A wireless sensor/actuator network (WSAN) is a group of sensors and actuators that are geographically distributed and interconnected by wireless networks. Sensors gather information about the state of physical world. Actuators react to this information by performing appropriate actions. WSANs thus enable cyber systems to monitor and manipulate the behavior of the physical world. WSANs are growing at a tremendous pace, just like the exploding evolution of Internet. Supporting quality of service (QoS) will be of critical importance for pervasive WSANs that serve as the network infrastructure of diverse applications. To spark new research and development interests in this field, this paper examines and discusses the requirements, critical challenges, and open research issues on QoS management in WSANs. A brief overview of recent progress is given.
Wireless sensor/actuator networks (WSANs) are emerging rapidly as a new generation of sensor networks. Despite intensive research in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), limited work has been found in the open literature in the field of WSANs. In particular, quality-of-service (QoS) management in WSANs remains an important issue yet to be investigated. As an attempt in this direction, this paper develops a fuzzy logic control based QoS management (FLC-QM) scheme for WSANs with constrained resources and in dynamic and unpredictable environments. Taking advantage of the feedback control technology, …
Internet of Things (IoT) have motivated a paradigm shift in the development of various applications such as mobile health. Wireless body area network (WBAN) comprises many low-power devices in, on, or around the human body, which offers a desirable solution to monitor physiological signals for mobile-health applications. In the implant WBAN, an implant medical device transmits its measured biological parameters to a target hub with the help of at least one on-body device(s) to satisfy its strict requirements on size, quality of service (QoS, e.g., reliability), and power consumption. In this a…
Virtualization enables multiple applications to share the same wireless sensor and actuator network (WSAN). However, in heterogeneous environments, virtualized wireless sensor and actuator networks (VWSAN) raise new challenges, such as the need for on-the-fly, dynamic, elastic, and scalable provisioning of gateways. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is a paradigm emerging to help tackle these new challenges. It leverages standard virtualization technology to consolidate special-purpose network elements on commodity hardware. This article presents NFV architecture for VWSAN gateways, in wh…
Technical advances in ubiquitous sensing, embedded computing, and wireless communication are leading to a new generation of engineered systems called cyber-physical systems (CPS). CPS promises to transform the way we interact with the physical world just as the Internet transformed how we interact with one another. Before this vision becomes a reality, however, a large number of challenges have to be addressed. Network quality of service (QoS) management in this new realm is among those issues that deserve extensive research efforts. It is envisioned that wireless sensor/actuator networks (WSA…
The flexibility offered by reconfigurable wireless networks, provide new opportunities for various applications such as online AR/VR gaming, high-quality video streaming and autonomous vehicles, that desire high-bandwidth, reliable and low-latency communications. These applications come with very stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements and increase the burden over mobile networks. Currently, there is a huge spectrum scarcity due to the massive data explosion and this problem can be solved by helps of Reconfigurable Wireless Networks (RWNs) where nodes have reconfiguration and perceptio…
Devices with multiple Subscriber Identification Modules (SIM)s are expected to prevail over the conventional devices with only one SIM. Despite the growing demand for such devices, only proprietary solutions are available so far. To fill this gap, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is aiming at the development of unified cross-platform solutions for multi-SIM device coordination. This paper extends the technical discussion and investigation of the 3GPP solutions for improving mobile Terminated (MT) service delivery to multi-SIM devices. Implementation trade-offs, impact on the Qua…
Internet of Things (IoT) application deployment requires the allocation of resources such as virtual machines, storage, and network elements that must be deployed over distinct infrastructures such as cloud computing, Cloud of Things (CoT), datacenters and backbone networks. For massive IoT data acquisition, a gateway-based data aggregation approach is commonly used featuring sensor/ actuator seamless access and providing cache/ buffering and preprocessing functionality. In this perspective , gateways acting as producers need to allocate network resources to send IoT data to consumers. In this…
In recent years, long-term evolution (LTE) and 5G NR (5th Generation New Radio) technologies have showed great potential to utilize Machine Learning (ML) algorithms in optimizing their operations, both thanks to the availability of fine-grained data from the field, as well as the need arising from growing complexity of networks. The aforementioned complexity sparked mobile operators' attention as a way to reduce the capital expenditures (CAPEX) and the operational (OPEX) expenditures of their networks through network management automation (NMA). NMA falls under the umbrella of Self-Organizing …
With rapid advancements in sensing, networking, and computing technologies, recent years have witnessed the emergence of cyber-physical systems (CPS) in a broad range of application domains. CPS is a new class of engineered systems that features the integration of computation, communications, and control. In contrast to general-purpose computing systems, many cyber-physical applications are safety-cricial. These applications impose considerable requirements on quality of service (QoS) of the employed networking infrastruture. Since IEEE 802.15.4 has been widely considered as a suitable protoco…
The proliferation of emergent network applications (e.g., telesurgery, metaverse) is increasing the difficulty of managing modern communication networks. These applications entail stringent network requirements (e.g., ultra-low deterministic latency), which hinders network operators to manage their resources efficiently. In this article, we introduce the network digital twin (NDT), a renovated concept of classical network modeling tools whose goal is to build accurate data-driven network models that can operate in real-time. We describe the general architecture of the NDT and argue that modern…
Data center networks (DCNs) are essential infrastructures to embrace the era of highly diversified massive amount of data generated by emerging technological applications. In order to store and process such a data deluge, today's DCNs have to deploy enormous length of wires to interconnect a plethora of servers and switches. Unfortunately, wired DCNs with uniform and inflexible link capacities expose several drawbacks such as high cabling cost and complexity, low space utilization, and lack of bandwidth efficiency. Wireless DCNs (WDCNs) have emerged as a promising solution to reduce the time, …
In this work, a new region-based, multipath-enabled packet routing is presented and called SmartPacket Routing. The proposed approach provides several opportunities to re-distribute the smartness and decision making among various elements of a network including the packets themselves toward providing a decentralized solution for SDNs. This would bring efficiency and scalability, and therefore also lower environmental footprint for the ever-growing networks. In particular, a region-based representation of the network topology is proposed which is then used to describe the routing actions along …
In 5G and beyond, the newly emerging services, such as edge computing/intelligence services, may demand the provision of heterogeneous communications, computing, and storage (CCS) resources on and across network entities multihop apart. In such cases, traditional resource-oriented auction schemes, where buyers place bids on resources, may not be effective in providing end-to-end (E2E) quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees. To overcome these limitations, in this article, we coin the concept of E2E service auction where the auction commodities are E2E services rather than certain resource. Under t…
Mobile networks (MN) are anticipated to provide unprecedented opportunities to enable a new world of connected experiences and radically shift the way people interact with everything. MN are becoming more and more complex, driven by ever-increasingly complicated configuration issues and blossoming new service requirements. This complexity poses significant challenges in deployment, management, operation, optimization, and maintenance, since they require a complete understanding and cognition of MN. Artificial intelligence (AI), which deals with the simulation of intelligent behavior in compute…
Cloud computing aims to power the next generation data centers and enables application service providers to lease data center capabilities for deploying applications depending on user QoS (Quality of Service) requirements. Cloud applications have different composition, configuration, and deployment requirements. Quantifying the performance of resource allocation policies and application scheduling algorithms at finer details in Cloud computing environments for different application and service models under varying load, energy performance (power consumption, heat dissipation), and system size …
The Internet of Things (IoT) has brought the dream of ubiquitous data access from physical environments into reality. IoT embeds sensors and actuators in physical objects so that they can communicate and exchange data between themselves to improve efficiency along with enabling real-time intelligent services and offering better quality of life to people. The number of deployed IoT devices has rapidly grown in the past five years in a way that makes IoT the most disruptive technology in recent history. In this paper, we reevaluate the position of IoT in our life and provide deep insights on its…
Augmenting ground-level communications with flying networks, such as the high-altitude platform system (HAPS), is among the major innovative initiatives of the next generation of wireless systems (6G). Given HAPS quasi-static positioning at the stratosphere, HAPS-to-ground and HAPS-to-air connectivity frameworks are expected to be prolific in terms of data acquisition and computing, especially given the mild weather and quasi-constant wind speed characteristics of the stratospheric layer. This paper explores the opportunities stemming from the realization of cloud-enabled HAPS in the context o…
Densification of network base stations is indispensable to achieve the stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of future mobile networks. However, with a dense deployment of transmitters, interference management becomes an arduous task. To solve this issue, exploring radically new network architectures with intelligent coordination and cooperation capabilities is crucial. This survey paper investigates the emerging user-centric cell-free massive Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) network architecture that sets a foundation for future mobile networks. Such networks use a dense deploy…
