Apolinar González-Potes

Developing a New Wireless Sensor Network Platform and Its Application in Precision Agriculture

Wireless sensor networks are gaining greater attention from the research community and industrial professionals because these small pieces of “smart dust” offer great advantages due to their small size, low power consumption, easy integration and support for “green” applications. Green applications are considered a hot topic in intelligent environments, ubiquitous and pervasive computing. This work evaluates a new wireless sensor network platform and its application in precision agriculture, including its embedded operating system and its routing algorithm. To validate the technological platform and the embedded operating system, two different routing strategies were compared: hierarchical and flat. Both of these routing algorithms were tested in a small-scale network applied to a watermelon field. However, we strongly believe that this technological platform can be also applied to precision agriculture because it incorporates a modified version of LORA-CBF, a wireless location-based routing algorithm that uses cluster-based flooding. Cluster-based flooding addresses the scalability concerns of wireless sensor networks, while the modified LORA-CBF routing algorithm includes a metric to monitor residual battery energy. Furthermore, results show that the modified version of LORA-CBF functions well with both the flat and hierarchical algorithms, although it functions better with the flat algorithm in a small-scale agricultural network.

Distributed multi-agent architecture for real-time wireless control networks of multiple plants

Abstract This paper describes an interesting model architecture based on the tree topology, as well as its analysis through an associated validation method for control networks designed for low-rate wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSAN), consisting of multiple control loops closed over a wireless communication network, taking advantage of the flexible communications features of IEEE 802.15.4 protocol. The main problem to be addressed is the control of multiple or parallel plants, which should have an intelligent and flexible architecture based on multi-agent systems (MAS), that allows to add or remove new plants or nodes online, without the need of reconfiguring the system, while maintaining temporal and functional restrictions in the system. Important issues to consider in the research are tackled herein like topology, optimal static routing, end-to-end test analysis of the real-time flows on the WSAN, real-time kernel with Earliest Deadline First (EDF) scheduler, periodic and aperiodic tasking models for the nodes, lightweight and flexible compensation-based control algorithms for WSAN that exhibit packet dropouts, and an event-triggered sampling scheme. Additionally, as example of an application in a simulation environment is presented, in which is intended to guarantee an optimal parallel fed-batch bioreactor operations model controlled over a WSAN, using a master–slave synchronization system as control strategy, obtaining an accurate end-to-end communication analysis of the proposed plant with Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks.

Comparative Analysis of Wireless Broadband Mesh and Multi-hop Networks

This paper provides a comparative analysis of wireless broadband mesh and multi-hop networks. This analysis focuses on synchronization and centralized and distributed scheduling in wireless broadband mesh networks. In addition, it also describes the additional addressing and connection definition that applies to multi-hop relay systems. The comparative analysis is made on the basis of conceptual flow diagrams.