for building deployment application. The core of the mote design is based on the 8 bit AVR microcontroller, Atmega1281 and 2.4 GHz wireless communication chip, CC2420. The module PCB fabrication is using the stackable technology providing powerful configuration capability. Three main layers of size 25 mm2 are structured to form the mote; these are RF, sensor and power layers. The sensors were selected carefully to meet both the building monitoring and design requirements. Beside the sensing capability, actuation and interfacing to external meters/sensors are provided to perform different management control and data recording tasks. Experiments show that the developed mote works effectively in giving stable data acquisition and owns good communication and power performance.

Practical assessment of hardware limitations on power aware wireless sensor networks - An anti-windup approach

This work considers the effect of hardware constraints that typically arise in practical power-aware wireless sensor network systems. A rigorous methodology is presented that quantifies the effect of output power limit and quantization constraints on bit error rate performance. The approach uses a novel, intuitively appealing means of addressing the output power constraint, wherein the attendant saturation block is mapped from the output of the plant to its input and compensation is then achieved using a robust anti-windup scheme. A priori levels of system performance are attained using a quantitative feedback theory approach on the initial, linear stage of the design paradigm. This hybrid design is assessed experimentally using a fully compliant 802.15.4 testbed where mobility is introduced through the use of autonomous robots. A benchmark comparison between the new approach and a number of existing strategies is also presented.

Antenna development for wearable wireless sensing systems

Embedded wireless sensor network (WSN) systems have been developed and used in a wide variety of applications such as local automatic environmental monitoring; medical applications analysing aspects of fitness and health energy metering and management in the built environment as well as traffic pattern analysis and control applications. While the purpose and functions of embedded wireless sensor networks have a myriad of applications and possibilities in the future, a particular implementation of these ambient sensors is in the area of wearable electronics incorporated into body area networks and everyday garments. Some of these systems will incorporate inertial sensing devices and other physical and physiological sensors with a particular focus on the application areas of athlete performance monitoring and e-health. Some of the important physical requirements for wearable antennas are that they are light-weight, small and robust and should also use materials that are compatible with a standard manufacturing process such as flexible polyimide or fr4 material where low cost consumer market oriented products are being produced. The substrate material is required to be low loss and flexible and often necessitates the use of thin dielectric and metallization layers. This paper describes the development of such a wearable, flexible antenna system for ISM band wearable wireless sensor networks. The material selected for the development of the wearable system in question is DE104i characterized by a dielectric constant of 3.8 and a loss tangent of 0.02. The antenna feed line is a 50 Ohm microstrip topology suitable for use with standard, high-performance and low-cost SMA-type RF connector technologies, widely used for these types of applications. The desired centre frequency is aimed at the 2.4GHz ISM band to be compatible with IEEE 802.15.4 Zigbee communication protocols and the Bluetooth standard which operate in this band.

Development of miniaturized wireless sensor nodes suitable for building energy management and modelling

Buildings consume 40% of Ireland's total annual energy translating to 3.5 billion (2004). The EPBD directive (effective January 2003) places an onus on all member states to rate the energy performance of all buildings in excess of 50m2. Energy and environmental performance management systems for residential buildings do not exist and consist of an ad-hoc integration of wired building management systems and Monitoring & Targeting systems for non-residential buildings. These systems are unsophisticated and do not easily lend themselves to cost effective retrofit or integration with other enterprise management systems. It is commonly agreed that a 15-40% reduction of building energy consumption is achievable by efficiently operating buildings when compared with typical practice. Existing research has identified that the level of information available to Building Managers with existing Building Management Systems and Environmental Monitoring Systems (BMS/EMS) is insufficient to perform the required performance based building assessment. The cost of installing additional sensors and meters is extremely high, primarily due to the estimated cost of wiring and the needed labour. From this perspective wireless sensor technology provides the capability to provide reliable sensor data at the required temporal and spatial granularity associated with building energy management. In this paper, a wireless sensor network mote hardware design and implementation is presented for a building energy management application. Appropriate sensors were selected and interfaced with the developed system based on user requirements to meet both the building monitoring and metering requirements. Beside the sensing capability, actuation and interfacing to external meters/sensors are provided to perform different management control and data recording tasks associated with minimisation of energy consumption in the built environment and the development of appropriate Building information models(BIM)to enable the design and development of energy efficient spaces.

Wireless networked control systems with QoS-based sampling

Closing feedback loops using an IEEE 802.11b ad hoc wireless communication network incurs many challenges sensitivity to varying channel conditions and lower physical transmission rates tend to limit the bandwidth of the communication channel. Given that the bandwidth usage and control performance are linked, a method of adapting the sampling interval based on an 'a priori', static sampling policy has been proposed and, more significantly, assuring stability in the mean square sense using discrete-time Markov jump linear system theory. Practical issues including current limitations of the 802.11 b protocol, the sampling policy and stability are highlighted. Simulation results on a cart-mounted inverted pendulum show that closed-loop stability can be improved using sample rate adaptation and that the control design criteria can be met in the presence of channel errors and severe channel contention.

Xheal: A localized self-healing algorithm using expanders

We consider the problem of self-healing in reconfigurable networks e.g., peer-to-peer and wireless mesh networks. For such networks under repeated attack by an omniscient adversary, we propose a fully distributed algorithm, Xheal, that maintains good expansion and spectral properties of the network, while keeping the network connected. Moreover, Xheal does this while allowing only low stretch and degree increase per node. The algorithm heals global properties like expansion and stretch while only doing local changes and using only local information. We also provide bounds on the second smallest eigenvalue of the Laplacian which captures key properties such as mixing time, conductance, congestion in routing etc. Xheal has low amortized latency and bandwidth requirements. Our work improves over the self-healing algorithms Forgiving tree [PODC 2008] andForgiving graph [PODC 2009] in that we are able to give guarantees on degree and stretch, while at the same time preserving the expansion and spectral properties of the network.

Dependable wireless real-time communications for open environments

Wireless communication technologies have become widely adopted, appearing in heterogeneous applications ranging from tracking victims, responders and equipments in disaster scenarios to machine health monitoring in networked manufacturing systems. Very often, applications demand a strictly bounded timing response, which, in distributed systems, is generally highly dependent on the performance of the underlying communication technology. These systems are said to have real-time timeliness requirements since data communication must be conducted within predefined temporal bounds, whose unfulfillment may compromise the correct behavior of the system and cause economic losses or endanger human lives. The potential adoption of wireless technologies for an increasingly broad range of application scenarios has made the operational requirements more complex and heterogeneous than before for wired technologies. On par with this trend, there is an increasing demand for the provision of cost-effective distributed systems with improved deployment, maintenance and adaptation features. These systems tend to require operational flexibility, which can only be ensured if the underlying communication technology provides both time and event triggered data transmission services while supporting on-line, on-the-fly parameter modification. Generally, wireless enabled applications have deployment requirements that can only be addressed through the use of batteries and/or energy harvesting mechanisms for power supply. These applications usually have stringent autonomy requirements and demand a small form factor, which hinders the use of large batteries. As the communication support may represent a significant part of the energy requirements of a station, the use of power-hungry technologies is not adequate. Hence, in such applications, low-range technologies have been widely adopted. In fact, although low range technologies provide smaller data rates, they spend just a fraction of the energy of their higher-power counterparts. The timeliness requirements of data communications, in general, can be met by ensuring the availability of the medium for any station initiating a transmission. In controlled (close) environments this can be guaranteed, as there is a strict regulation of which stations are installed in the area and for which purpose. Nevertheless, in open environments, this is hard to control because no a priori abstract knowledge is available of which stations and technologies may contend for the medium at any given instant. Hence, the support of wireless real-time communications in unmanaged scenarios is a highly challenging task. Wireless low-power technologies have been the focus of a large research effort, for example, in the Wireless Sensor Network domain. Although bringing extended autonomy to battery powered stations, such technologies are known to be negatively influenced by similar technologies contending for the medium and, especially, by technologies using higher power transmissions over the same frequency bands. A frequency band that is becoming increasingly crowded with competing technologies is the 2.4 GHz Industrial, Scientific and Medical band, encompassing, for example, Bluetooth and ZigBee, two lowpower communication standards which are the base of several real-time protocols. Although these technologies employ mechanisms to improve their coexistence, they are still vulnerable to transmissions from uncoordinated stations with similar technologies or to higher power technologies such as Wi- Fi, which hinders the support of wireless dependable real-time communications in open environments. The Wireless Flexible Time-Triggered Protocol (WFTT) is a master/multi-slave protocol that builds on the flexibility and timeliness provided by the FTT paradigm and on the deterministic medium capture and maintenance provided by the bandjacking technique. This dissertation presents the WFTT protocol and argues that it allows supporting wireless real-time communication services with high dependability requirements in open environments where multiple contention-based technologies may dispute the medium access. Besides, it claims that it is feasible to provide flexible and timely wireless communications at the same time in open environments. The WFTT protocol was inspired on the FTT paradigm, from which higher layer services such as, for example, admission control has been ported. After realizing that bandjacking was an effective technique to ensure the medium access and maintenance in open environments crowded with contention-based communication technologies, it was recognized that the mechanism could be used to devise a wireless medium access protocol that could bring the features offered by the FTT paradigm to the wireless domain. The performance of the WFTT protocol is reported in this dissertation with a description of the implemented devices, the test-bed and a discussion of the obtained results.

LNT: a logical neighbor tree secure group communication scheme for wireless sensor networks

Secure group communication is a paradigm that primarily designates one-to-many communication security. The proposed works relevant to secure group communication have predominantly considered the whole network as being a single group managed by a central powerful node capable of supporting heavy communication, computation and storage cost. However, a typical Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) may contain several groups, and each one is maintained by a sensor node (the group controller) with constrained resources. Moreover, the previously proposed schemes require a multicast routing support to deliver the rekeying messages. Nevertheless, multicast routing can incur heavy storage and communication overheads in the case of a wireless sensor network. Due to these two major limitations, we have reckoned it necessary to propose a new secure group communication with a lightweight rekeying process. Our proposal overcomes the two limitations mentioned above, and can be applied to a homogeneous WSN with resource-constrained nodes with no need for a multicast routing support. Actually, the analysis and simulation results have clearly demonstrated that our scheme outperforms the previous well-known solutions.

A distributed algorithm for hexagonal topology formation in wireless sensor networks

Hexagonal wireless sensor network refers to a network topology where a subset of nodes have six peer neighbors. These nodes form a backbone for multi-hop communications. In a previous work, we proposed the use of hexagonal topology in wireless sensor networks and discussed its properties in relation to real-time (bounded latency) multi-hop communications in large-scale deployments. In that work, we did not consider the problem of hexagonal topology formation in practice - which is the subject of this research. In this paper, we present a decentralized algorithm that forms the hexagonal topology backbone in an arbitrary but sufficiently dense network deployment. We implemented a prototype of our algorithm in NesC for TinyOS based platforms. We present data from field tests of our implementation, collected using a deployment of fifty wireless sensor nodes.

IEEE 802.15.4: a Federating Communication Protocol for Time-Sensitive Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been attracting increasing interests for developing a new generation of embedded systems with great potential for many applications such as surveillance, environment monitoring, emergency medical response and home automation. However, the communication paradigms in WSNs differ from the ones attributed to traditional wireless networks, triggering the need for new communication protocols. In this context, the recently standardised IEEE 802.15.4 protocol presents some potentially interesting features for deployment in wireless sensor network applications, such as power-efficiency, timeliness guarantees and scalability. Nevertheless, when addressing WSN applications with (soft/hard) timing requirements some inherent paradoxes emerge, such as power-efficiency versus timeliness, triggering the need of engineering solutions for an efficient deployment of IEEE 802.15.4 in WSNs. In this technical report, we will explore the most relevant characteristics of the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol for wireless sensor networks and present the most important challenges regarding time-sensitive WSN applications. We also provide some timing performance and analysis of the IEEE 802.15.4 that unveil some directions for resolving the previously mentioned paradoxes.

Modeling and worst-case dimensioning of cluster-tree wireless sensor networks

Time-sensitive Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications require finite delay bounds in critical situations. This paper provides a methodology for the modeling and the worst-case dimensioning of cluster-tree WSNs. We provide a fine model of the worst-case cluster-tree topology characterized by its depth, the maximum number of child routers and the maximum number of child nodes for each parent router. Using Network Calculus, we derive “plug-and-play” expressions for the endto- end delay bounds, buffering and bandwidth requirements as a function of the WSN cluster-tree characteristics and traffic specifications. The cluster-tree topology has been adopted by many cluster-based solutions for WSNs. We demonstrate how to apply our general results for dimensioning IEEE 802.15.4/Zigbee cluster-tree WSNs. We believe that this paper shows the fundamental performance limits of cluster-tree wireless sensor networks by the provision of a simple and effective methodology for the design of such WSNs.

CMOS indoor light energy harvesting system for wireless sensing applications

This book discusses in detail the CMOS implementation of energy harvesting. The authors describe an integrated, indoor light energy harvesting system, based on a controller circuit that dynamically and automatically adjusts its operation to meet the actual light circumstances of the environment where the system is placed. The system is intended to power a sensor node, enabling an autonomous wireless sensor network (WSN). Although designed to cope with indoor light levels, the system is also able to work with higher levels, making it an all-round light energy harvesting system. The discussion includes experimental data obtained from an integrated manufactured prototype, which in conjunction with a photovoltaic (PV) cell, serves as a proof of concept of the desired energy harvesting system. © 2016 Springer International Publishing. All rights are reserved.

Métriques de routage dans les réseaux maillés sans fil

Ces dernières années, les technologies sans fil ont connu un essor fulgurant. Elles ont permis la mise en place de réseaux sans fil à hautes performances. Les réseaux maillées sans fil (RMSF) sont une nouvelle génération de réseaux sans fil qui offrent des débits élevés par rapport aux réseaux Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity) classiques et aux réseaux ad-hoc. Ils présentent de nombreux avantages telles que leur forte tolérance aux pannes, leur robustesse, leur faible coût etc. Les routeurs des RMSF peuvent disposer de plusieurs interfaces radio et chaque interface peut opérer sur plusieurs canaux distincts, c’est des RMSF multiples-radios, multiples-canaux. Ce type de réseau peut accroître de manière considérable les performances des RMSF. Cependant plusieurs problèmes subsistent et doivent être résolus notamment celui du routage. Le routage dans les RMSF demeure un défi majeur. Le but des protocoles de routage est de trouver les meilleures routes i.e. des routes qui maximisent les débits et minimisent les délais, lors de l’acheminement du trafic. La qualité des routes dans les RMSF peut être fortement affectée par les interférences, les collisions, les congestions etc. Alors les protocoles doivent être en mesure de détecter ces problèmes pour pouvoir en tenir compte lors de la sélection des routes. Plusieurs études ont été dédiées aux métriques et aux protocoles de routage dans les RMSF afin de maximiser les performances de celles ci. Mais la plupart ne prennent pas en considération toutes les contraintes telles que les interférences, le problème des stations cachées etc. Ce mémoire propose une nouvelle métrique de routage pour RMSF. Nous avons mis en place une nouvelle métrique de routage pour RMSF appelée MBP (Metric Based on Probabilities). Cette métrique est destinée aux RMSF mono-radio ou multiples-radios. Elle permet d’éviter les routes à forte ii interférence. Les résultats des simulations ont montré que MBP présente des améliorations par rapport à certaines métriques : ETT, WCETT et iAWARE qui sont connues dans le domaine.

Routage adaptatif et stabilité dans les réseaux maillés sans fil

Grâce à leur flexibilité et à leur facilité d’installation, les réseaux maillés sans fil (WMNs) permettent un déploiement d’une infrastructure à faible coût. Ces réseaux étendent la couverture des réseaux filaires permettant, ainsi, une connexion n’importe quand et n’importe où. Toutefois, leur performance est dégradée par les interférences et la congestion. Ces derniers causent des pertes de paquets et une augmentation du délai de transmission d’une façon drastique. Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéressons au routage adaptatif et à la stabilité dans ce type de réseaux. Dans une première partie de la thèse, nous nous intéressons à la conception d’une métrique de routage et à la sélection des passerelles permettant d’améliorer la performance des WMNs. Dans ce contexte nous proposons un protocole de routage à la source basé sur une nouvelle métrique. Cette métrique permet non seulement de capturer certaines caractéristiques des liens tels que les interférences inter-flux et intra-flux, le taux de perte des paquets mais également la surcharge des passerelles. Les résultats numériques montrent que la performance de cette métrique est meilleure que celle des solutions proposées dans la littérature. Dans une deuxième partie de la thèse, nous nous intéressons à certaines zones critiques dans les WMNs. Ces zones se trouvent autour des passerelles qui connaissent une concentration plus élevé du trafic ; elles risquent de provoquer des interférences et des congestions. À cet égard, nous proposons un protocole de routage proactif et adaptatif basé sur l’apprentissage par renforcement et qui pénalise les liens de mauvaise qualité lorsqu’on s’approche des passerelles. Un chemin dont la qualité des liens autour d’une passerelle est meilleure sera plus favorisé que les autres chemins de moindre qualité. Nous utilisons l’algorithme de Q-learning pour mettre à jour dynamiquement les coûts des chemins, sélectionner les prochains nœuds pour faire suivre les paquets vers les passerelles choisies et explorer d’autres nœuds voisins. Les résultats numériques montrent que notre protocole distribué, présente de meilleurs résultats comparativement aux protocoles présentés dans la littérature. Dans une troisième partie de cette thèse, nous nous intéressons aux problèmes d’instabilité des réseaux maillés sans fil. En effet, l’instabilité se produit à cause des changements fréquents des routes qui sont causés par les variations instantanées des qualités des liens dues à la présence des interférences et de la congestion. Ainsi, après une analyse de l’instabilité, nous proposons d’utiliser le nombre de variations des chemins dans une table de routage comme indicateur de perturbation des réseaux et nous utilisons la fonction d’entropie, connue dans les mesures de l’incertitude et du désordre des systèmes, pour sélectionner les routes stables. Les résultats numériques montrent de meilleures performances de notre protocole en comparaison avec d’autres protocoles dans la littérature en termes de débit, délai, taux de perte des paquets et l’indice de Gini.