Nargis Khan

Localization in terrestrial and underwater sensor-based m2m communication networks: architecture,classification and challenges

Summary Localizing machine-type communication (MTC) devices or sensors is becoming important because of the increasing popularity of machine-to-machine (M2M) communication networks for location-based applications. These include such as health monitoring, rescue operations, vehicle tracking, and wildfire monitoring. Moreover, efficient localization approaches for sensor-based MTC devices reduce the localization error and energy consumption of MTC devices. Because sensors are used as an integral part of M2M communication networks and have achieved popularity in underwater applications, research is being conducted on sensor localization in both underwater and terrestrial M2M networks. Major challenges in designing underwater localization techniques are the lack of good radio signal propagation in underwater, sensor mobility management, and ensuring network coverage in 3D underwater M2M networks. Similarly, predicting the mobility pattern of MTC devices, trading-off energy consumption and location accuracy pose great design challenges for terrestrial localization techniques. This article presents a comprehensive survey on the current state-of-the-art research on both terrestrial and underwater localization approaches for sensor-based MTC devices. It also classifies localization approaches based on several factors, identifies their limitations with potential solutions, and compares them. Copyright

Towards an efficient rendezvous protocol for a cognitive PAN

In this paper we describe a rendezvous protocol that enables nodes to quickly and reliably discover an existing channel-hopping cognitive PAN. The proposed protocol does not rely on the presence of a dedicated controller, the availability of a common control channel, or clock synchronization between the cognitive PAN and the new node. Furthermore, the CPAN need not suspend its operation for the discovery procedure to succeed. The performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated under fixed and adaptive superframe duration.

Sharing It My Way: Efficient M2M Access in LTE/LTE-A Networks

When a large number of machine-to-machine (M2M) terminals attempt to access the Long-Term Evolution (LTE)/LTE Advanced (LTE-A) cellular network using the physical random access channel (PRACH), congestion and overload may result, which can lead to serious degradation of performance for both M2M and human-to-human (H2H) terminals. The main cause for this is the inherent complexity of the four-way handshake used for random access, which is well suited for H2H terminal access but unsuitable for massive M2M access. In this paper, we describe an efficient scheme for concurrent M2M and H2H access on the PRACH, which separates the resources for M2M and H2H access at the level of preamble codes and avoids the use of the four-step handshake for M2M terminals by implementing a carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) overlay network using the designated preamble codes. We analyze the performance of the scheme for both H2H and M2M traffic and show the values of the most important design parameters that enable this scheme to support concurrent access by H2H and M2M terminals with little performance degradation.

CPWS: An efficient routing protocol for RGB sensor-based fish pond monitoring system

This paper proposes a simple Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)-based water level and water quality monitoring system for fish ponds. The proposed architecture uses RGB color sensors and provides a low cost and real-time monitoring system to grow healthy fish and avoid anomalies such as overflow or low water level and the death or disease of fishes for unhealthy water (e.g., rise of acid level due to the change of pH and lack of oxygen in water) in a pond. In this simple monitoring system, sensors monitor the water level, dissolved oxygen, temperature and pH level of the water of the fish ponds at some predefined sensing interval. We also introduce a simple but efficient Clustering Protocol for Water Sensor network (CPWS) for the proposed fish pond monitoring framework in terms of network energy consumptions, network lifetime and number of data communications.

CSCD: A simple channel scan protocol to discover and join a cognitive PAN

The paper describes a simple channel scan protocol through which a station can quickly discover and join an existing piconet following a specified channel-hopping MAC protocol piconet in its vicinity. The proposed MAC protocol is simple and does not need a dedicated control channel. Moreover, the cognitive piconet can operate normally throughout the search, unlike Bluetooth where piconet operation is temporarily suspended during the inquiry/inquiry scan procedure. The performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated through discrete event simulation.

Recent advancement in sensor web architectures and applications

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) consist of thousands of spatially distributed, low cost, low energy, unattended, and resource constrained sensor nodes for environmental monitoring, pollution detections, battle field surveillance etc. A Sensor Web (SW) is a web-based WSN, where a web application works as a gateway between the WSN and Internet. The Web interface is connected to the World Wide Web or huge computing resources and integrates sensor data and networks. Two major SW architectures are Open Geospatial Consortium defined Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) and Microsoft defined SenseMap. On the other hand, SW is used in academic purposes, agriculture, traffic monitoring, disasters monitoring, and smart home etc. There are many other novel applications as well as middleware for SW. Moreover, researchers from different fields give emphasis on different aspects of SW, while combining these two networks: sensor and web. They focus on strategies and technical issues of SW as well the utilization of sensor data by distributing it through the Web. In this paper, we discuss and compare existing SW architectures. We also present several SW applications and classify them with some potential research issues in this field.

Tradeoffs in PRACH Bandwidth Partitioning for VM2M Overlay Network in LTE

In this paper, we evaluate the impact of physical layer on the performance of the Control Channel (CCH) in a Vehicular Access Network (VANET). CCH is implemented as an overlay network over LTE physical random access channel (PRACH). Physical layer of the VM2M overlay uses dedicated Zadoff- Chu preambles while the medium access control (MAC) layer uses a carrier sense multiple access (CSMA/CA) mechanism. We study three deployment scenarios of VM2M overlay-based CCH and evaluate the performance tradeoffs between the VM2M and human to human (H2H) traffic, and show that the overlay is a feasible solution to implement the CCH in a VANET.

VM2M: An overlay network to support Vehicular traffic over LTE

We describe a Vehicular M2M (VM2M) overlay network over random access channel (RACH) in LTE that aims to emulate the control channel (CCH) of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). VM2M overlay is implemented over a dedicated subset of preamble codes, at the physical layer, and uses a medium access control (MAC) layer modeled as IEEE 802.15.4 carrier sense multiple access (CSMA/CA) mechanism. We evaluate the performance and interaction of regular LTE (H2H) traffic and VM2M traffic, in particular the impact of RACH resource configuration and preamble format (PF) in large cells. We have found that the format PF = 2 is capable but not ideal for handling large amount of CCH traffic due to repeated preamble transmissions in H2H layer; better results may be obtained if the frequency of RACH subframe allocation for CCH is increased, or a larger number of preambles is used at the physical layer of CCH.

LRSA: A multi-component Wireless Sensor Network management framework

Although Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have significant applications in monitoring, security and other areas, they still lack network management solutions to enable large scale adoption. Such solutions would help in determining the degree of data aggregation prior to transforming it into useful information, localizing the sensors accurately, scheduling and routing data by reducing end-to-end delay, and energy consumptions. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, no integrated network management framework consisting of efficient localization, data scheduling, routing, and data aggregation approaches exists in the literature for a large scale WSN. Thus, we introduce an integrated management framework comprising sensors Localization, Routing, data Scheduling, and Aggregation (LRSA) for a large scale WSN. Simulation results show that LRSA outperforms other approaches in terms of localization energy consumptions and error, end-to-end delay, and network energy consumptions.

Priority-Based Machine-To-Machine Overlay Network over LTE for a Smart City

Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and its improvement, Long-Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A), are attractive choices for Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication due to their ubiquitous coverage and high bandwidth. However, the focus of LTE design was high performance connection-based communications between human-operated devices (also known as human-to-human, or H2H traffic), which was initially established over the Physical Random Access Channel (PRACH). On the other hand, M2M traffic is mostly based on contention-based transmission of short messages and does not need connection establishment. As a result, M2M traffic transmitted over LTE PRACH has to use the inefficient four-way handshake and compete for resources with H2H traffic. When a large number of M2M devices attempts to access the PRACH, an outage condition may occur; furthermore, traffic prioritization is regulated only through age-based power ramping, which drives the network even faster towards the outage condition. In this article, we describe an overlay network that allows a massive number of M2M devices to coexist with H2H traffic and access the network without going through the full LTE handshake. The overlay network is patterned after IEEE 802.15.6 to support multiple priority classes of M2M traffic. We analyse the performance of the joint M2M and H2H system and investigate the trade-offs needed to keep satisfactory performance and reliability for M2M traffic in the presence of H2H traffic of known intensity. Our results confirm the validity of this approach for applications in crowd sensing, monitoring and others utilized in smart city development.