Atif Sharif

Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), an element of pervasive computing, are presently being used on a large scale to monitor real-time environmental status. However these sensors operate under extreme energy constraints and are designed by keeping an application in mind. Designing a new wireless sensor node is extremely challenging task and involves assessing a number of different parameters required by the target application, which includes range, antenna type, target technology, components, memory, storage, power, life time, security, computational capability, communication technology, power, size, programming interface and applications. This paper analyses commercially (and research prototypes) available wireless sensor nodes based on these parameters and outlines research directions in this area.

Wireless multimedia sensor network technology: A survey

Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) is comprised of small embedded video motes capable of extracting the surrounding environmental information, locally processing it and then wirelessly transmitting it to parent node or sink. It is comprised of video sensor, digital signal processing unit and digital radio interface. In this paper we have surveyed existing WMSN hardware and communication protocol layer technologies for achieving or fulfilling the objectives of WMSN. We have also listed the various technical challenges posed by this technology while discussing the communication protocol layer technologies. Sensor networking capabilities are urgently required for some of our most important scientific and societal problems like understanding the international carbon budget, monitoring water resources, monitoring vehicle emissions and safeguarding public health. This is a daunting research challenge requiring distributed sensor systems operating in complex environments while providing assurance of reliable and accurate sensing.

Prioritizing Information for Achieving QoS Control in WSN

Achieving QoS objective in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) that deals with multimedia information is of paramount importance in the WSN research community. From the application point of view, meeting application specific QoS constraints is equally important as designing energy efficient embedded circuitry for WSN nodes. Among various WSN communication protocol stack, the transport layer functionality has gain fundamental fame lately in addressing the application specific QoS objectives by supporting Source prioritization besides the reliability and congestion control aspects of the design that helps in gaining high throughput with minimum end-to-end packet latency. This paper present the design of a new transport layer protocol that prioritizes sensed information based on its nature while simultaneously supporting the data reliability and congestion control features. The proposed transport protocol is tested in three possible scenarios i.e. with priority, without and distributed priority features. Simulation results reveal that by prioritizing the Source information and prioritized intermediate storage and forwarding reduces the End-to-End (E-2-E) latency of Source packets having ≪100 msec except for Source A where it is slightly higher than 400msec compared to non prioritized case where the E-2-E Source packet latency accounts to ≫400msec which is quite significant. Simulation test has been performed for distributed prioritized intermediate storage and forwarding among which the network distribution with node K as prioritized intermediate storage node (DIST-K) outperformed all of the mentioned cases by having 100% achieved Source priority,0% packet drop rate and 0.28Mbps achieved bit rate.

Priority Enabled Transport Layer Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network

Achieving Quality of Service (QoS) objective in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) handling the multimedia information has significantly gained the importance lately besides energy efficient hardware designing. Transport layer of the WSN communication protocol stack plays a significant role in meeting the QoS objective of WSN. This paper presents a light weight transport protocol for WSN that can handle packets from a numbers of sources having different sensed information and having different priority levels. The protocol assigned middle motes are intelligent enough to achieve prioritization in transmission based on the priority level and packets Time-To-Live (TTL) information. Extensive simulation is carried out for the three different modes of the envisaged protocol having no prioritized enabled storage, complete prioritized enabled storage and distributed prioritized enabled storage. The results reveal that the significant improvement is observed in case of distributed prioritized enabled storage, approximately 3% data loss occurred, in comparison to 7% data loss for without prioritized enabled storage mode.

User friendly smart home infrastructure: BeeHouse

Home Automation is a major commercial field in modern days, many manufacturers have realised that fact and started to produce different types of solutions targeted at that market. The paper will present a user friendly smart home infrastructure that offers the base platform for modular wireless nodes (utilising ZigBee technology integrated with the Arduino microcontroller board) which can collect data, send information and control almost any aspect of the house (given that a proper interface is established), as well as the ability to access those nodes and their information through a cross-platform graphical user interface (a combination of Java and MySQL database). The system will be referred to as “BeeHouse” in this paper. This paper will propose a possible solution for a wireless modular home automation system that is smart, user friendly and easy to setup. This paper is part of the thesis of a final year project in Bachelors of Engineering (Computer Systems Engineering).

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.

Applications of Wireless Sensor Networks in Pharmaceutical Industry

Pharmaceutical and healthcare industries are highly regulated industries in each and every nation around the globe. Every nation has a governing body like USFDA, TGA, and M.H.R.A, Schedule-M etc. that assures that the medicines are manufactured under strict guidelines to ensure highest quality of manufactured products. However assuring high quality products requires that the manufacturing facility is monitored 24x7 and this monitoring requires the use of high end networking technology. Currently pharmaceutical plants capture this information using a number of scalar sensors that measure temperature, pressure, humidity etc. In some developing nations this sensed information is manually recorded by a supervisor in charge. This often results in data entry errors that need to be addressed. This paper aims at identifying current technologies that can be used by Indian Pharmaceutical Industries to capture this information and process it in real time to provide the kind of track and trace which so far is not implemented in majority of Indian pharmaceutical companies. We specifically focus on identifying the importance of Wireless Sensor Networks and how it can be implemented in pharmaceutical manufacturing plants.

Adaptive Channel Coding and Modulation Scheme Selection for Achieving High Throughput in Wireless Networks

Modern wireless communication demands reliable data communication at high throughput in severe channel conditions like narrowband interference, frequency selective fading due to multipath and attenuation of high frequencies. Traditional single carrier systems address this set of problems by the use of complex, computationally intensive equalization filters. The Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) based system, as opposed to single-carrier systems, is considered to be the future of the wireless communication and is being used to achieve high data rate by overcoming severe channel conditions without the use of these complex filters. This paper discusses the problem of Adaptive Modulation scheme selection through an OFDM based system over parallel frequency selective fading channels. An adaptive coding scheme is proposed by using Generalized Concatenated Codes (GCC), which have simple structure and are designed in such a way that they are best suited for fading channels. GCC are based on binary cyclic codes. The criterion of the proposed research is to optimize the throughput of a wireless system. Depending on the quality of sub-channels an adaptive modulation selection scheme and code assigning method is proposed. The proposed research combats against channel impairments better than those used in conventional systems by exploiting individual sub-channel condition. Results show better performance in terms of higher throughput by minimizing the bit error rate.

LCART: A cross-layered transport protocol for heterogeneous WSN

Lightweight Congestion Aware Reliable Transport protocol (LCART) is based on cross-layering the prevalent or reciprocal functionalities of Transport, MAC and Wireless-Physical layers in order to achieve energy efficiency and meeting QoS objectives of heterogeneous WSN1 including multimedia. LCART intelligently overcomes network congestion by the simultaneous use of Packet Service Time, Packet Inter Arrival Time, Buffer Occupancy Level and Channel Loading threshold limits and ensures packet level reliability by the use of β parameter entirely being dictated by the nature of traffic flow. LCART has been evaluated against TCP-Westwood+ (TCP-WW+), TCPWestwood (TCP-WW), TCPNewReno and TCPReno for 24 mote ad-hoc topology. The results reveal that LCART outperforms others by exhibiting highest good throughput of 0.3112 Mbps, average End-to-End (E-2-E) packet latency of < 80 msec for multimedia and < 130 msec for scalar information, 1.014% average percentage packet drop and overall exhibits energy efficient behavior.