A. J. Dinusha Rathnayaka

Review: Wireless Sensor Network transport protocol: A critical review

The transport protocols for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) play vital role in achieving the high performance together with longevity of the network. The researchers are continuously contributing in developing new transport layer protocols based on different principles and architectures enabling different combinations of technical features. The uniqueness of each new protocol more or less lies in these functional features, which can be commonly classified based on their proficiencies in fulfilling congestion control, reliability support, and prioritization. The performance of these protocols has been evaluated using dissimilar set of experimental/simulation parameters, thus there is no well defined benchmark for experimental/simulation settings. The researchers working in this area have to compare the performance of the new protocol with the existing protocols to prove that new protocol is better. However, one of the major challenges faced by the researchers is investigating the performance of all the existing protocols, which have been tested in different simulation environments. This leads the significance of having a well-defined benchmark for the experimental/simulation settings. If the future researchers simulate their protocols according to a standard set of simulation/experimental settings, the performance of those protocols can be directly compared with each other just using the published simulation results. This article offers a twofold contribution to support researchers working in the area of WSN transport protocol design. First, we extensively review the technical features of existing transport protocols and suggest a generic framework for a WSN transport protocol, which offers a strong groundwork for the new researchers to identify the open research issues. Second we analyse the experimental settings, focused application areas and the addressed performance criteria of existing protocols; thus suggest a benchmark of experimental/simulation settings for evaluating prospective transport protocols.

Evaluation of wireless home automation technologies

Introduction of Wireless Home Automation (WHA) has become a positive inspiration to the new home and renovation projects, as it increases the quality of life and comfort of the inhabitants, simultaneously facilitating energy conservation and environmental sustainability. Generally WHA networks comprise of wireless embedded sensors and actuators that intelligently interconnect with each other through a suitable wireless architecture. Many wireless technologies have been emerged recently targeting WHA, hence selecting the optimal technology is challenging. In this article, we present an evaluation of these emerging wireless technologies and discuss their suitability for smart home networks.

Identifying prosumer's energy sharing behaviours for forming optimal prosumer-communities

Smart Grid (SG) achieves bidirectional energy and information flow between the energy user and the utility grid, allowing energy users not only to consume energy, but also to generate the energy and share with the utility grid or with other energy consumers. This type of energy user who consumes energy and who also can generate the energy is called the “prosumer”. The sustainability of the SG energy sharing process heavily depends on its participating prosumers, making prosumer participation and management schemes crucial within the energy sharing approaches. However in literature, there is very little attention on prosumer management schemes. The contribution of this article is twofold. First, this article introduces a novel concept of participating and managing the prosumers in the SG energy sharing process in the form of autonomous, intelligent goal-oriented virtual communities. Here, the community of prosumers can collectively increase the amount of power to be auctioned or bought offering higher bargaining power, thereby settling for a higher price per kilowatt in long-term. According to the literature, this research is the first of this type introducing a community approach for prosumer management. The initial step to build an effective prosumer-community is the identification of those prosumers who would be suitable to make efficient prosumer communities. This leads the necessity of identifying parameters that influence the energy sharing behaviours of prosumers. The second contribution of this article is that, this comprehensively analyzes the different parameters influencing the prosumers energy sharing behaviours and thus presents multi-agent architecture for optimal prosumer-community formation.

Goal-Oriented Prosumer Community Groups for the Smart Grid

Energy demand is continually rising, worldwide. Most of the current demand is met by non-renewable energy sources, like coal, petroleum, and natural gas. However, currently, society is faced with the problem of dwindling and scarce non-renewable energy resources, resulting in a shortage of energy. Moreover, the process of energy production from non-renewable sources is increasing greenhouse gas emissions, leading to unpleasant and potentially dangerous climatic changes. Therefore, in today?s world, the focus is on inducing users to reduce their household energy consumption, and shift to using energy produced from renewable sources, such as solar, water, and wind. Not only this, but users are being encouraged to generate the green energy, and to either store the surplus for future usage or to feed it back into the utility grid. In order to evolve such bidirectional energy and information flow, the concept of the smart-grid has been proposed [1].

A Methodology to Find Influential Prosumers in Prosumer Community Groups

Smart grids have created an emerging entity of “prosumer” in the energy value network who not only consumes energy but also generates and shares the green energy with the utility grid. Hence, effective management of prosumers has become pivotal to ensure a long-term, sustainable energy-sharing process. Recently, the concept of a Prosumer Community Group (PCG) has emerged as one of the most promising and effective ways to manage prosumers. However, developing sustainable PCGs is challenging. One of the key challenges in this regard is to assess the contribution made by individual prosumers of a PCG, and find a subset of the most influential prosumers whose behavior would facilitate the long-term sustainability of the PCG. In this paper, we have focused on this challenge and proposed an innovative methodology to assess and rank the prosumers, in order to build an influential membership base. We have assessed the long-term and short-term energy behaviors of prosumers based on multiple evaluation criteria and accordingly decided the ranks of the prosumers, whereby the higher ranked prosumers are deemed to be more influential in enhancing the long-term sustenance of the PCG. Furthermore, we have presented simulation results to verify our proposed methodology. The current literature on smart-grid research field has no work investigating this challenge, making our contribution novel.

Wireless Sensor Network Transport Protocol - A State of the Art

In this article, we present a survey of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) existing Transport Protocols. We have evaluated the design concepts of different protocols based on congestion control, reliability support and source traffic priority support. Then we draw the concluding remarks, while highlighting up-and-coming research challenges for WSN transport protocols, which should be addressed further in prospective designs.

Wireless Sensor Networks: Challenges Ahead

The aim of this paper is to analyze the different Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) transport protocols by identifying various experimental parameters in order to undertake a comparative evaluation. To build the groundwork, we first discuss the generic design for a transport protocol based on three key concepts, congestion control, reliability support and priority support. The basis of this design was developed by assessing several aspects of numerous transport protocols. However they all using different set of parameters and settings and hence it is difficult to benchmark one against the other. In this paper, we discuss the simulation settings like packet size, number of exploited sensors and their distribution in the field, buffer size, coverage area and power levels.

Energy resource management in smart home: state of the art and challenges ahead

Residential sector registers one of the highest energy consumers in the world; hence efficient Energy Resource Management (ERM) scheme has become essential in new home or renovation projects. Smart home concept is an appealing way to promote the ERM. According to the literature, diverse research efforts have been emerged to investigate the ERM in smart homes. However in order to succeed in future researches, it is imperative to realize the current position of the ERM in the smart home research field. A clear identification of gaps in existing literature would significantly benefit the new researchers to understand the challenges ahead. In this article, we critically discuss the state of the art and the open research issues of the ERM in smart home.

Evaluation of Wireless Home Automation Technologies for Smart Mining Camps in Remote Western Australia

Remote Western Australian (WA) is featured with harsh environmental and living conditions, but extremely rich soil with large mineral deposits. Mining companies have invested immensely in those areas, and mining camps have been constructed with thousands of Single Person Quarter (SPQ) units to fulfill mining worker accommodation. Major challenge faced by SPQ suppliers is improving the quality of life of the workers, while minimizing the energy cost. In recent years, Wireless Home Automation (WHA) has become an ideal choice for SPQs to achieve these targets. In this paper we perform one of the initial steps of the feasibility study of integrating WHA to SPQs. Generally in a WHA network, wireless sensors and actuators intelligently interconnect with each other through a suitable WHA technology. This paper evaluates different WHA technologies to find out the most suitable technology to implement WHA specifically for SPQs based on the practical requirements outlined by our industry collaborator, who is an Australian mobile accommodation company, supplying smart SPQs to mining camps.

Handling the Quality of Service for the data dissemination in Wireless Sensor Networks

Now-a-days Wireless Sensor Networks plays predominant role in the communication domain. The data to be disseminated from multiple sources to the destination base station or sink is having vital significance. There are many problems with which data can be conveyed up to the sink. The congestion, reliability, delay, fairness, etc. are of main concern. These can be treated as Quality of Service parameters that govern the performance of the WSN. Above all the Energy consumption is the main constrain for WSN node. It is very difficult to obtain good QoS by keeping energy consumption low. Even if response of one of QoS parameter will depends on the many other QoS parameters. We have to take care of all QoS parameters to improve the performance of the wireless sensor networks. This Quality of Services may improve the application base of the WSN. In this paper we study the QoS parameters that affect the data dissemination along with energy optimization. We are going to check the performance of the WSN against the QoS metrics for different data inputs. This may contain the periodic- non periodic data, event based data, transient or bursty data. For all these different types of inputs data we are checking the performance of QoS parameters like congestion, reliability and fairness. This may lead to new researcher to verify their results and excel their research work accordingly.