Hussein T. Mouftah

Wireless Sensor Networks for Cost-Efficient Residential Energy Management in the Smart Grid

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) will play a key role in the extension of the smart grid towards residential premises, and enable various demand and energy management applications. Efficient demand-supply balance and reducing electricity expenses and carbon emissions will be the immediate benefits of these applications. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of an in-home energy management (iHEM) application. The performance of iHEM is compared with an optimization-based residential energy management (OREM) scheme whose objective is to minimize the energy expenses of the consumers. We show that iHEM decreases energy expenses, reduces the contribution of the consumers to the peak load, reduces the carbon emissions of the household, and its savings are close to OREM. On the other hand, iHEM application is more flexible as it allows communication between the controller and the consumer utilizing the wireless sensor home area network (WSHAN). We evaluate the performance of iHEM under the presence of local energy generation capability, prioritized appliances, and for real-time pricing. We show that iHEM reduces the expenses of the consumers for each case. Furthermore, we show that packet delivery ratio, delay, and jitter of the WSHAN improve as the packet size of the monitoring applications, that also utilize the WSHAN, decreases.

Survey of ATM switch architectures

For reasons of economy and flexibility, BISDN (Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network) is expected to replace existing application-oriented communication networks. ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) is a high-speed packet-switching technique that has emerged as the most promising technology for BISDN. Since early 1980s, a large number of architectures have been proposed for ATM switching. In this paper, we present a descriptive survey of ATM switch architectures, with emphasis on electronic space-division point-to-point switches.

A Survey of Architectures and Localization Techniques for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

The widespread adoption of the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in various applications in the terrestrial environment and the rapid advancement of the WSN technology have motivated the development of Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs). UASNs and terrestrial WSNs have several common properties while there are several challenges particular to UASNs that are mostly due to acoustic communications, and inherent mobility. These challenges call for novel architectures and protocols to ensure successful operation of the UASN. Localization is one of the fundamental tasks for UASNs which is required for data tagging, node tracking, target detection, and it can be used for improving the performance of medium access and network protocols. Recently, various UASN architectures and a large number of localization techniques have been proposed. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of these architectures and localization methods. To familiarize the reader with the UASNs and localization concepts, we start our paper by providing background information on localization, state-of-the-art oceanographic systems, and the challenges of underwater communications. We then present our detailed survey, followed by a discussion on the performance of the localization techniques and open research issues.

A framework for service-guaranteed shared protection in WDM mesh networks

In this article a framework for end-to-end service-guaranteed shared protection in dynamic wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) mesh networks, called short leap shared protection (SLSP), is introduced. The idea of SLSP is to divide each working path into several overlapped protection domains, each of which contains a working and protection path pair. In addition to a guaranteed restoration service, SLSP is designed to satisfy the future requirements of wavelength-routed optical mesh networks in scalability, class of service, and capacity efficiency. Tutorial-like discussions are given in the architecture design and signaling mechanisms for implementing the SLSP framework in a dynamic network environment with examples and illustrations. To show that SLSP can improve capacity efficiency, simulations are conducted using four networks (22-, 30-, 79-, 100-node) for a comparative study between ordinary shared protection schemes and SLSP.

Energy-Efficient Information and Communication Infrastructures in the Smart Grid: A Survey on Interactions and Open Issues

Smart grid has modernized the way electricity is generated, transported, distributed, and consumed by integrating advanced sensing, communications, and control in the day-to-day operation of the grid. Electricity is a core utility for the functioning of society and for the services provided by information and communication technologies (ICTs). Several concepts of the smart grid, such as dynamic pricing, distributed generation, and demand management, have significantly impacted the operation of ICT services, in particular, communication networks and data centers. Ongoing energy-efficiency and operational expenditures reduction efforts in communication networks and data centers have gained another dimension with those smart grid concepts. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on the smart grid-driven approaches in energy-efficient communications and data centers, and the interaction between smart grid and information and communication infrastructures. Although the studies on smart grid, energy-efficient communications, and green data centers have been separately surveyed in previous studies, to this end, research that falls in the intersection of those fields has not been properly classified and surveyed yet. We start our survey by providing background information on the smart grid and continue with surveying smart grid-driven approaches in energy-efficient communication systems, followed by energy, cost and emission minimizing approaches in data centers, and the corresponding cloud network infrastructure. We discuss the open issues in smart grid-driven approaches in ICTs and point some important research directions such as the distributed renewable energy generation capability-coupled communication infrastructures, optimum energy-efficient network design for the smart grid environment, the impact of green communication techniques on the reliability and latency requirements of smart grid data, workload consolidation with smart grid-awareness, and many more.

Opportunistic routing for wireless ad hoc and sensor networks: Present and future directions

Opportunistic routing has recently attracted much attention as it is considered a promising direction for improving the performance of wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. With opportunistic routing, intermediate nodes collaborate on packet forwarding in a localized and consistent manner. Opportunistic routing greatly increases transmission reliability and network throughput by taking advantage of the broadcast nature of the wireless medium. In this article we first illustrate the basic idea behind opportunistic routing, and then categorize current research work based on different criteria. We illustrate how different protocols work, and discuss their merits and drawbacks. Finally, we point out potential issues and future directions in opportunistic routing for wireless ad hoc and sensor networks.

Wireless multimedia sensor and actor networks for the next generation power grid

Electrical power grid is undergoing a major renovation, to meet the power quality and power availability demands of the 21st century. The new power grid, which is also called as the smart grid, aims to integrate the recent technological advancements in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) field to the power engineering field. The present smart grid implementations focus on smart meter based utility-to-meter and utility-to-customer communications. Although these features provide significant improvements on the customer management side, in the following decades, grid management will be one of the major ICT-dominant fields. Recently, adoption of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) for the power grid is gaining wide attention from the industry and the academia. Scalar sensor measurements bring valuable insights, however they can provide limited set of information. In the next generation power grid, limited-sensing, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) based, centrally controlled operational architecture will be replaced with wireless connected, low-cost, multimedia sensors combined with distributed decision-making and acting systems, working in coordination with a supervisory software tool. In this paper, we discuss the potential applications and the challenges of employing wireless multimedia sensor and actor network (WMSAN) for the smart grid.

QoS routing for wireless ad hoc networks: problems, algorithms, and protocols

QoS routing plays an important role for providing QoS in wireless ad hoc networks. The goals of QoS routing are in general twofold: selecting routes with satisfied QoS requirement(s), and achieving global efficiency in resource utilization. In this article we first discuss some key design considerations in providing QoS routing support, and present a review of previous work addressing the issue of route selection subject to QoS constraint(s). We then devise an on-demand delay-constrained unicast routing protocol. Various strategies are employed in the protocol to reduce the communication overhead in acquiring cost-effective delay-constrained routes. Simulation results are used to verify our expectation of the high performance of the devised protocol. Finally, we discuss some possible future directions for providing efficient QoS routing support in wireless ad hoc networks.

Media access control for Ethernet passive optical networks: an overview

Medium access control is one of the crucial issues in the design of Ethernet passive optical networks. To ensure efficient transmission, an EPON system must employ a MAC mechanism to arbitrate access to the shared medium in order to avoid data collisions in the upstream direction and at the same time efficiently share the upstream transmission bandwidth among all ONUs. The purpose of this article is to provide a good understanding of the MAC issue, discuss the major problems involved (e.g., multiple access, bandwidth allocation, transmission scheduling, and quality of service support), and present an overview of the state-of-the-art solutions proposed thus far to the problems. It is also our purpose to motivate further studies on the problems described in this article

On the characterization of binary concentration-encoded molecular communication in nanonetworks

Abstract In this study, nanoscale communication networks have been investigated in the context of binary concentration-encoded unicast molecular communication suitable for numerous emerging applications, for example in healthcare and nanobiomedicine. The main focus of the paper has been given to the spatiotemporal distribution of signal strength and modulation schemes suitable for short-range, medium-range, and long-range molecular communication between two communicating nanomachines in a nanonetwork. This paper has principally focused on bio-inspired transmission techniques for concentration-encoded molecular communication systems. Spatiotemporal distributions of a carrier signal in the form of the concentration of diffused molecules over the molecular propagation channel and diffusion-dependent communication ranges have been explained for various scenarios. Finally, the performance analysis of modulation schemes has been evaluated in the form of the steady-state loss of amplitude of the received concentration signals and its dependence on the transmitter–receiver distance.