The spatial features of emitted wireless signals are the basis of location distinction and determination for wireless indoor localization. Available in mainstream wireless signal measurements, the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) has been adopted in vast indoor localization systems. However, it suffers from dramatic performance degradation in complex situations due to multipath fading and temporal dynamics. Break-through techniques resort to finer-grained wireless channel measurement than RSSI. Different from RSSI, the PHY layer power feature, channel response, is able to discriminate multipath characteristics, and thus holds the potential for the convergence of accurate and pervasive indoor localization. Channel State Information (CSI, reflecting channel response in 802.11 a/g/n) has attracted many research efforts and some pioneer works have demonstrated submeter or even centimeter-level accuracy. In this article, we survey this new trend of channel response in localization. The differences between CSI and RSSI are highlighted with respect to network layering, time resolution, frequency resolution, stability, and accessibility. Furthermore, we investigate a large body of recent works and classify them overall into three categories according to how to use CSI. For each category, we emphasize the basic principles and address future directions of research in this new and largely open area.

From RSSI to CSI: Indoor Localization via Channel Response, A survey on indoor localization using PHY-layer information

Elements of Information Theory (2nd ed.). Thomas M. Cover and Joy A. Thomas

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication has emerged as a promising technology for optimizing spectral efficiency in future cellular networks. D2D takes advantage of the proximity of communicating devices for efficient utilization of available resources, improving data rates, reducing latency, and increasing system capacity. The research community is actively investigating the D2D paradigm to realize its full potential and enable its smooth integration into the future cellular system architecture. Existing surveys on this paradigm largely focus on interference and resource management. We review recently proposed solutions in over explored and under explored areas in D2D. These solutions include protocols, algorithms, and architectures in D2D. Furthermore, we provide new insights on open issues in these areas. Finally, we discuss potential future research directions.

A Survey of Device-to-Device Communications: Research Issues and Challenges

The new era of the Internet of Things is driving the evolution of conventional Vehicle Ad-hoc Networks into the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). With the rapid development of computation and communication technologies, IoV promises huge commercial interest and research value, thereby attracting a large number of companies and researchers. This paper proposes an abstract network model of the IoV, discusses the technologies required to create the IoV, presents different applications based on certain currently existing technologies, provides several open research challenges and describes essential future research in the area of IoV.

An overview of Internet of Vehicles

Due to global climate change as well as economic concern of network operators, energy consumption of the infrastructure of cellular networks, or “Green Cellular Networking,” has become a popular research topic. While energy saving can be achieved by adopting renewable energy resources or improving design of certain hardware (e.g., power amplifier) to make it more energy-efficient, the cost of purchasing, replacing, and installing new equipment (including manpower, transportation, disruption to normal operation, as well as associated energy and direct cost) is often prohibitive. By comparison, approaches that work on the operating protocols of the system do not require changes to current network architecture, making them far less costly and easier for testing and implementation. In this survey, we first present facts and figures that highlight the importance of green mobile networking and then review existing green cellular networking research with particular focus on techniques that incorporate the concept of the “sleep mode” in base stations. It takes advantage of changing traffic patterns on daily or weekly basis and selectively switches some lightly loaded base stations to low energy consumption modes. As base stations are responsible for the large amount of energy consumed in cellular networks, these approaches have the potential to save a significant amount of energy, as shown in various studies. However, it is noticed that certain simplifying assumptions made in the published papers introduce inaccuracies. This review will discuss these assumptions, particularly, an assumption that ignores the effect of traffic-load-dependent factors on energy consumption. We show here that considering this effect may lead to noticeably lower benefit than in models that ignore this effect. Finally, potential future research directions are discussed.

Energy-Efficient Base-Stations Sleep-Mode Techniques in Green Cellular Networks: A Survey

Sensor nodes are densely deployed to accomplish various applications because of the inexpensive cost and small size. Depending on different applications, the traffic in the wireless sensor networks may be mixed with time-sensitive packets and reliability-demanding packets. Therefore, QoS routing is an important issue in wireless sensor networks. Our goal is to provide soft-QoS to different packets as path information is not readily available in wireless networks. In this paper, we utilize the multiple paths between the source and sink pairs for QoS provisioning. Unlike E2E QoS schemes, soft-QoS mapped into links on a path is provided based on local link state information. By the estimation and approximation of path quality, traditional NP-complete QoS problem can be transformed to a modest problem. The idea is to formulate the optimization problem as a probabilistic programming, then based on some approximation technique, we convert it into a deterministic linear programming, which is much easier and convenient to solve. More importantly, the resulting solution is also one to the original probabilistic programming. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

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Multiconstrained QoS multipath routing in wireless sensor networks

The integration of wireless power transfer (WPT) with the low-power backscatter communications provides a promising way to sustain battery-less wireless networks. In this paper, we consider a backscatter communication network wirelessly powered by a power beacon station (PBS). Each backscatter radio uses the harvested energy to power its data transmissions, in which some other radios can help as the wireless relays with an aim to improve throughput performance by cooperative transmission. Under this setting, we formulate a throughput maximization problem to jointly optimize WPT and the relay strategy of the backscatter radios. An iterative algorithm with reduced complexity and communication overhead is proposed to decompose the original problem into two sub-problems distributed at the PBS and the backscatter receiver. Moreover, we take uncertain channel information into consideration and formulate robust counter-parts of the throughput maximization problem when either the backscatter or relay channel is subject to estimation errors. The difficulty of the robust counter-part lies in the coupling of the PBS’ power allocation and relay strategy in matrix inequalities, which is addressed by alternating optimization with guaranteed convergence. Numerical results reveal that the cooperative relay strategy of the backscatter radios significantly improves the throughput performance.

Backscatter Relay Communications Powered by Wireless Energy Beamforming

In wireless sensor networks, path breakage occurs frequently due to node mobility, node failure, and channel impairments It is challenging to combat path breakage with minimal control overhead, while adapting to rapid topological changes Due to the Wireless Broadcast Advantage (WBA), all nodes inside the transmission range of a single transmitting node may receive the packet, hence naturally they can serve as cooperative caching and backup nodes if the intended receiver fails to receive the packet In this paper, we present a distributed robust routing protocol in which nodes work cooperatively to enhance the robustness of routing against path breakage We compare the energy efficiency of cooperative routing with noncooperative routing and show that our robust routing protocol can significantly improve robustness while achieving considerable energy efficiency

Robust cooperative routing protocol in mobile wireless sensor networks

Many multipath routing schemes have recently been proposed to improve the performance of wireless networks. Multipath routing is supposed to reduce the end-to-end packet delay and increase the packet delivery ratio. Therefore, it can also improve the packet delivery ratio in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) when the mobility of relaying vehicles is unknown. However, in wireless networks, multiple paths are exposed to mutual interference or path coupling, which impairs efficiency. The intriguing question is whether the node-disjoint multipath routing really helps. In this paper, we examine the performance of node-disjoint multipath routing in VANETs. Through extensive simulations, we explore the effect of mutual interference on the behavior of node-disjoint paths. It is shown that whether node-disjoint paths are able to improve performance, compared with the single path, is determined by path coupling and the source-destination distance. Results show that node-disjoint multipath routing can be applied to VANETs to substantially improve performance in terms of delay and packet delivery probability only if the node-disjoint paths are properly chosen.

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Performance Study of Node-Disjoint Multipath Routing in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

In vehicular networks, mobile users in vehicles can access the Internet and enjoy various kinds of services such as Voice over IP (VoIP) and online streaming video. To provide satisfactory quality of service (QoS), we need to appropriately place gateways to link mobile nodes to the Internet or any other information networks. In this paper, we address the problem of optimally placing gateways in vehicular networks to minimize the average number of hops from access points (APs) to gateways, so that the communication delay can be minimized. Moreover, we also investigate how to minimize the total power consumption, and we show that, when the average number of hops is minimized, the average capacity of each AP can be maximized.

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Xiaoxia Huang

Papers

Multiconstrained QoS multipath routing in wireless sensor networks

Backscatter Relay Communications Powered by Wireless Energy Beamforming

Robust cooperative routing protocol in mobile wireless sensor networks

Performance Study of Node-Disjoint Multipath Routing in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Optimal Placement of Gateways in Vehicular Networks