Eduardo Cañete

HERO: A hierarchical, efficient and reliable routing protocol for wireless sensor and actor networks

It is well known that the use of clusters makes wireless sensor and actor networks more scalable, and it also reduces energy consumption and improves their performance. Most hierarchical routing and clustering protocols are designed to be efficient when the data is sent from the sensor nodes to their cluster-head but not when it is sent the opposite way. In this paper, a simple mechanism to form clusters in an efficient way by using meta-data is proposed. And, furthermore, a novelty multi-hop and fault-tolerance routing protocol able to transport data from sensor nodes to their cluster-head and vice versa in an energy-efficient way is also presented. Moreover, this approach allows developers to establish the desired reliability level (in a quantitative way) between two nodes which are N hops far away from each other. The performance and the energy consumption of our approach is studied by means of a set of experiments which have been carried out by using the COOJA simulator.

A service-oriented approach to facilitate WSAN application development

Due to the complex nature of developing Wireless Sensor and Actor Network (WSAN) applications it is obvious that new frameworks, tools, middleware and higher-level abstractions are needed to make the task of the developers easier. Depending on the WSAN system we want to develop, different characteristics must be taken into account but, perhaps, some of the most important are the capacity to add real-time constraints, the QoS and, of course energy saving. Our proposal USEME is a service-oriented and component-based framework which allows the easy combination of macro-programming and node-centric programming to develop real-time and efficient applications over WSANs. USEME allows the specification of real-time constraints between services, permits the use of groups to structure the network and is platform independent. Two prototypes (Imote2.Net and SunSPOT) have been implemented and several performance tests have been carried out.

A Service-Oriented Middleware for Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks are potentially one of the most important technologies of this century. There are many fields where they can be used in order to develop varied and interesting applications: high security environments, environmental monitoring, objects and events detection, military surveillance and precision agriculture. On the other hand, the ease of programming is a major barrier to the adoption of this kind of system. Recently, different high-level programming abstractions and middleware have appeared as promising solutions. In this paper, a middleware is proposed for USEME, a Service-Oriented Framework focussed on the deployment of lightweight services in sensors and actors. The high-level model supported abstracts application programmers from implementation tasks such as discovery, communication, group formation or real-time constraints.

Measuring and Modeling the Energy Cost of Reconfiguration in Sensor Networks

As wireless sensor networks (WSNs) must operate for long periods on a limited power budget, estimating the energy cost of software operations is critical. Contemporary reconfiguration approaches for WSN allow for software evolution at various granularities; from reflashing of a complete software image, through replacement of complete applications, to the reconfiguration of individual software components. This paper contributes a generic model for measuring and modeling the energy cost of reconfiguration in WSN. We validate that this model is accurate in the face of different hardware platforms, software stacks, and software encapsulation approaches. We have embedded this model in the loosely coupled component infrastructure middleware, resulting in the first energy aware reconfigurable component model for sensor networks. We evaluate our approach using two real-world WSN applications and demonstrate that our model predicts the energy cost of reconfiguration with 93% accuracy. Using this model, we demonstrate that selecting the most appropriate software modularization approach is key to minimizing energy consumption.

Sensor4PRI: A Sensor Platform for the Protection of Railway Infrastructures

Wireless Sensor Networks constitute pervasive and distributed computing systems and are potentially one of the most important technologies of this century. They have been specifically identified as a good candidate to become an integral part of the protection of critical infrastructures. In this paper we focus on railway infrastructure protection and we present the details of a sensor platform designed to be integrated into a slab track system in order to carry out both installation and maintenance monitoring activities. In the installation phase, the platform helps operators to install the slab tracks in the right position. In the maintenance phase, the platform collects information about the structural health and behavior of the infrastructure when a train travels along it and relays the readings to a base station. The base station uses trains as data mules to upload the information to the internet. The use of a train as a data mule is especially suitable for collecting information from remote or inaccessible places which do not have a direct connection to the internet and require less network infrastructure. The overall aim of the system is to deploy a permanent economically viable monitoring system to improve the safety of railway infrastructures.

NeuralSens: A neural network based framework to allow dynamic adaptation in wireless sensor and actor networks

Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs) constitute a new way of distributed computing and are steadily gaining importance due to the wide variety of applications that can be implemented with them. As a result they are increasingly present everywhere (industry, farm use, buildings, etc.). However, there are still many important areas in which the WSANs can be improved. One of the most important aspects is to give the sensor networks the capability of being wirelessly reprogrammed so that developers do not have to physically interact with the sensor nodes. Many proposals that deal with this issue have been proposed, but most of them are hardly dependent on the operating system and demand a high energy consumption, even if only a small change has been made in the code. In this work, we propose a new way of wirelessly reprogramming based on the concept of neural networks. Unlike most of the existing approaches, our proposal is independent of the operating system and allows small pieces of code to be reprogrammed with a low energy consumption. The architecture developed to achieve that is described and case studies are presented that show the use of our proposal by means of practical examples.

Using Wireless Sensor Networks and Trains as Data Mules to Monitor Slab Track Infrastructures

Recently, slab track systems have arisen as a safer and more sustainable option for high speed railway infrastructures, compared to traditional ballasted tracks. Integrating Wireless Sensor Networks within these infrastructures can provide structural health related data that can be used to evaluate their degradation and to not only detect failures but also to predict them. The design of such systems has to deal with a scenario of large areas with inaccessible zones, where neither Internet coverage nor electricity supply is guaranteed. In this paper we propose a monitoring system for slab track systems that measures vibrations and displacements in the track. Collected data is transmitted to passing trains, which are used as data mules to upload the information to a remote control center. On arrival at the station, the data is stored in a database, which is queried by an application in order to detect and predict failures. In this paper, different communication architectures are designed and tested to select the most suitable system meeting such requirements as efficiency, low cost and data accuracy. In addition, to ensure communication between the sensing devices and the train, the communication system must take into account parameters such as train speed, antenna coverage, band and frequency.

Smart Winery: A Real-Time Monitoring System for Structural Health and Ullage in Fino Style Wine Casks

The rapid development in low-cost sensor and wireless communication technology has made it possible for a large number of devices to coexist and exchange information autonomously. It has been predicted that a substantial number of devices will be able to exchange and provide information about an environment with the goal of improving our lives, under the well-known paradigm of the Internet of Things (IoT). One of the main applications of these kinds of devices is the monitoring of scenarios. In order to improve the current wine elaboration process, this paper presents a real-time monitoring system to supervise the status of wine casks. We have focused on a special kind of white wine, called Fino, principally produced in Andalusia (Southern Spain). The process by which this kind of wind is monitored is completely different from that of red wine, as the casks are not completely full and, due to the fact that they are not renewed very often, are more prone to breakage. A smart cork prototype monitors the structural health, the ullage, and the level of light inside the cask and the room temperature. The advantage of this smart cork is that it allows winemakers to monitor, in real time, the status of each wine cask so that, if an issue is detected (e.g., a crack appears in the cask), they can act immediately to resolve it. Moreover, abnormal parameters or incorrect environmental conditions can be detected in time before the wine loses its desired qualities. The system has been tested in “Bodegas San Acacio,” a winery based in Montemayor, a town in the north of Andalusia. Results show that the use of such a system can provide a solution that tracks the evolution and assesses the suitability of the delicate wine elaboration process in real time, which is especially important for the kind of wine considered in this paper.

A wireless sensor network framework based on light databases

The development of wireless sensor and actor network applications is made difficult by the fact that developers have to face up to a set of resource‐constrained devices which have to work wirelessly and distributely. In this work, we propose a framework to create and integrate light databases within nodes that need to manage and process data. The databases will be designed by means of simple entity‐relationship models from which the code needed to manage the database will be generated. Basically, this code will be composed of data structures and the algorithms in charge of managing them. This architecture will help developers avoid data redundancy to better manage the memory of the nodes and to save time in developing applications. Copyright