Showing papers on "Wireless sensor network published in 2018"

A New Wireless Communication Paradigm through Software-Controlled Metasurfaces

Abstract: Electromagnetic waves undergo multiple uncontrollable alterations as they propagate within a wireless environment. Free space path loss, signal absorption, as well as reflections, refractions, and diffractions caused by physical objects within the environment highly affect the performance of wireless communications. Currently, such effects are intractable to account for and are treated as probabilistic factors. This article proposes a radically different approach, enabling deterministic, programmable control over the behavior of wireless environments. The key enabler is the so-called HyperSurface tile, a novel class of planar meta-materials that can interact with impinging electromagnetic waves in a controlled manner. The HyperSurface tiles can effectively re-engineer electromagnetic waves, including steering toward any desired direction, full absorption, polarization manipulation, and more. Multiple tiles are employed to coat objects such as walls, furniture, and overall, any objects in indoor and outdoor environments. An external software service calculates and deploys the optimal interaction types per tile to best fit the needs of communicating devices. Evaluation via simulations highlights the potential of the new concept.

Joint Offloading and Computing Optimization in Wireless Powered Mobile-Edge Computing Systems

Abstract: Mobile-edge computing (MEC) and wireless power transfer (WPT) have been recognized as promising techniques in the Internet of Things era to provide massive low-power wireless devices with enhanced computation capability and sustainable energy supply. In this paper, we propose a unified MEC-WPT design by considering a wireless powered multiuser MEC system, where a multiantenna access point (AP) (integrated with an MEC server) broadcasts wireless power to charge multiple users and each user node relies on the harvested energy to execute computation tasks. With MEC, these users can execute their respective tasks locally by themselves or offload all or part of them to the AP based on a time-division multiple access protocol. Building on the proposed model, we develop an innovative framework to improve the MEC performance, by jointly optimizing the energy transmit beamforming at the AP, the central processing unit frequencies and the numbers of offloaded bits at the users, as well as the time allocation among users. Under this framework, we address a practical scenario where latency-limited computation is required. In this case, we develop an optimal resource allocation scheme that minimizes the AP’s total energy consumption subject to the users’ individual computation latency constraints. Leveraging the state-of-the-art optimization techniques, we derive the optimal solution in a semiclosed form. Numerical results demonstrate the merits of the proposed design over alternative benchmark schemes.

Deep learning algorithms for human activity recognition using mobile and wearable sensor networks: State of the art and research challenges

Abstract: Human activity recognition systems are developed as part of a framework to enable continuous monitoring of human behaviours in the area of ambient assisted living, sports injury detection, elderly care, rehabilitation, and entertainment and surveillance in smart home environments. The extraction of relevant features is the most challenging part of the mobile and wearable sensor-based human activity recognition pipeline. Feature extraction influences the algorithm performance and reduces computation time and complexity. However, current human activity recognition relies on handcrafted features that are incapable of handling complex activities especially with the current influx of multimodal and high dimensional sensor data. With the emergence of deep learning and increased computation powers, deep learning and artificial intelligence methods are being adopted for automatic feature learning in diverse areas like health, image classification, and recently, for feature extraction and classification of simple and complex human activity recognition in mobile and wearable sensors. Furthermore, the fusion of mobile or wearable sensors and deep learning methods for feature learning provide diversity, offers higher generalisation, and tackles challenging issues in human activity recognition. The focus of this review is to provide in-depth summaries of deep learning methods for mobile and wearable sensor-based human activity recognition. The review presents the methods, uniqueness, advantages and their limitations. We not only categorise the studies into generative, discriminative and hybrid methods but also highlight their important advantages. Furthermore, the review presents classification and evaluation procedures and discusses publicly available datasets for mobile sensor human activity recognition. Finally, we outline and explain some challenges to open research problems that require further research and improvements.

Computation Rate Maximization for Wireless Powered Mobile-Edge Computing With Binary Computation Offloading

Abstract: Finite battery lifetime and low computing capability of size-constrained wireless devices (WDs) have been longstanding performance limitations of many low-power wireless networks, e.g., wireless sensor networks and Internet of Things. The recent development of radio frequency-based wireless power transfer (WPT) and mobile edge computing (MEC) technologies provide a promising solution to fully remove these limitations so as to achieve sustainable device operation and enhanced computational capability. In this paper, we consider a multi-user MEC network powered by the WPT, where each energy-harvesting WD follows a binary computation offloading policy, i.e., the data set of a task has to be executed as a whole either locally or remotely at the MEC server via task offloading. In particular, we are interested in maximizing the (weighted) sum computation rate of all the WDs in the network by jointly optimizing the individual computing mode selection (i.e., local computing or offloading) and the system transmission time allocation (on WPT and task offloading). The major difficulty lies in the combinatorial nature of the multi-user computing mode selection and its strong coupling with the transmission time allocation. To tackle this problem, we first consider a decoupled optimization, where we assume that the mode selection is given and propose a simple bi-section search algorithm to obtain the conditional optimal time allocation. On top of that, a coordinate descent method is devised to optimize the mode selection. The method is simple in implementation but may suffer from high computational complexity in a large-size network. To address this problem, we further propose a joint optimization method based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) decomposition technique, which enjoys a much slower increase of computational complexity as the networks size increases. Extensive simulations show that both the proposed methods can efficiently achieve a near-optimal performance under various network setups, and significantly outperform the other representative benchmark methods considered.

Energy-Efficient Data Collection in UAV Enabled Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract: In wireless sensor networks, utilizing the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a mobile data collector for the sensor nodes (SNs) is an energy-efficient technique to prolong the network lifetime. In this letter, considering a general fading channel model for the SN-UAV links, we jointly optimize the SNs’ wake-up schedule and UAV’s trajectory to minimize the maximum energy consumption of all SNs, while ensuring that the required amount of data is collected reliably from each SN. We formulate our design as a mixed-integer non-convex optimization problem. By applying the successive convex optimization technique, an efficient iterative algorithm is proposed to find a sub-optimal solution. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme achieves significant network energy saving as compared to benchmark schemes.

Through-Wall Human Pose Estimation Using Radio Signals

Abstract: This paper demonstrates accurate human pose estimation through walls and occlusions. We leverage the fact that wireless signals in the WiFi frequencies traverse walls and reflect off the human body. We introduce a deep neural network approach that parses such radio signals to estimate 2D poses. Since humans cannot annotate radio signals, we use state-of-the-art vision model to provide cross-modal supervision. Specifically, during training the system uses synchronized wireless and visual inputs, extracts pose information from the visual stream, and uses it to guide the training process. Once trained, the network uses only the wireless signal for pose estimation. We show that, when tested on visible scenes, the radio-based system is almost as accurate as the vision-based system used to train it. Yet, unlike vision-based pose estimation, the radio-based system can estimate 2D poses through walls despite never trained on such scenarios. Demo videos are available at our website.

Network Topology and Communication-Computation Tradeoffs in Decentralized Optimization

Abstract: In decentralized optimization, nodes cooperate to minimize an overall objective function that is the sum (or average) of per-node private objective functions. Algorithms interleave local computations with communication among all or a subset of the nodes. Motivated by a variety of applications..decentralized estimation in sensor networks, fitting models to massive data sets, and decentralized control of multirobot systems, to name a few..significant advances have been made toward the development of robust, practical algorithms with theoretical performance guarantees. This paper presents an overview of recent work in this area. In general, rates of convergence depend not only on the number of nodes involved and the desired level of accuracy, but also on the structure and nature of the network over which nodes communicate (e.g., whether links are directed or undirected, static or time varying). We survey the state-of-theart algorithms and their analyses tailored to these different scenarios, highlighting the role of the network topology.

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Online Computation Offloading in Wireless Powered Mobile-Edge Computing Networks

Abstract: Wireless powered mobile-edge computing (MEC) has recently emerged as a promising paradigm to enhance the data processing capability of low-power networks, such as wireless sensor networks and internet of things (IoT). In this paper, we consider a wireless powered MEC network that adopts a binary offloading policy, so that each computation task of wireless devices (WDs) is either executed locally or fully offloaded to an MEC server. Our goal is to acquire an online algorithm that optimally adapts task offloading decisions and wireless resource allocations to the time-varying wireless channel conditions. This requires quickly solving hard combinatorial optimization problems within the channel coherence time, which is hardly achievable with conventional numerical optimization methods. To tackle this problem, we propose a Deep Reinforcement learning-based Online Offloading (DROO) framework that implements a deep neural network as a scalable solution that learns the binary offloading decisions from the experience. It eliminates the need of solving combinatorial optimization problems, and thus greatly reduces the computational complexity especially in large-size networks. To further reduce the complexity, we propose an adaptive procedure that automatically adjusts the parameters of the DROO algorithm on the fly. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve near-optimal performance while significantly decreasing the computation time by more than an order of magnitude compared with existing optimization methods. For example, the CPU execution latency of DROO is less than $0.1$ second in a $30$-user network, making real-time and optimal offloading truly viable even in a fast fading environment.

Wireless Network Design for Control Systems: A Survey

Abstract: Wireless networked control systems (WNCSs) are composed of spatially distributed sensors, actuators, and controllers communicating through wireless networks instead of conventional point-to-point wired connections. Due to their main benefits in the reduction of deployment and maintenance costs, large flexibility and possible enhancement of safety, WNCS are becoming a fundamental infrastructure technology for critical control systems in automotive electrical systems, avionics control systems, building management systems, and industrial automation systems. The main challenge in WNCS is to jointly design the communication and control systems considering their tight interaction to improve the control performance and the network lifetime. In this survey, we make an exhaustive review of the literature on wireless network design and optimization for WNCS. First, we discuss what we call the critical interactive variables including sampling period, message delay, message dropout, and network energy consumption. The mutual effects of these communication and control variables motivate their joint tuning. We discuss the analysis and design of control systems taking into account the effect of the interactive variables on the control system performance. Moreover, we discuss the effect of controllable wireless network parameters at all layers of the communication protocols on the probability distribution of these interactive variables. We also review the current wireless network standardization for WNCS and their corresponding methodology for adapting the network parameters. Finally, we present the state-of-the-art wireless network design and optimization for WNCS, while highlighting the tradeoff between the achievable performance and complexity of various approaches. We conclude the survey by highlighting major research issues and identifying future research directions.

How Can Heterogeneous Internet of Things Build Our Future: A Survey

Abstract: Heterogeneous Internet of Things (HetIoT) is an emerging research field that has strong potential to transform both our understanding of fundamental computer science principles and our future living. HetIoT is being employed in increasing number of areas, such as smart home, smart city, intelligent transportation, environmental monitoring, security systems, and advanced manufacturing. Therefore, relaying on strong application fields, HetIoT will be filled in our life and provide a variety of convenient services for our future. The network architectures of IoT are intrinsically heterogeneous, including wireless sensor network, wireless fidelity network, wireless mesh network, mobile communication network, and vehicular network. In each network unit, smart devices utilize appropriate communication methods to integrate digital information and physical objects, which provide users with new exciting applications and services. However, the complexity of application requirements, the heterogeneity of network architectures and communication technologies impose many challenges in developing robust HetIoT applications. This paper proposes a four-layer HetIoT architecture consisting of sensing, networking, cloud computing, and applications. Then, the state of the art in HetIoT research and applications have been discussed. This paper also suggests several potential solutions to address the challenges facing future HetIoT, including self-organizing, big data transmission, privacy protection, data integration and processing in large-scale HetIoT.

Monitoring of Large-Area IoT Sensors Using a LoRa Wireless Mesh Network System: Design and Evaluation

Abstract: Although many techniques exist to transfer data from the widely distributed sensors that make up the Internet of Things (IoT) (e.g., using 3G/4G networks or cables), these methods are associated with prohibitively high costs, making them impractical for real-life applications. Recently, several emerging wireless technologies have been proposed to provide long-range communication for IoT sensors. Among these, LoRa has been examined for long-range performance. Although LoRa shows good performance for long-range transmission in the countryside, its radio signals can be attenuated over distance, and buildings, trees, and other radio signal sources may interfere with the signals. Our observations show that in urban areas, LoRa requires dense deployment of LoRa gateways (GWs) to ensure that indoor LoRa devices can successfully transfer data back to remote GWs. Wireless mesh networking is a solution for increasing communication range and packet delivery ratio (PDR) without the need to install additional GWs. This paper presents a LoRa mesh networking system for large-area monitoring of IoT applications. We deployed 19 LoRa mesh networking devices over an $800\,\,\text {m} \times 600$ m area on our university campus and installed a GW that collected data at 1-min intervals. The proposed LoRa mesh networking system achieved an average 88.49% PDR, whereas the star-network topology used by LoRa achieved only 58.7% under the same settings. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first academic study discussing LoRa mesh networking in detail and evaluating its performance via real experiments.

Design of Secure User Authenticated Key Management Protocol for Generic IoT Networks

Abstract: In recent years, the research in generic Internet of Things (IoT) attracts a lot of practical applications including smart home, smart city, smart grid, industrial Internet, connected healthcare, smart retail, smart supply chain and smart farming. The hierarchical IoT network (HIoTN) is a special kind of the generic IoT network, which is composed of the different nodes, such as the gateway node, cluster head nodes, and sensing nodes organized in a hierarchy. In HIoTN, there is a need, where a user can directly access the real-time data from the sensing nodes for a particular application in generic IoT networking environment. This paper emphasizes on the design of a new secure lightweight three-factor remote user authentication scheme for HIoTNs, called the user authenticated key management protocol (UAKMP). The three factors used in UAKMP are the user smart card, password, and personal biometrics. The security of the scheme is thoroughly analyzed under the formal security in the widely accepted real-or-random model, the informal security as well as the formal security verification using the widely accepted automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications tool. UAKMP offers several functionality features including offline sensing node registration, freely password and biometric update facility, user anonymity, and sensing node anonymity compared to other related existing schemes. In addition, UAKMP is also comparable in computation and communication costs as compared to other existing schemes.

A Robust ECC-Based Provable Secure Authentication Protocol With Privacy Preserving for Industrial Internet of Things

Abstract: Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) play an important role in the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and have been widely used in many industrial fields to gather data of monitoring area. However, due to the open nature of wireless channel and resource-constrained feature of sensor nodes, how to guarantee that the sensitive sensor data can only be accessed by a valid user becomes a key challenge in IIoT environment. Some user authentication protocols for WSNs have been proposed to address this issue. However, previous works more or less have their own weaknesses, such as not providing user anonymity and other ideal functions or being vulnerable to some attacks. To provide secure communication for IIoT, a user authentication protocol scheme with privacy protection for IIoT has been proposed. The security of the proposed scheme is proved under a random oracle model, and other security discussions show that the proposed protocol is robust to various attacks. Furthermore, the comparison results with other related protocols and the simulation by NS-3 show that the proposed protocol is secure and efficient for IIoT.

A Survey of Enabling Technologies for Network Localization, Tracking, and Navigation

Abstract: Location information for events, assets, and individuals, mostly focusing on two dimensions so far, has triggered a multitude of applications across different verticals, such as consumer, networking, industrial, health care, public safety, and emergency response use cases. To fully exploit the potential of location awareness and enable new advanced location-based services, localization algorithms need to be combined with complementary technologies including accurate height estimation, i.e., three dimensional location, reliable user mobility classification, and efficient indoor mapping solutions. This survey provides a comprehensive review of such enabling technologies. In particular, we present cellular localization systems including recent results on 5G localization, and solutions based on wireless local area networks, highlighting those that are capable of computing 3D location in multi-floor indoor environments. We overview range-free localization schemes, which have been traditionally explored in wireless sensor networks and are nowadays gaining attention for several envisioned Internet of Things applications. We also present user mobility estimation techniques, particularly those applicable in cellular networks, that can improve localization and tracking accuracy. Regarding the mapping of physical space inside buildings for aiding tracking and navigation applications, we study recent advances and focus on smartphone-based indoor simultaneous localization and mapping approaches. The survey concludes with service availability and system scalability considerations, as well as security and privacy concerns in location architectures, discusses the technology roadmap, and identifies future research directions.

Flight Time Minimization of UAV for Data Collection Over Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: In this paper, we consider a scenario where an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) collects data from a set of sensors on a straight line. The UAV can either cruise or hover while communicating with the sensors. The objective is to minimize the UAV’s total flight time from a starting point to a destination while allowing each sensor to successfully upload a certain amount of data using a given amount of energy. The whole trajectory is divided into non-overlapping data collection intervals, in each of which one sensor is served by the UAV. The data collection intervals, the UAV’s speed, and the sensors’ transmit powers are jointly optimized. The formulated flight time minimization problem is difficult to solve. We first show that when only one sensor is present, the sensor’s transmit power follows a water-filling policy and the UAV’s speed can be found efficiently by bisection search. Then, we show that for the general case with multiple sensors, the flight time minimization problem can be equivalently reformulated as a dynamic programming (DP) problem. The subproblem involved in each stage of the DP reduces to handle the case with only one sensor node. Numerical results present the insightful behaviors of the UAV and the sensors. Specifically, it is observed that the UAV’s optimal speed is proportional to the given energy of the sensors and the inter-sensor distance, but it is inversely proportional to the data upload requirement.

Drone networks: Communications, coordination, and sensing

Abstract: Small drones are being utilized in monitoring, transport, safety and disaster management, and other domains. Envisioning that drones form autonomous networks incorporated into the air traffic, we describe a high-level architecture for the design of a collaborative aerial system consisting of drones with on-board sensors and embedded processing, coordination, and networking capabilities. We implement a multi-drone system consisting of quadcopters and demonstrate its potential in disaster assistance, search and rescue, and aerial monitoring. Furthermore, we illustrate design challenges and present potential solutions based on the lessons learned so far.

Energy-Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks (EH-WSNs): A Review

Abstract: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are crucial in supporting continuous environmental monitoring, where sensor nodes are deployed and must remain operational to collect and transfer data from the environment to a base-station. However, sensor nodes have limited energy in their primary power storage unit, and this energy may be quickly drained if the sensor node remains operational over long periods of time. Therefore, the idea of harvesting ambient energy from the immediate surroundings of the deployed sensors, to recharge the batteries and to directly power the sensor nodes, has recently been proposed. The deployment of energy harvesting in environmental field systems eliminates the dependency of sensor nodes on battery power, drastically reducing the maintenance costs required to replace batteries. In this article, we review the state-of-the-art in energy-harvesting WSNs for environmental monitoring applications, including Animal Tracking, Air Quality Monitoring, Water Quality Monitoring, and Disaster Monitoring to improve the ecosystem and human life. In addition to presenting the technologies for harvesting energy from ambient sources and the protocols that can take advantage of the harvested energy, we present challenges that must be addressed to further advance energy-harvesting-based WSNs, along with some future work directions to address these challenges.

Distributed Attack Detection and Secure Estimation of Networked Cyber-Physical Systems Against False Data Injection Attacks and Jamming Attacks

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the problem of joint distributed attack detection and distributed secure estimation for a networked cyber-physical system under physical and cyber attacks. The system is monitored by a wireless sensor network, in which a group of sensors is spatially distributed and the sensors’ measurements are broadcast to remote estimators via a wireless network medium. A malicious adversary simultaneously launches a false data injection attack at the physical system layer to intentionally modify the system's state and jamming attacks at the cyber layer to block the wireless transmission channels between sensors and remote estimators. The sensors’ measurements can be randomly dropped with mathematical probability if the corresponding transmission channels are deliberately jammed by the adversary. Resilient attack detection estimators are delicately constructed to provide locally reliable state estimations and detect the false data injection attack. Then, criteria for analyzing the estimation performance and designing the desired estimators are derived to guarantee the solvability of the problem. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is shown through an illustrative example.

An Enhanced PEGASIS Algorithm with Mobile Sink Support for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: Energy efficiency has been a hot research topic for many years and many routing algorithms have been proposed to improve energy efficiency and to prolong lifetime for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Since nodes close to the sink usually need to consume more energy to forward data of its neighbours to sink, they will exhaust energy more quickly. These nodes are called hot spot nodes and we call this phenomenon hot spot problem. In this paper, an Enhanced Power Efficient Gathering in Sensor Information Systems (EPEGASIS) algorithm is proposed to alleviate the hot spots problem from four aspects. Firstly, optimal communication distance is determined to reduce the energy consumption during transmission. Then threshold value is set to protect the dying nodes and mobile sink technology is used to balance the energy consumption among nodes. Next, the node can adjust its communication range according to its distance to the sink node. Finally, extensive experiments have been performed to show that our proposed EPEGASIS performs better in terms of lifetime, energy consumption, and network latency.

A PSO based Energy Efficient Coverage Control Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are large-scale and high-density networks that typically have coverage area overlap. In addition, a random deployment of sensor nodes cannot fully guarantee coverage of the sensing area, which leads to coverage holes in WSNs. Thus, coverage control plays an important role in WSNs. To alleviate unnecessary energy wastage and improve network performance, we consider both energy efficiency and coverage rate for WSNs. In this paper, we present a novel coverage control algorithm based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Firstly, the sensor nodes are randomly deployed in a target area and remain static after deployment. Then, the whole network is partitioned into grids, and we calculate each grid’s coverage rate and energy consumption. Finally, each sensor nodes’ sensing radius is adjusted according to the coverage rate and energy consumption of each grid. Simulation results show that our algorithm can effectively improve coverage rate and reduce energy consumption.

Finite-Time Distributed State Estimation Over Sensor Networks With Round-Robin Protocol and Fading Channels

Abstract: This paper considers finite-time distributed state estimation for discrete-time nonlinear systems over sensor networks. The Round-Robin protocol is introduced to overcome the channel capacity constraint among sensor nodes, and the multiplicative noise is employed to model the channel fading. In order to improve the performance of the estimator under the situation, where the transmission resources are limited, fading channels with different stochastic properties are used in each round by allocating the resources. Sufficient conditions of the average stochastic finite-time boundedness and the average stochastic finite-time stability for the estimation error system are derived on the basis of the periodic system analysis method and Lyapunov approach, respectively. According to the linear matrix inequality approach, the estimator gains are designed. Finally, the effectiveness of the developed results are illustrated by a numerical example.

End-to-End Learning From Spectrum Data: A Deep Learning Approach for Wireless Signal Identification in Spectrum Monitoring Applications

Abstract: This paper presents end-to-end learning from spectrum data—an umbrella term for new sophisticated wireless signal identification approaches in spectrum monitoring applications based on deep neural networks. End-to-end learning allows to: 1) automatically learn features directly from simple wireless signal representations, without requiring design of hand-crafted expert features like higher order cyclic moments and 2) train wireless signal classifiers in one end-to-end step which eliminates the need for complex multi-stage machine learning processing pipelines. The purpose of this paper is to present the conceptual framework of end-to-end learning for spectrum monitoring and systematically introduce a generic methodology to easily design and implement wireless signal classifiers. Furthermore, we investigate the importance of the choice of wireless data representation to various spectrum monitoring tasks. In particular, two case studies are elaborated: 1) modulation recognition and 2) wireless technology interference detection. For each case study three convolutional neural networks are evaluated for the following wireless signal representations: temporal IQ data, the amplitude/phase representation, and the frequency domain representation. From our analysis, we prove that the wireless data representation impacts the accuracy depending on the specifics and similarities of the wireless signals that need to be differentiated, with different data representations resulting in accuracy variations of up to 29%. Experimental results show that using the amplitude/phase representation for recognizing modulation formats can lead to performance improvements up to 2% and 12% for medium to high SNR compared to IQ and frequency domain data, respectively. For the task of detecting interference, frequency domain representation outperformed amplitude/phase and IQ data representation up to 20%.

Context-Sensitive Access in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) Healthcare Applications

Abstract: Industrial Internet of Things (IIoTs) is the fast growing network of interconnected things that collects and exchange data using embedded sensors planted everywhere. Several IIoT applications such as the ones related to healthcare systems are expected to widely utilize the evolving 5G technology. This 5G-inspired IIoT paradigm in healthcare applications enables the users to interact with various types of sensors via secure wireless medical sensor networks (WMSNs). Users of 5G networks should interact with each other in a seamless secure manner. And thus, security richness is highly coveted for the real time wireless sensor network systems. Asking users to verify themselves before every interaction is a tedious, time-consuming process that disrupts inhabitants’ activities, and degrades the overall healthcare system performance. To avoid such problems, we propose a context-sensitive seamless identity provisioning (CSIP) framework for the IIoT. CSIP proposes a secure mutual authentication approach using hash and global assertion value to prove that the proposed mechanism can achieve the major security goals of the WMSN in a short time period.

A Critical Analysis of Research Potential, Challenges, and Future Directives in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: In recent years, industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) have emerged as an important research theme with applications spanning a wide range of industries including automation, monitoring, process control, feedback systems, and automotive. Wide scope of IWSNs applications ranging from small production units, large oil and gas industries to nuclear fission control, enables a fast-paced research in this field. Though IWSNs offer advantages of low cost, flexibility, scalability, self-healing, easy deployment, and reformation, yet they pose certain limitations on available potential and introduce challenges on multiple fronts due to their susceptibility to highly complex and uncertain industrial environments. In this paper, a detailed discussion on design objectives, challenges, and solutions, for IWSNs, are presented. A careful evaluation of industrial systems, deadlines, and possible hazards in industrial atmosphere are discussed. This paper also presents a thorough review of the existing standards and industrial protocols and gives a critical evaluation of potential of these standards and protocols along with a detailed discussion on available hardware platforms, specific industrial energy harvesting techniques and their capabilities. This paper lists main service providers for IWSNs solutions and gives insight of future trends and research gaps in the field of IWSNs.

Drone Assisted Vehicular Networks: Architecture, Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract: This article introduces the DAVN, which provides ubiquitous connections for vehicles by efficiently integrating the communication and networking technologies of drones and connected vehicles. Specifically, we first propose a comprehensive architecture of the DAVN and outline its potential services. By cooperating with vehicles and infrastructures, drones can improve vehicle-to-vehicle connectivity, infrastructure coverage, network information collection ability, and network interworking efficiency. We then present the challenges and research opportunities of DAVNs. In addition, a case study is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of DAVNs by leveraging our designed simulation platform. Simulation results demonstrate that the performance of vehicular networks can be significantly enhanced with the proposed DAVN architecture.