MAC protocols and mobility management module for healthcare applications using Wireless Sensor Networks

Using Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in healthcare systems has had a lot of attention in recent years. In much of this research tasks like sensor data processing, health states decision making and emergency message sending are done by a remote server. Many patients with lots of sensor data consume a great deal of communication resources, bring a burden to the remote server and delay the decision time and notification time. A healthcare application for elderly people using WSN has been simulated in this paper. A WSN designed for the proposed healthcare application needs efficient Medium Access Control (MAC) and routing protocols to provide a guarantee for the reliability of the data delivered from the patients to the medical centre. Based on these requirements, the GinMAC protocol including a mobility module has been chosen, to provide the required performance such as reliability for data delivery and energy saving. Simulation results show that this modification to GinMAC can offer the required performance for the proposed healthcare application.

MAC protocols and mobility management module for healthcare applications using wireless sensor networks

Using Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in healthcare systems has had a lot of attention in recent years. In much of this research tasks like sensor data processing, health states decision making and emergency message sending are done by a remote server. Many patients with lots of sensor data consume a great deal of communication resources, bring a burden to the remote server and delay the decision time and notification time. A healthcare application for elderly people using WSN has been simulated in this paper. A WSN designed for the proposed healthcare application needs efficient MAC and routing protocols to provide a guarantee for the reliability of the data delivered from the patients to the medical centre. Based on these requirements, the GinMAC protocol including a mobility module has been chosen, to provide the required performance such as reliability for data delivery and energy saving. Simulation results show that this modification to GinMAC can offer the required performance for the proposed healthcare application.

Wireless Sensor Networks: MAC protocols and real time applications

Wireless Senor Networks(WSNs) detect events using one or more sensors, then collect data from detected events using these sensors. This data is aggregated and forwarded to a base station(sink) through wireless communication to provide the required operations. Different kinds of MAC and routing protocols need to be designed for WSN in order to guarantee data delivery from the source nodes to the sink. Some of the proposed MAC protocols for WSN with their techniques, advantages and disadvantages in the terms of their suitability for real time applications are discussed in this paper. We have concluded that most of these protocols can not be applied to real time applications without improvement

Cross layer based protocols for energy aware and critical data delivery related applications using wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been an exciting topic in recent years. The services offered by a WSN can be classified into three major categories: monitoring, alerting, and information on demand. WSNs have been used for a variety of applications related to the environment (agriculture, water and forest fire detection), the military, buildings, health (elderly people and home monitoring), disaster relief, and area or industrial monitoring. In most WSNs tasks like processing the sensed data, making decisions and generating emergency messages are carried out by a remote server, hence the need for efficient means of transferring data across the network. Because of the range of applications and types of WSN there is a need for different kinds of MAC and routing protocols in order to guarantee delivery of data from the source nodes to the server (or sink). In order to minimize energy consumption and increase performance in areas such as reliability of data delivery, extensive research has been conducted and documented in the literature on designing energy efficient protocols for each individual layer. The most common way to conserve energy in WSNs involves using the MAC layer to put the transceiver and the processor of the sensor node into a low power, sleep state when they are not being used. Hence the energy wasted due to collisions, overhearing and idle listening is reduced. As a result of this strategy for saving energy, the routing protocols need new solutions that take into account the sleep state of some nodes, and which also enable the lifetime of the entire network to be increased by distributing energy usage between nodes over time. This could mean that a combined MAC and routing protocol could significantly improve WSNs because the interaction between the MAC and network layers lets nodes be active at the same time in order to deal with data transmission. In the research presented in this thesis, a cross-layer protocol based on MAC and routing protocols was designed in order to improve the capability of WSNs for a range of different applications. Simulation results, based on a range of realistic scenarios, show that these new protocols improve WSNs by reducing their energy consumption as well as enabling them to support mobile nodes, where necessary. A number of conference and journal papers have been published to disseminate these results for a range of applications.

A case for cross layer design: the impact of physical layer properties on routing protocol performance in MANETs

In this work we evaluate the performance of routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks using different physical layer models. The results obtained show that the performance results obtained using idealized models such as the free space propagation model vary significantly when propagation effects such as path loss and shadowing are considered. This difference in performance indicates that optimization is required in the protocol development space that takes into account channel state information (CSI). Such an optimization requires a cross layer approach to be adopted and a framework for protocol performance evaluation to be established. We believe that this work would serve as a first step in this direction. We provide comparative performance results through network simulations.

GeoConnect : geographic and connectivity-aware routing protocol for wireless sensor network

Sensor nodes are closely tied with their geographic location and their connectivity. In recent years many routing protocols have been developed to provide efficient strategy. But most of them are either focus on the geographic proximity or on connectivity. However in sparse network, Geographic routing would fail at local dead ends where a node has no neighbour closer to destination. In contrast, connectivity-based routing may result in non-optimal path and overhead management. In this paper we designed a scalable and distributed routing protocol, GeoConnect, which considers geographic proximity and connectivity for choosing next hop. In GeoConnecl, we construct a new naming system that integrates geographic and connectivity information into a node identification. We use dissimilarity function to compute the dissimilarity and apply a distributed routing algorithm to route packets. The experimental results show that GeoConnect routing provides robust and better performance than sole geographic routing or connectivity routing.

M-Dimension : multi-characteristics based routing protocol in human associated delay-tolerant networks with improved performance over one dimensional classic models

Human associated delay-tolerant network (HDTN) is a new delay-tolerant network where mobile devices are associated with humans. It can be viewed from both their geographic and social dimensions. The combination of these different dimensions can enable us to more accurately comprehend a delay-tolerant network and consequently use this multi-dimensional information to improve overall network efficiency. Alongside the geographic dimension of the network which is concerned with geographic topology of routing, social dimensions such as social hierarchy can be used to guide the routing message to improve not only the routing efficiency for individual nodes, but also efficiency for the entire network.

We propose a multi-dimensional routing protocol (M-Dimension) for the human associated delay-tolerant network which uses the local information derived from multiple dimensions to identify a mobile node more accurately. Each dimension has a weight factor and is organized by the Distance Function to select an intermediary and applies multi-cast routing. We compare M-Dimension to existing benchmark routing protocols using the MIT Reality Dataset, a well-known benchmark dataset based on a human associated mobile network trace file. The results of our simulations show that M-Dimension has a significant increase in the average success ratio and is very competitive when End-to-End Delay of packet delivery is used in comparison to other multi-cast DTN routing protocols.

Context-Aware Adaptive Opportunistic Routing in Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been attracting increasing attention for decades due to their broad civilian and military applications. Basically, a MANET or WSN is a network of nodes connected by wireless communication links. Due to the limited transmission range of the radio, many pairs of nodes in MANETs or WSNs may not be able to communicate directly, hence they need other intermediate nodes to forward packets for them. Routing in such types of networks is an important issue and it poses great challenges due to the dynamic nature of MANETs or WSNs. On the one hand, the open-air nature of wireless environments brings many difficulties when an efficient routing solution is required. The wireless channel is unreliable due to fading and interferences, which makes it impossible to maintain a quality path from a source node to a destination node. Additionally, node mobility aggravates network dynamics, which causes frequent topology changes and brings significant overheads for maintaining and recalculating paths. Furthermore, mobile devices and sensors are usually constrained by battery capacity, computing and communication resources, which impose limitations on the functionalities of routing protocols. On the other hand, the wireless medium possesses inherent unique characteristics, which can be exploited to enhance transmission reliability and routing performance. Opportunistic routing (OR) is one promising technique that takes advantage of the spatial diversity and broadcast nature of the wireless medium to improve packet forwarding reliability in multihop wireless communication. OR combats the unreliable wireless links by involving multiple neighboring nodes (forwarding candidates) to choose packet forwarders. In opportunistic routing, a source node does not require an end-to-end path to transmit packets. The packet forwarding decision is made hop-by-hop in a fully distributed fashion. Motivated by the deficiencies of existing opportunistic routing protocols in dynamic environments such as mobile ad-hoc networks or wireless sensor networks, this thesis proposes a novel context-aware adaptive opportunistic routing scheme. Our proposal selects packet forwarders by simultaneously exploiting multiple types of cross-layer context information of nodes and environments. Our approach significantly outperforms other routing protocols that rely solely on a single metric. The adaptivity feature of our proposal enables network nodes to adjust their behaviors at run-time according to network conditions. To accommodate the strict energy constraints in WSNs, this thesis integrates adaptive duty-cycling mechanism to opportunistic routing for wireless sensor nodes. Our approach dynamically adjusts the sleeping intervals of sensor nodes according to the monitored traffic load and the estimated energy consumption rate. Through the integration of duty cycling of sensor nodes and opportunistic routing, our protocol is able to provide a satisfactory balance between good routing performance and energy efficiency for WSNs.

Self-organizing Routing Algorithm fo Wireless Sensors Networks (WSN) using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) with Tinyos.

This paper describes the basic tools to work with wireless sensors. TinyOShas a componentbased architecture which enables rapid innovation and implementation while minimizing code size as required by the severe memory constraints inherent in sensor networks. TinyOS's component library includes network protocols, distributed services, sensor drivers, and data acquisition tools ? all of which can be used asia or be further refined for a custom application. TinyOS was originally developed as a research project at the University of California Berkeley, but has since grown to have an international community of developers and users. Some algorithms concerning packet routing are shown. Incar entertainment systems can be based on wireless sensors in order to obtain information from Internet, but routing protocols must be implemented in order to avoid bottleneck problems. Ant Colony algorithms are really useful in such cases, therefore they can be embedded into the sensors to perform such routing task.

Ad hoc network state aware routing protocol

The environment of a mobile ad hoc network may vary greatly depending on nodes' mobility, traffic load and resource conditions. In this paper we categorize the environment of an ad hoc network into three main states: an ideal state, wherein the network is relatively stable with sufficient resources; a congested state, wherein some nodes, regions or the network is experiencing congestion; and an energy critical state, wherein the energy capacity of nodes in the network is critically low. Each of these states requires unique routing schemes, but existing ad hoc routing protocols are only effective in one of these states. This implies that when the network enters into any other states, these protocols run into a sub optimal mode, degrading the performance of the network. We propose an Ad hoc Network State Aware Routing Protocol (ANSAR) which conditionally switches between earliest arrival scheme and a joint Load-Energy aware scheme depending on the current state of the network. Comparing to existing schemes, it yields higher efficiency and reliability as shown in our simulation results. © 2007 IEEE.

Location management and routing in urban vehicular ad hoc networks

In recent years, urban vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are gaining importance for inter-vehicle communication, because they allow for the local communication between vehicles without any infrastructure, configuration effort, and without expensive cellular networks. But such architecture may increase the complexity of routing since there is no central control system in urban VANETs. Therefore, a challenging research task is to improve urban VANETs' routing efficiency. ^ Hence, in this dissertation we propose two location-based routing protocols and a location management protocol to facilitate location-based routing in urban VANETs. The Multi-hop Routing Protocol (MURU) is proposed to make use of predicted mobility and geometry map in urban VANETs to estimate a path's life time and set up robust end-to-end routing paths. The Light-weight Routing Protocol (LIRU) is proposed to take advantage of the node diversity under dynamic channel condition to exploit opportunistic forwarding to achieve efficient data delivery. A scalable location management protocol (MALM) is also proposed to support location-based routing protocols in urban VANETs. MALM uses high mobility in VANETs to help disseminate vehicles' historical location information, and a vehicle is able to implement Kalman-filter based predicted to predict another vehicle's current location based on its historical location information. ^

Cooperative routing for collision minimization in wireless sensor networks

Cooperative communication has gained much interest due to its ability to exploit the broadcasting nature of the wireless medium to mitigate multipath fading. There has been considerable amount of research on how cooperative transmission can improve the performance of the network by focusing on the physical layer issues. During the past few years, the researchers have started to take into consideration cooperative transmission in routing and there has been a growing interest in designing and evaluating cooperative routing protocols. Most of the existing cooperative routing algorithms are designed to reduce the energy consumption; however, packet collision minimization using cooperative routing has not been addressed yet. This dissertation presents an optimization framework to minimize collision probability using cooperative routing in wireless sensor networks. More specifically, we develop a mathematical model and formulate the problem as a large-scale Mixed Integer Non-Linear Programming problem. We also propose a solution based on the branch and bound algorithm augmented with reducing the search space (branch and bound space reduction). The proposed strategy builds up the optimal routes from each source to the sink node by providing the best set of hops in each route, the best set of relays, and the optimal power allocation for the cooperative transmission links. To reduce the computational complexity, we propose two near optimal cooperative routing algorithms. In the first near optimal algorithm, we solve the problem by decoupling the optimal power allocation scheme from optimal route selection. Therefore, the problem is formulated by an Integer Non-Linear Programming, which is solved using a branch and bound space reduced method. In the second near optimal algorithm, the cooperative routing problem is solved by decoupling the transmission power and the relay node se- lection from the route selection. After solving the routing problems, the power allocation is applied in the selected route. Simulation results show the algorithms can significantly reduce the collision probability compared with existing cooperative routing schemes.

Impact of node mobility in user-centric routing

Recent paradigms in wireless communication architectures describe environments where nodes present a highly dynamic behavior (e.g., User Centric Networks). In such environments, routing is still performed based on the regular packet-switched behavior of store-and-forward. Albeit sufficient to compute at least an adequate path between a source and a destination, such routing behavior cannot adequately sustain the highly nomadic lifestyle that Internet users are today experiencing. This thesis aims to analyse the impact of the nodes’ mobility on routing scenarios. It also aims at the development of forwarding concepts that help in message forwarding across graphs where nodes exhibit human mobility patterns, as is the case of most of the user-centric wireless networks today. The first part of the work involved the analysis of the mobility impact on routing, and we found that node mobility significance can affect routing performance, and it depends on the link length, distance, and mobility patterns of nodes. The study of current mobility parameters showed that they capture mobility partially. The routing protocol robustness to node mobility depends on the routing metric sensitivity to node mobility. As such, mobility-aware routing metrics were devised to increase routing robustness to node mobility. Two categories of routing metrics proposed are the time-based and spatial correlation-based. For the validation of the metrics, several mobility models were used, which include the ones that mimic human mobility patterns. The metrics were implemented using the Network Simulator tool using two widely used multi-hop routing protocols of Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) and Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV). Using the proposed metrics, we reduced the path re-computation frequency compared to the benchmark metric. This means that more stable nodes were used to route data. The time-based routing metrics generally performed well across the different node mobility scenarios used. We also noted a variation on the performance of the metrics, including the benchmark metric, under different mobility models, due to the differences in the node mobility governing rules of the models.

Study of a geo-multicast framework for efficient message dissemination at unmanned level crossings

Collisions among trains and cars at road/rail level crossings (LXs) can have severe consequences such as high level of fatalities, injuries and significant financial losses. As communication and positioning technologies have significantly advanced, implementing vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) in the vicinity of unmanned LXs, generally LXs without barriers, is seen as an efficient and effective approach to mitigate or even eliminate collisions without imposing huge infrastructure costs. VANETs necessitate unique communication strategies, in which routing protocols take a prominent part in their scalability and overall performance, through finding optimised routes quickly and with low bandwidth overheads. This article studies a novel geo-multicast framework that incorporates a set of models for communication, message flow and geo-determination of endangered vehicles with a reliable receiver-based geo-multicast protocol to support cooperative level crossings (CLXs), which provide collision warnings to the endangered motorists facing road/rail LXs without barriers. This framework is designed and studied as part of a $5.5 m Government and industry funded project, entitled 'Intelligent-Transport-Systems to improve safety at road/rail crossings'. Combined simulation and experimental studies of the proposed geo-multicast framework have demonstrated promising outcomes as cooperative awareness messages provide actionable critical information to endangered drivers who are identified by CLXs.

An efficient proactive route maintenance process for reliable data transmissions in sensor networks

For industrial wireless sensor networks, maintaining the routing path for a high packet delivery ratio is one of the key objectives in network operations. It is important to both provide the high data delivery rate at the sink node and guarantee a timely delivery of the data packet at the sink node. Most proactive routing protocols for sensor networks are based on simple periodic updates to distribute the routing information. A faulty link causes packet loss and retransmission at the source until periodic route update packets are issued and the link has been identified as broken. We propose a new proactive route maintenance process where periodic update is backed-up with a secondary layer of local updates repeating with shorter periods for timely discovery of broken links. Proposed route maintenance scheme improves reliability of the network by decreasing the packet loss due to delayed identification of broken links. We show by simulation that proposed mechanism behaves better than the existing popular routing protocols (AODV, AOMDV and DSDV) in terms of end-to-end delay, routing overhead, packet reception ratio.