Wireless sensor/actuator networks (WSANs) are emerging as a new generation of sensor networks. Serving as the backbone of control applications, WSANs will enable an unprecedented degree of distributed and mobile control. However, the unreliability of wireless communications and the real-time requirements of control applications raise great challenges for WSAN design. With emphasis on the reliability issue, this paper presents an application-level design methodology for WSANs in mobile control applications. The solution is generic in that it is independent of the underlying platforms, environment, control system models, and controller design. To capture the link quality characteristics in terms of packet loss rate, experiments are conducted on a real WSAN system. From the experimental observations, a simple yet efficient method is proposed to deal with unpredictable packet loss on actuator nodes. Trace-based simulations give promising results, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
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…
This work presents the design and implementation of a wireless home monitoring and automation system consisting of wireless sensor/actuator nodes, wireless camera, and a home server. The low-cost wireless sensor/actuator node features temperature, light intensity and motion sensors, and actuator driver circuits for the control of motors, heaters, and lights. Server and client programs used to monitor and control the home were also developed. The home server receives and processes sensor readings, such as temperature and light intensity readings, and also transmits user commands to wireless nod…
With the proliferation of mobile demands and increasingly multifarious services and applications, mobile Internet has been an irreversible trend. Unfortunately, the current mobile and wireless network (MWN) faces a series of pressing challenges caused by the inherent design. In this paper, we extend two latest and promising innovations of Internet, software-defined networking and network virtualization, to mobile and wireless scenarios. We first describe the challenges and expectations of MWN, and analyze the opportunities provided by the software-defined wireless network (SDWN) and wireless n…
Wireless charging is a technique of transmitting power through an air gap to an electrical device for the purpose of energy replenishment. Recently, the wireless charging technology has been significantly advanced in terms of efficiency and functionality. This article first presents an overview and fundamentals of wireless charging. We then provide the review of standards, i.e., Qi and Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP), and highlight on their communication protocols. Next, we propose a novel concept of wireless charger networking which allows chargers to be connected to facilitate information…
Congestion control and avoidance in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is a subject that has attracted a lot of research attention in the last decade. Besides rate and resource control, the utilization of mobile nodes has also been suggested as a way to control congestion. In this work, we present a Mobile Congestion Control (MobileCC) algorithm with two variations, to assist existing congestion control algorithms in facing congestion in WSNs. The first variation employs mobile nodes that create locally-significant alternative paths leading to the sink. The second variation employs mobile nodes t…
The emerging edge caching provides an effective way to reduce service delay for mobile users. However, due to high deployment cost of edge hosts, a practical problem is how to achieve minimum delay under a proper edge deployment strategy. In this letter, we provide an analytical framework for delay optimal mobile edge deployment in a partially connected wireless network, where the request files can be cached at the edge hosts and cooperatively transmitted through multiple base stations. In order to deal with the heterogeneous transmission requirements, we separate the entire transmission into …
Recent advances in software-defined mobile networks (SDMNs), in-network caching, and mobile edge computing (MEC) can have great effects on video services in next generation mobile networks. In this paper, we jointly consider SDMNs, in-network caching, and MEC to enhance the video service in next generation mobile networks. With the objective of maximizing the mean measurement of video quality, an optimization problem is formulated. Due to the coupling of video data rate, computing resource, and traffic engineering (bandwidth provisioning and paths selection), the problem becomes intractable in…
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are groups of spatially distributed and dedicated autonomous sensors for monitoring (and recording) the physical conditions of the environment (and organizing the collected data at a central location). They have been a topic of interest due to their versatility and diverse capabilities despite having simple sensors measuring local quantities such as temperature, pH, or pressure. We delve into understanding how such networks can be utilized for localization, and propose a technique for improving conditions of living for animals and humans on the IIT Bombay campus…
Mobile edge computing (MEC) has attracted great interests as a promising approach to augment computational capabilities of mobile devices. An important issue in the MEC paradigm is computation offloading. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework for computation offloading and interference management in wireless cellular networks with mobile edge computing. In this integrated framework, the MEC server makes the offloading decision according to the local computation overhead estimated by all user equipments (UEs) and the offloading overhead estimated by the MEC server itself. Then, the …
In closed-loop wireless control systems, the state-of-the-art approach prescribes that a controller receives by wireless communications the individual sensor measurements, and then sends the computed control signal to the actuators. We propose an over-the-air controller scheme where all sensors attached to the plant simultaneously transmit scaled sensing signals directly to the actuator; then the feedback control signal is computed partially over the air and partially by a scaling operation at the actuator. Such over-the-air controller essentially adopts the over-the-air computation concept to…
The integration of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) and Wireless Power Transfer (WPT), which is usually referred to as Wireless Powered Mobile Edge Computing (WP-MEC), has been recognized as a promising technique to enhance the lifetime and computation capacity of wireless devices (WDs). Compared to the conventional battery-powered MEC networks, WP-MEC brings new challenges to the computation scheduling problem because we have to jointly optimize the resource allocation in WPT and computation offloading. In this paper, we consider the energy minimization problem for WP-MEC networks with multiple WD…
Offloading computation to a mobile cloud is a promising solution to augment the computation capabilities of mobile devices. In this paper we consider selfish mobile devices in a dense wireless network, in which individual mobile devices can offload computations via multiple access points (APs) to a mobile cloud so as to minimize their computation costs, and we provide a game theoretical analysis of the problem. We show that in the case of an elastic cloud, all improvement paths are finite, and thus a pure strategy Nash equilibrium exists and can be computed easily. In the case of a non-elastic…
The position of the base station (BS) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has a significant impact on network lifetime. This paper suggests a mobile BS positioning algorithm for cluster-based WSNs, which considers both the location and the remaining energy level of the cluster heads in the network and evaluate the performance of the algorithm under different values of network sizes, including 100m x 100m, 200m x 200m and 300m x 300m. Simulations are conducted by using OMNeT++ and proposed method is compared with two different static BS positions, including central and external, on HEED protocol…
In mobile computation offloading (MCO), mobile devices (MDs) can choose to either execute tasks locally or to have them executed on a remote edge server (ES). This paper addresses the problem of assigning both the wireless communication bandwidth needed, along with the ES capacity that is used for the task execution, so that task completion time constraints are satisfied. The objective is to obtain these allocations so that the average power consumption of the mobile devices is minimized, subject to a cost budget constraint. The paper includes contributions for both soft and hard task completi…
This paper deals with distributed algorithms for monitoring the topology of a dynamic group of mobile wireless sensor networks. We propose two major extensions of a distributed static group consensus algorithm and an experimental implementation. Group consensus algorithms are exploited to let each node obtain the knowledge of its connected com-ponents. The proposed extensions provide a more accurate information about the proximity of nodes and allow to deal with dynamic networks using a periodical reevaluation of the group detection. We validate these algorithms by implementing them in an orig…
In energy-constrained wireless sensor networks (WSNs), maximizing the data collection using mobile sink(s) with minimum energy consumption is one of the practical challenging issues. In this article, we consider the problem of efficient data collection along with a pre-specified path using a mobile sink with constant speed. We refer the problem as a Maximizing data gathering with minimum energy consumption (MDGMEC) problem. So far, existing works have heuristic algorithms for MDGMEC problem. Therefore, based on network flow optimization approach, we propose a deterministic algorithm called dat…
The last years have witnessed a dramatic growth in the number as well as the variety of graphics intensive mobile applications, which allow users to interact and navigate through large scenes such as ancient places, museums and even virtual cities. These applications support many clients and impose a heavy requirement on network resources and computational resources. One key issue in the design of cost efficient mobile walkthrough applications is the data transmission between servers and mobile client devices. In this paper, we propose an effective progressive mesh transmission framework that …
With the rapid increase in demand for mobile data, mobile network operators are trying to expand wireless network capacity by deploying wireless local area network (LAN) hotspots on which they can offload their mobile traffic. However, these network-centric methods usually do not fulfill the interests of mobile users (MUs). Taking into consideration many issues, MUs should be able to decide whether to offload their traffic to a complementary wireless LAN. Our previous work studied single-flow wireless LAN offloading from a MU's perspective by considering delay-tolerance of traffic, monetary co…
Localization in wireless sensor networks not only provides a node with its geographical location but also a basic requirement for other applications such as geographical routing. Although a rich literature is available for localization in static WSN, not enough work is done for mobile WSNs, owing to the complexity due to node mobility. Most of the existing techniques for localization in mobile WSNs uses Monte-Carlo localization, which is not only time-consuming but also memory intensive. They, consider either the unknown nodes or anchor nodes to be static. In this paper, we propose a technique…
The rapidly growing wave of wireless data service is pushing against the boundary of our communication network's processing power. The pervasive and exponentially increasing data traffic present imminent challenges to all the aspects of the wireless system design, such as spectrum efficiency, computing capabilities and fronthaul/backhaul link capacity. In this article, we discuss the challenges and opportunities in the design of scalable wireless systems to embrace such a "bigdata" era. On one hand, we review the state-of-the-art networking architectures and signal processing techniques adapta…
-This paper presents an efficient approach to data collection in mobile wireless sensor networks, with the specific application of sensing in bike races. Recent sensor technology permits to track GPS position of each bike. Because of the inherent correlation between bike positions in a bike race, a simple GPS log is inefficient. The idea presented in this work is to aggregate GPS data at sensors using compressive sensing techniques. We enforce, in addition to signal sparsity, a spatial prior on biker motion because of the group behaviour (peloton) in bike races. The spatial prior is modeled by…
We present a low complexity experimental RF-based indoor localization system based on the collection and processing of WiFi RSSI signals and processing using a RSS-based multi-lateration algorithm to determine a robotic mobile node's location. We use a real indoor wireless testbed called w-iLab.t that is deployed in Zwijnaarde, Ghent, Belgium. One of the unique attributes of this testbed is that it provides tools and interfaces using Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) project to easily create reproducible wireless network experiments in a controlled environment. We provide a low…
