Kin K. Leung

MAC Essentials for Wireless Sensor Networks

The wireless medium being inherently broadcast in nature and hence prone to interferences requires highly optimized medium access control (MAC) protocols. This holds particularly true for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consisting of a large amount of miniaturized battery-powered wireless networked sensors required to operate for years with no human intervention. There has hence been a growing interest on understanding and optimizing WSN MAC protocols in recent years, where the limited and constrained resources have driven research towards primarily reducing energy consumption of MAC functionalities. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive state-of-the-art study in which we thoroughly expose the prime focus of WSN MAC protocols, design guidelines that inspired these protocols, as well as drawbacks and shortcomings of the existing solutions and how existing and emerging technology will influence future solutions. In contrast to previous surveys that focused on classifying MAC protocols according to the technique being used, we provide a thematic taxonomy in which protocols are classified according to the problems dealt with. We also show that a key element in selecting a suitable solution for a particular situation is mainly driven by the statistical properties of the generated traffic.

A survey on the ietf protocol suite for the internet of things: standards, challenges, and opportunities

Technologies to support the Internet of Things are becoming more important as the need to better understand our environments and make them smart increases. As a result it is predicted that intelligent devices and networks, such as WSNs, will not be isolated, but connected and integrated, composing computer networks. So far, the IP-based Internet is the largest network in the world; therefore, there are great strides to connect WSNs with the Internet. To this end, the IETF has developed a suite of protocols and open standards for accessing applications and services for wireless resource constrained networks. However, many open challenges remain, mostly due to the complex deployment characteristics of such systems and the stringent requirements imposed by various services wishing to make use of such complex systems. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the current approaches to standardization in this area can be improved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the IoT field. To this end, this article presents an overview of current standards and research activities in both industry and academia.

Convergence of Iterative Waterfilling Algorithm for Gaussian Interference Channels

The full diversity gain provided by a multi-antenna channel can be achieved by transmit beamforming and receive combining. This requires the knowledge of channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter which is difficult to obtain in practice. Quantized beamforming where fixed codebooks known at both the transmitter and the receiver are used to quantize the CSI has been proposed to solve this problem. Most recent works focus attention on limited feedback codebook design for the uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channel. Such designs are sub-optimal when used in correlated channels. In this paper, we propose systematic codebook design for correlated channels when channel statistical information is known at the transmitter. This design is motivated by studying the performance of pure statistical beamforming in correlated channels and is implemented by maps that can rotate and scale spherical caps on the Grassmannian manifold. Based on this study, we show that even statistical beamforming is near-optimal if the transmitter covariance matrix is ill-conditioned and receiver covariance matrix is well-conditioned. This leads to a partitioning of the transmit and receive covariance spaces based on their conditioning with variable feedback requirements to achieve an operational performance level in the different partitions. When channel statistics are difficult to obtain at the transmitter, we propose a universal codebook design (also implemented by the rotation-scaling maps) that is robust to channel statistics. Numerical studies show that even few bits of feedback, when applied with our designs, lead to near perfect CSI performance in a variety of correlated channel conditions.The full diversity gain provided by a multi-antenna channel can be achieved by transmit beamforming and receive combining. This requires the knowledge of channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter which is difficult to obtain in practice. Quantized beamforming where fixed codebooks known at both the transmitter and the receiver are used to quantize the CSI has been proposed to solve this problem. Most recent works focus attention on limited feedback codebook design for the uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channel. Such designs are sub-optimal when used in correlated channels. In this paper, we propose systematic codebook design for correlated channels when channel statistical information is known at the transmitter. This design is motivated by studying the performance of pure statistical beamforming in correlated channels and is implemented by maps that can rotate and scale spherical caps on the Grassmannian manifold. Based on this study, we show that even statistical beamforming is near-optimal if the transmitter covariance matrix is ill-conditioned and receiver covariance matrix is well-conditioned. This leads to a partitioning of the transmit and receive covariance spaces based on their conditioning with variable feedback requirements to achieve an operational performance level in the different partitions. When channel statistics are difficult to obtain at the transmitter, we propose a universal codebook design (also implemented by the rotation-scaling maps) that is robust to channel statistics. Numerical studies show that even few bits of feedback, when applied with our designs, lead to near perfect CSI performance in a variety of correlated channel conditions.

On the study of network coding with diversity

Recently proposed physical-layer network coding (PNC) has demonstrated the promise to significantly improve the throughput of wireless networks whose links can be modeled as additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. However, the extension to multipath channels is problematic, since the technique would then require both amplitude and phase compensation at each transmitter. Phase compensation requires accurate distributed phase tracking, whereas the required amplitude compensation is even more troubling, as it leads to an inefficient system that yields no diversity even in the presence of perfect channel estimates. Here, a system that avoids these limitations is obtained by reaching up one level higher in the network hierarchy and performing distributed relay selection with cognizance of the PNC technique that we will employ at the physical layer. Since the resulting scheme will achieve a form of selection diversity, we term it ldquonetwork coding with diversityrdquo (NCD). To facilitate performance evaluation, two information-theoretic metrics, the outage and ergodic capacity, are studied. Our analytical and simulation results show that the proposed protocol achieves more robust performance and higher system throughput than comparable schemes. Finally, the proposed network coding is extended to the context of cooperative multiple access channels, which yields a new cooperative protocol with larger outage and ergodic capacity compared with existing transmission schemes.

Frequency assignment for IEEE 802.11 wireless networks

The IEEE 802.11 standard specifies both radio and MAC protocol design. We observe that its CSMA protocol helps avoid much of co-channel interference by sharing radio resources in time at the potential expense of degraded network performance. Due to the coupling between the physical and MAC layers, conventional frequency allocation methods for typical cellular networks cannot be applied directly to the 802.11 networks. In this paper, by focusing on interactions among access points, we formulate the channel assignment problem for the 802.11 network, considering the traffic load at the MAC layer, and prove that the problem is NP-complete. In light of computational complexity, a heuristic algorithm is proposed and analyzed. The algorithm is then applied to two cellular settings with known optimal assignments for verification. For one of the settings, the proposed technique generates the optimal channel assignment. As for the second case of a large network, although only a suboptimal solution is obtained by the algorithm, it is shown to be excellent. Thus, as the 802.11 networks are widely deployed, the proposed method can serve as a valuable tool for frequency planning of networks with non-uniform coverage and load.

A dynamic clustering and energy efficient routing technique for sensor networks

In the development of various large-scale sensor systems, a particularly challenging problem is how to dynamically organize the sensors into a wireless communication network and route sensed information from the field sensors to a remote base station. This paper presents a new energy-efficient dynamic clustering technique for large-scale sensor networks. By monitoring the received signal power from its neighboring nodes, each node estimates the number of active nodes in realtime and computes its optimal probability of becoming a cluster head, so that the amount of energy spent in both intra- and inter-cluster communications can be minimized. Based on the clustered architecture, this paper also proposes a simple multihop routing algorithm that is designed to be both energy-efficient and power-aware, so as to prolong the network lifetime. The new clustering and routing algorithms scale well and converge fast for large-scale dynamic sensor networks, as shown by our extensive simulation results.

Distributed beamforming and power allocation for cooperative networks

Cooperative diversity systems rely on using relay nodes to relay copies of transmitted information to the destination such that each copy experiences different channel fading, hence increasing the diversity of the system. However, without proper processing of the message at the relays, the performance of the cooperative system may not necessarily perform better than direct transmission systems. In this paper, we proposed a distributed beamforming and power allocation algorithm which substantially improves the diversity of the system with only very limited feedback from the destination node. We also derive outage probability as well as study the outage behavior of this scheme.

Opportunistic Relaying for Secrecy Communications: Cooperative Jamming vs. Relay Chatting

In this letter, we study the opportunistic use of relays for secret communications, and propose two transmission schemes that do not require the knowledge of the eavesdroppers channel state information. Both analytic and numerical results are provided.

A Survey of Incentive Mechanisms for Participatory Sensing

Participatory sensing is now becoming more popular and has shown its great potential in various applications. It was originally proposed to recruit ordinary citizens to collect and share massive amounts of sensory data using their portable smart devices. By attracting participants and paying rewards as a return, incentive mechanisms play an important role to guarantee a stable scale of participants and to improve the accuracy/coverage/timeliness of the sensing results. Along this direction, a considerable amount of research activities have been conducted recently, ranging from experimental studies to theoretical solutions and practical applications, aiming at providing more comprehensive incentive procedures and/or protecting benefits of different system stakeholders. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 2004-2014 from the state of the art of theoretical frameworks, applications and system implementations, and experimental studies of the incentive strategies used in participatory sensing by providing up-to-date research in the literature. We also point out future directions of incentive strategies used in participatory sensing.

Physical Layer Network Coding and Precoding for the Two-Way Relay Channel in Cellular Systems

In this paper, we study the application of physical layer network coding to the joint design of uplink and downlink transmissions, where the base station and the relay have multiple antennas, and all mobile stations only have a single antenna. A new network coding transmission protocol is proposed, where uplink and downlink transmissions can be accomplished within two time slots. Since each single antenna user has poor receive capability, precoding at the base station and relay has been carefully designed to ensure that co-channel interference can be removed completely. Explicit analytic results have been developed to demonstrate that the multiplexing gain achieved by the proposed transmission protocol is , much better than existing time sharing schemes. To further increase the achievable diversity gain, two variations of the proposed transmission protocols have also been proposed when there are multiple relays and the number of the antennas at the base station and relay is increased. Monte-Carlo simulation results have also been provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed network coded transmission protocol.