Jean-Marie Bonnin

Wireless sensor networks: a survey on recent developments and potential synergies

Wireless sensor network (WSN) has emerged as one of the most promising technologies for the future. This has been enabled by advances in technology and availability of small, inexpensive, and smart sensors resulting in cost effective and easily deployable WSNs. However, researchers must address a variety of challenges to facilitate the widespread deployment of WSN technology in real-world domains. In this survey, we give an overview of wireless sensor networks and their application domains including the challenges that should be addressed in order to push the technology further. Then we review the recent technologies and testbeds for WSNs. Finally, we identify several open research issues that need to be investigated in future.Our survey is different from existing surveys in that we focus on recent developments in wireless sensor network technologies. We review the leading research projects, standards and technologies, and platforms. Moreover, we highlight a recent phenomenon in WSN research that is to explore synergy between sensor networks and other technologies and explain how this can help sensor networks achieve their full potential. This paper intends to help new researchers entering the domain of WSNs by providing a comprehensive survey on recent developments.

Radio resource management in emerging heterogeneous wireless networks

Deployment of heterogeneous wireless networks is spreading throughout the world as users want to be connected anytime, anywhere, and anyhow. Meanwhile, these users are increasingly interested in multimedia applications such as video streaming and Voice over IP (VoIP), which require strict Quality of Service (QoS) support. Provisioning network resources with such constraints is a challenging task. In fact, considering the availability of various access technologies (WiFi, WiMAX, or cellular networks), it is difficult for a network operator to find reliable criteria to select the best network that ensures user satisfaction while maximizing network utilization. Designing an efficient Radio Resource Management (RRM), in this type of environment, is mandatory for solving such problems. In order to provide a better understanding of RRMs design, this paper presents a detailed investigation of key challenges that constitute an efficient RRM framework. More importantly, an overview with a classification of recent solutions, in terms of decision making, is provided along with the discussion.

Comparative Handover Performance Analysis of IPv6 Mobility Management Protocols

IPv6 mobility management is one of the most challenging research topics for enabling mobility service in the forthcoming mobile wireless ecosystems. The Internet Engineering Task Force has been working for developing efficient IPv6 mobility management protocols. As a result, Mobile IPv6 and its extensions such as Fast Mobile IPv6 and Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 have been developed as host-based mobility management protocols. While the host-based mobility management protocols were being enhanced, the network-based mobility management protocols such as Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) and Fast Proxy Mobile IPv6 (FPMIPv6) have been standardized. In this paper, we analyze and compare existing IPv6 mobility management protocols including the recently standardized PMIPv6 and FPMIPv6. We identify each IPv6 mobility management protocols characteristics and performance indicators by examining handover operations. Then, we analyze the performance of the IPv6 mobility management protocols in terms of handover latency, handover blocking probability, and packet loss. Through the conducted numerical results, we summarize considerations for handover performance.

An overview and classification of research approaches in green wireless networks

Energy consumption of wireless networks is now a very important research topic and several research teams worldwide are proposing solutions for the so-called green wireless networks, i.e. energy-efficient wireless networks. Although the increase of this research activity is rather recent, a great number of research papers and collaborative projects exist nowadays. We first summarise the metrics used in the related literature for performance evaluation. Then, we focus on describing the current approaches proposed by reviewing a good number of references from literature. The main research directions are presented: the component level research, where the efforts are mainly concentrated on the power amplifier section; the cell layout adaptation including the cell-breathing technique and coverage extension methods like femtocells and relays; in addition, we also include the radio resource management and the cognitive radio into the studied approaches. These methods are analysed, compared, classified and then a framework of classification and integration is proposed. We finally describe some major collaborative projects dedicated to this topic.

Routing protocols in Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks: A comprehensive survey

This article presents a comprehensive survey of routing protocols proposed for routing in Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks (VDTN) in vehicular environment. DTNs are utilized in various operational environments, including those subject to disruption and disconnection and those with high-delay, such as Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANET). We focus on a special type of VANET, where the vehicular traffic is sparse and direct end-to-end paths between communicating parties do not always exist. Thus, communication in this context falls into the category of Vehicular Delay Tolerant Network (VDTN). Due to the limited transmission range of an RSU (Road Side Unit), remote vehicles, in VDTN, may not connect to the RSU directly and thus have to rely on intermediate vehicles to relay the packets. During the message relay process, complete end-to-end paths may not exist in highly partitioned VANETs. Therefore, the intermediate vehicles must buffer and forward messages opportunistically. Through buffer, carry and forward, the message can eventually be delivered to the destination even if an end-to-end connection never exists between source and destination. The main objective of routing protocols in DTN is to maximize the probability of delivery to the destination while minimizing the end-to-end delay. Also, vehicular traffic models are important for DTN routing in vehicle networks because the performance of DTN routing protocols is closely related to population and mobility models of the network.

Cognitive radio for vehicular ad hoc networks (CR-VANETs): approaches and challenges

With growing interest in using cognitive radio (CR) technology in wireless communication systems for vehicles, it is envisioned that future vehicles will be CR-enabled. This paper discusses CR technologies for vehicular networks aimed at improving vehicular communication efficiency. CR for vehicular networks has the potential of becoming a killer CR application in the future due to a huge consumer market for vehicular communications. This paper surveys novel approaches and discusses research challenges related to the use of cognitive radio technology in vehicular ad hoc networks. We review how CR technologies such as dynamic spectrum access, adaptive software-defined radios, and cooperative communications will enhance vehicular communications and, hence, present the potential of transforming vehicle communication in terms of efficiency and safety. Our work is different from existing works in that we provide recent advances and open research directions on applying cognitive radio in vehicular ad hoc networks (CR-VANETs) focusing on architecture, machine learning, cooperation, reprogrammability, and spectrum management as well as QoE optimization for infotainment applications. A taxonomy of recent advances in cognitive radio for vehicular networks is also provided. In addition, several challenges and requirements have been identified. The research on applying CR in vehicular networks is still in its early stage, and there are not many experimental platforms due to their complex setup and requirements. Some related testbeds and research projects are provided at the end.

New control plane in 3GPP LTE/EPC architecture for on-demand connectivity service

The on-demand connectivity service is one of the main requirements of the cellular data network. It consists in moving sessions transparently and temporarily from one network equipment to another without causing user session interruption. This service enables networks to cope with the ever-changing network condition such as sudden congestion or arbitrary network equipment failure. In this paper, we argue that the cellular data networks such as LTE/EPC lack the network visibility and control elasticity that enable the on-demand connectivity service. The Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging trend that should be considered to overcomes the above drawback. As a first step, we propose an OpenFlow-based control plane for LTE/EPC architectures. Using resiliency and load balancing use cases, we show that our proposal guarantees the on-demand connectivity service.

QoE-Aware Admission Control for Multimedia Applications in IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks

Widespread use of wireless networks nowadays raises many problems for service providers in managing their resources. These problems are caused mainly by restricted bandwidth and variable radio condition in this type of network. Moreover, with the emergence of multimedia traffic and its requirements in terms of quality, admission control is hence an inevitable choice to optimize network resources while maintaining high service quality at users. In this paper, we propose an admission control mechanism based on quality of experience (QoE) perceived by users. The human QoE is obtained by a tool called pseudo subjective quality assessment (PSQA), which is based on statistic learning using random neural network (RNN). Instead of relying on technical parameters such as bandwidth, loss, or latency, which do not correlate well with human perception, our scheme is based on mean opinion score (MOS) but without interaction from real humans. The simulation results demonstrate the better performance of our proposition compared to the loss-based approach regarding user satisfaction evaluated by achieved QoE at user and bandwidth utilization of the network evaluated by good put.

Cognitive radio for M2M and Internet of Things: A survey

Internet of things (IoT) paradigm poses new challenges to the communication technology as numerous heterogeneous objects will need to be connected. To address these issues new radio technologies and network architectures need to be designed to cater to several future devices having connectivity demands. For radio communications, the frequency spectrum allocation will have to be adapted for efficient spectrum utilization considering new bandwidth and application requirements. Novel research directions based on the use of opportunistic radio resource utilization such as those based on cognitive radio (CR) technology will have to be pursued for efficiency as well as reliability. Cognitive Radio is a promising enabler communication technology for IoT. Its opportunistic communication paradigm is suited to communicating objects having event driven nature, that generate bursty traffic. Cognitive Radio can help overcome the problems of collision and excessive contention in the wireless access network that will arise due to the deployment of several objects connected to infrastructure through radio links. However, there are several issues that need to be addressed before cognitive radio technology can be used for Internet of things. This paper surveys novel approaches and discusses research challenges related to the use of cognitive radio technology for Internet of things. In addition, the paper presents a general background on cognitive radio and Internet of Things with some potential applications. Our survey is different from existing surveys in that we focus on recent advances and ongoing research directions in cognitive radio in the context of Machine to Machine and Internet of Things. We review CR solutions that address generic problems of IoT including emerging challenges of autonomicity, scalability, energy efficiency, heterogeneity in terms of user equipment capabilities, complexity and environments, etc. The solutions are supported by our taxonomy of different CR approaches that are classified into two categories, flexible and efficient networking, and tackling heterogeneity. This paper intends to help new researchers entering the domain of CR and IoT by providing a comprehensive survey on recent advances.

Distributed IP mobility management from the perspective of the IETF: motivations, requirements, approaches, comparison, and challenges

The recent explosion of mobile Internet traffic is accelerating the evolution of mobile network architectures toward flat architectures with all IP backhaul support. IP mobility support protocols are thus required to be adopted in such mobile network architectures. Accordingly, the IETF Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) working group was recently chartered to address such architectural changes with rapidly increasing mobile Internet usages. Unlike existing IP mobility support protocols, DMM protocols being considered at the IETF aim at distributing mobile Internet traffic in an optimal way while not relying on centrally deployed mobility anchors. In this article, we first discuss motivations and requirements of DMM. We then present two different possible approaches: host-based and network-based DMM approaches. Furthermore, comprehensive comparison results are provided. Finally, we discuss challenges in developments of DMM protocols.