Qiong Huo

Pulse Switching: Toward a Packet-Less Protocol Paradigm for Event Sensing

This paper presents a novel pulse switching protocol framework for ultra light-weight wireless network applications. The key idea is to abstract a single Ultra Wide Band (UWB) pulse as the information switching granularity. Pulse switching is shown to be sufficient for on-off style event monitoring applications for which a monitored parameter can be modeled using a binary variable. Monitoring such events with conventional packet transport can be prohibitively energy-inefficient due to the communication, processing, and buffering overheads of the large number of bits within a packets data, header, and preambles for synchronization. The paper presents a joint MAC-routing protocol architecture for pulse switching with a novel hop-angular event localization strategy. Through analytical modeling and simulation-based experiments it is shown that pulse switching can be an effective means for event networking, which can potentially replace the traditional packet transport when the information to be transported is binary in nature.

Ultra wide band impulse switching protocols for event and target tracking applications

This paper presents a novel energy-efficient pulse switching protocol for ultra light-weight wireless network applications. The key idea is to abstract a single pulse, as opposed to multi-bit packets, as the information exchange mechanism. Pulse switching is shown to be sufficient for event and target tracking applications with binary sensing. Target tracking with conventional packet transport can be prohibitively energy-inefficient due to the communication, processing, and buffering overheads of the large number of bits within a packets data, header, and preambles. The paper presents a joint MAC and Routing architecture for pulse switching with a novel hop-angular event localization. Through analytical modeling and simulation experiments, it is shown that pulse switching can be an effective means for event based networking, which can potentially replace the packet transport when the information to be transported is binary in nature.

Fast track article: A pulse switching paradigm for ultra low power cellular sensor networks

This paper presents a novel energy-efficient and fault-tolerant pulse switching protocol for ultra-light-weight wireless cellular network applications. The key idea of pulse switching is to abstract a single pulse, as opposed to multi-bit packets, as the information exchange mechanism. In this paper it is shown to be sufficient for event and target tracking applications with binary sensing in terms of cellular localization. Event monitoring and target tracking with conventional packet transport can be prohibitively energy-inefficient due to the communication, processing, and buffering overheads of the large number of bits within a packets data, header, and preambles. Additionally, both of them can be unreliable without protection from errors and faults occurrence. The paper presents a joint MAC and Routing architecture for pulse switching with a novel cellular event localization in the presence of errors and faults. Through analytical modeling and simulation experiments, it is shown that cellular pulse switching can be an effective means for event based networking, which can potentially replace the packet transport when the information is binary in nature.

Pulse based sensor networking using mechanical waves through metal substrates

This paper presents a novel wireless sensor networking technique using ultrasonic signal as the carrier wave for binary data exchange. Using the properties of lamb wave propagation through metal substrates, the proposed network structure can be used for runtime transport of structural fault information to ultrasound access points. Primary applications of the proposed sensor networking technique will include conveying fault information on an aircraft wing or on a bridge to an ultrasonic access point using ultrasonic wave through the structure itself (i.e. wing or bridge). Once a fault event has been detected, a mechanical pulse is forwarded to the access node using shortest path multi-hop ultrasonic pulse routing. The advantages of mechanical waves over traditional radio transmission using pulses are the following: First, unlike radio frequency, surface acoustic waves are not detectable outside the medium, which increases the inherent security for sensitive environments in respect to tapping. Second, event detection can be represented by the injection of a single mechanical pulse at a specific temporal position, whereas radio messages usually take several bits. The contributions of this paper are: 1) Development of a transceiver for transmitting/receiving ultrasound pulses with a pulse loss rate below 2·10-5 and false positive rate with an upper bound of 2·10-4. 2) A novel one-hop distance estimation based on the properties of lamb wave propagation with an accuracy of above 80%. 3) Implementation of a wireless sensor network using mechanical wave propagation for event detection on a 2024 aluminum alloy commonly used for aircraft skin construction.

Through-Substrate Event Reporting Using Harvested Energy in Ultrasound Sensor Networks

This paper develops an energy-aware and through- substrate sensor network using a Pulse Switching (PS) architecture for Structural Health Monitoring applications. Pulse Switching based protocols as developed in our prior work use single pulses instead of multi-bit packets for information delivery with ultra high energy-efficiency. Such packet-less networking is shown to be sufficient for event monitoring applications with binary sensing requirements. Pulse Switching using ultrasound, in particular, is well suited for communication through metal/composite substrates used in structures such as bridges, aircraft wings, etc. This paper presents a joint MAC- Routing architecture and its associated algorithms for Pulse Switching using an ultrasonic through- substrate physical layer. It also develops novel energy-aware protocol syntaxes in the PS domain for reliable operation in intermittently energy- constrained systems such as those powered by vibration energy harvesting. Experimental evaluation of a through-substrate pulse modem and ultrasonic pulse data-link is presented for demonstrating the feasibility of a pulse based ultrasonic physical layer. Using simulation experiments, it is shown that the proposed energy- aware mechanisms can offer a performance-enhanced through-substrate network that can be reliably used for structural health monitoring using energy harvested from structure vibrations.

Cellular Pulse Switching: An Architecture for Event Sensing and Localization in Sensor Networks

This paper presents a novel energy-efficient pulse switching protocol for ultra-light-weight wireless cellular network applications. The key idea of pulse switching is to abstract a single pulse, as opposed to multi-bit packets, as the information exchange mechanism. Event monitoring with conventional packet transport can be prohibitively energy-inefficient due to the communication, processing, and buffering overheads of the large number of bits within a packet’s data, header, and preambles. Pulse switching, on the other hand, is shown to be sufficient for event monitoring applications that require binary sensing. This paper presents a joint MAC and Routing architecture for pulse switching with a novel cellular event localization framework. Through analytical modeling and simulation experiments, it is shown that pulse switching can be an effective means for event based networking, which can potentially replace packet transport when the information is binary in nature.

A cellular pulse switching architecture for binary event sensing

This paper presents a novel energy-efficient pulse switching protocol for ultra-light-weight cellular sensor network applications. The key idea is to abstract a single pulse, as opposed to multi-bit packets, as the information exchange mechanism. Pulse switching is shown to be sufficient for event monitoring applications with binary sensing in terms of cellular localization. Event monitoring with conventional packet transport can be prohibitively energy-inefficient due to the communication, processing, and buffering overheads of the large number of bits within a packets data, header, and preambles. The paper presents a joint MAC and Routing architecture for pulse switching with novel cellular event localization. Through simulation experiments, it is shown that pulse switching can be an effective means for event based networking, which can potentially replace packet transport when the information to be transported is binary in nature.

Self-organized pulse switching for binary sensing and actuation

This paper presents a novel energy-efficient distributed self-organized pulse switching architecture with a cell based event localization for wireless sensor and actuator network applications. The key idea of this pulse switching architecture is to abstract a single pulse, as opposed to multi-bit packets, as the information exchange mechanism. Unlike multi-bit packet communication, the proposed pulse switching architecture is based on pulse communications where a node either transmits a pulse or keeps silent at every time unit. Specifically, an event can be coded as a single pulse in a specific time unit with respect to the global clock. Then the pulse is transported multi-hop while preserving the event’s localization information in the form of temporal pulse position representing its originating cell, destination cell and next-hop cell. The proposed distributed pulse switching is shown to be energy-efficient compared to traditional packet switching especially for binary event sensing and actuation applications. Binary event sensing and actuation with conventional packet transport can be prohibitively energy-inefficient due to the communication, processing, and buffering overheads of the large number of bits within a packet’s data, header, and preambles. This paper presents a joint MAC and Routing architecture for self-organized distributed pulse switching. Through simulation experiments, it is shown that pulse switching can be an effective distributed means for event based networking in wireless sensor and actuator networks, which can potentially replace the packet transport when the information to be transported is binary in nature.

Pulse Switching for Static Event Sensing in Sensor Networks

This paper presents a novel energy-efficient pulse switching protocol for ultra light-weight wireless network applications. The key idea is to abstract a single pulse, as opposed to multi-bit packets, as the information exchange mechanism. Pulse switching is shown to be sufficient for event sensing applications with binary sensing. Event sensing with conventional packet transport can be prohibitively energy-inefficient due to the communication, processing, and buffering overheads of the large number of bits within a packets data, header, and preambles. The paper presents a joint MAC-Routing architecture for pulse switching with a novel hop-angular event localization. Through simulation experiments, it is shown that pulse switching can be an effective means for event based networking, which can potentially replace the packet transport when the information to be transported is binary in nature.