Faisal Karim Shaikh

Underwater sensor network applications: a comprehensive survey

There is no escaping fact that a huge amount of unexploited resources lies underwater which covers almost 70% of the Earth. Yet, the aquatic world has mainly been unaffected by the recent advances in the area of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and their pervasive penetration in modern day research and industrial development. The current pace of research in the area of underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) is slow due to the difficulties arising in transferring the state-of-the-art WSNs to their underwater equivalent. Maximum underwater deployments rely on acoustics for enabling communication combined with special sensors having the capacity to take on harsh environment of the oceans. However, sensing and subsequent transmission tend to vary as per different subsea environments; for example, deep sea exploration requires altogether a different approach for communication as compared to shallow water communication. This paper particularly focuses on comprehensively gathering most recent developments in UWSN applications and their deployments. We have classified the underwater applications into five main classes, namely, monitoring, disaster, military, navigation, and sports, to cover the large spectrum of UWSN. The applications are further divided into relevant subclasses. We have also shown the challenges and opportunities faced by recent deployments of UWSN.

TRCCIT: Tunable reliability with Congestion Control for Information Transport in Wireless Sensor Networks

A core functionality of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is to transport information from the network to the application/user. The evolvable application reliability requirements and the fluctuating perturbations lead to continuous deviation between the attained and desired reliability. Using an existing approach that guarantees a highest reliability is not appropriate for WSN as this over-provisioning wastes the most valuable resources, e.g., energy. In this paper, we present a new approach called as Tunable Reliability with Congestion Control for Information Transport (TRCCIT) in WSN. To provide probabilistically guaranteed tunable reliability TRCCIT implements localized techniques such as probabilistic adaptive retransmissions, hybrid acknowledgment and retransmission timer management. TRCCIT pro-actively alleviates the network congestion by opportunistically transporting the information on multiple paths. TRCCIT fulfills application reliability requirements in a localized way, which is desirable for scalability and adaptability to large scale WSNs. Simulation results show that TRCCIT provides tunable reliability and efficiently mitigates the congestion.

Enabling Technologies for Green Internet of Things

Recent technological advances have led to an increase in the carbon footprint. Energy efficiency in the Internet of Things (IoT) has been attracting a lot of attention from researchers and designers over the last couple of years, paving the way for an emerging area called green IoT. There are various aspects (such as key enablers, communications, services, and applications) of IoT, where efficient utilization of energy is needed to enable a green IoT environment. We explore and discuss how the various enabling technologies (such as the Internet, smart objects, sensors, etc.) can be efficiently deployed to achieve a green IoT. Furthermore, we also review various IoT applications, projects and standardization efforts that are currently under way. Finally, we identify some of the emerging challenges that need to be addressed in the future to enable a green IoT.

On Modeling the Reliability of Data Transport in Wireless Sensor Networks

Data transport is a core function for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with different applications having varied requirements on the reliability and timeliness of data delivery. While node redundancy, inherent in WSNs, increases the fault tolerance, no guarantees on reliability levels can be assured. Furthermore, the frequent failures within WSNs impact the observed reliability over time and make it more challenging to achieve the desired reliability. Unfortunately, a framework for modeling reliability of data transport protocols in WSNs is currently missing. The existence of such a framework would simplify evaluation, comparison and also adaptation of these protocols. We formulate the problem of data transport in a WSN as a set of operations carried out on raw data. The operations aim at filtering the raw data to streamline its reliable transport towards the sink. Based on this formulation we systematically define a reliability framework. This paper argues for the usefulness of the reliability framework by classifying existing transport protocols and comparing their reliability

Generic Information Transport for Wireless Sensor Networks

A primary functionality of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is transporting the information acquired by the sensors as per the desired application requirements. The diverse applications supported by WSNs also stipulate a diverse range of reliability requirements for the transport of various information types. The continuous variation of application requirements and dynamic operational perturbations complicates the design of a generic solution for information transport in WSNs. In this paper, we present a new framework for generic information transport (GIT), which considers varied application requirements and evolvable network conditions in WSNs. GIT manages the information and utilizes a probabilistic approach to ensure tunable reliability of information transport. The GIT framework is distributed in nature and performs its operations locally. The simulation results validate the tunability of the GIT framework. In some setups GIT achieves up to 4-5 times reduction in number of transmissions compared to existing approaches.

gMAP: Efficient construction of global maps for mobility-assisted wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks are seeing increasing usage in several applications such as military, rescue and surveillance scenarios. Typical for such scenarios is that mobile nodes cooperate side-by-side with stationary sensor nodes to monitor the area of interest and to support the core network operations such as data transport. Global maps of the sensor field, such as temperature and residual energy maps, are of high interest for both users and network designers. However, the map construction can become very inefficient if it requires an extensive intervention of the resource-limited sensor nodes. In this work, we present gMAP, an extremely efficient mobility-assisted approach to construct global maps. In gMAP (a) sensor nodes do not need to process readings of other nodes and (b) require to communicate a minimal number of messages compared to all existing approaches. This is achieved by opportunistically exploiting node mobility to collect data of interest, keeping sensor nodes transmit only their own readings on-demand to a mobile node in their transmission area.

Emerging Trends and Applications in Information Communication Technologies

For countries like Pakistan where demand of energy is being increased every year, the design of a framework that analyzes the impact of adding renewable energy to the power grid is of high interest. Such analysis may help ensure a reliable energy supply, and identify energy savings opportunities. Appropriate simulation tools are needed in order to discover the best approach. Such impact analysis also results in cost-effective generation and, further, in environmental improvements. In this paper, one analysis frame work is proposed. The main objective of this study is to propose a framework that helps optimize development and implementation of renewable energy resources focusing on their probable advantages to improve both the electricity system and the environment. The results of this analysis will be helpful in determining the performance issues related to generation, transmission and green technology. Prime locations inside system may be identified where adequate renewable generation may efficiently address transmission crisis.

A comparative study of data transport protocols in wireless sensor networks

Several proposals describing transport layer protocols for sensor networks appear in the literature. As each proposal is typically evaluated in the context of carefully selected parameters and scenarios, the benefits can be subjective. Also, given the limited details available of different proposals, it is difficult for developers of sensor network applications to select from the range of alternative transport protocols. This paper develops a common basis for evaluation of varied proposals. We first classify and review the existing protocols and evaluate them by measuring their performance in terms of responsiveness and efficiency in a conformal simulation environment and for a wide range of operational conditions. Common sources of poor performance are identified. Based on this experience, a set of design principles for the designers of applications and future transport protocols is presented.

Comparative Analysis of VANET Routing Protocols: On Road Side Unit Placement Strategies

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a communication paradigm where vehicles can communicate directly with other vehicles or via intermediate fixed architectures called as road side units (RSU). Generally, the density of vehicles vary from very dense to shallow depending on various factors and different scenarios of the roads. In cities the number of cars is high and on highways and specifically in rural areas the density of vehicles varies. Therefore, direct vehicle to vehicle communication faces many problems in communication due to outages. In such scenarios the intermediate infrastructure needs to play an important role. Various routing protocols are implemented for VANETs with variety of design goals. In this paper we investigate the performance of proactive and reactive routing protocols, namely destination sequence distance vector (DSDV) and ad-hoc on demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol, for various placement strategies of RSU based relays and in city scenario. The simulations were carried on NS2 which suggest that in various settings AODV perform better than DSDV routing protocol.

MPM: Map Based Predictive Monitoring for Wireless Sensor Networks

We present the design of a Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) level event prediction framework to monitor the network and its operational environment to support proactive self* actions. For example, by monitoring and subsequently predicting trends on network load or sensor nodes energy levels, the WSN can proactively initiate self-reconfiguration. We propose a Map based Predictive Monitoring (MPM) approach where a selected WSN attribute is first profiled as WSN maps, and based on the maps history, predicts future maps using time series modeling. The ”attribute” maps are created using a gridding technique and predicted maps are used to detect events using our regioning algorithm. The proposed approach is also a general framework to cover multiple application domains. For proof of concept, we show MPM’s enhanced ability to also accurately ”predict” the network partitioning, accommodating parameters such as shape and location of the partition with a very high accuracy and efficiency.