IM2PR: interference-minimized multipath routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

With respect to the inherent advantages of multipath routing, nowadays multipath routing is known as an efficient mechanism to provide even network resource utilization and efficient data transmission in different networks. In this context, several multipath routing protocols have been developed over the past years. However, due to the time-varying characteristics of low-power wireless communications and broadcast nature of radio channel, performance benefits of traffic distribution over multiple paths in wireless sensor networks are less obvious. Motivated by the drawbacks of the existing multipath routing protocols, this paper presents an Interference-Minimized MultiPath Routing protocol (IM2PR) which aims to discover a sufficient number of minimum interfering paths with high data transmission quality between each event area and sink node in order to provide efficient event data packet forwarding in event-driven wireless sensor networks. Extensive performance evaluations show that IM2PR presents improvements over the Micro Sensor Multipath Routing Protocol and Energy-Efficient data Routing Protocol as follows: 50 and 70 % in term of packet reception ratio at the sink, 44 and 80 % in term of goodput, 33 and 40 % in term of packet delivery latency, 40 and 57 % in term of energy consumption, 50 and 60 % in term of packet delivery overhead.     

A WiSN node SoC with real-time image compressor and IEEE 802.15.4 MAC accelerator

This article presents a wireless image sensor node SoC (system-on-a-chip) for low-power wireless image sensor network (WiSN), in which camera chip interface, high-quality image compression and IEEE 802.15.4 compliant acceleration modules are integrated on chip. The proposed SoC contains a hardware-implemented real-time lossless JPEG (JPEG-LS) compression engine for Bayer Color Filter Arrays (Bayer CFA), reaching a 3.5 bits/pixel with peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) greater than 46.3 dB and achieving a maximum 5 frames/s @16 MHz for VGA (640 × 480) colour images. The proposed hardware accelerator for IEEE 802.15.4 media access control (MAC) layer covers crucial protocol defined functions and algorithms, and reduces 45% software code in the host processor. This SoC has been fabricated in UMC 0.18 µm 1P6M CMOS process. The average power of the prototype chip is 18.2 mW at 3.0 V power supply and 16 MHz clock rate.     

Optimizing sensor networks in the energy-latency-density design space

In wireless sensor networks, energy efficiency is crucial to achieving satisfactory network lifetime. To reduce the energy consumption significantly, a node should turn off its radio most of the time, except when it has to participate in data forwarding. We propose a new technique, called sparse topology and energy management (STEM), which efficiently wakes up nodes from a deep sleep state without the need for an ultra low-power radio. The designer can trade the energy efficiency of this sleep state for the latency associated with waking up the node. In addition, we integrate STEM with approaches that also leverage excess network density. We show that our hybrid wakeup scheme results in energy savings of over two orders of magnitude compared to sensor networks without topology management. Furthermore, the network designer is offered full flexibility in exploiting the energy-latency-density design space by selecting the appropriate parameter settings of our protocol.     

Wide Dynamic Range CMOS Amplifier Design for RF Signal Power Detection via Electro-Thermal Coupling

A differential temperature sensor for on-chip signal and DC power monitoring is presented for built-in testing and calibration applications. The amplifiers in the sensor are designed with class AB output stages to extend the dynamic range of the temperature/power measurements. Two high-gain amplification stages are used to achieve high sensitivity to temperature differences at points close to devices under test. Designed in 0.18 μm CMOS technology, the sensor has a simulated sensitivity that is tunable up to 210 mV/°C with a corresponding dynamic range of 13 °C. The sensor consumes 2.23 mW from a 1.8 V supply. A low-power version of the sensor was designed that consumes 1.125 mW from a 1.8 V supply, which has a peak sensitivity of 185.7 mV/°C over a 8 °C dynamic range.     

Indoor Radio Propagation and Interference in 2.4 GHz Wireless Sensor Networks: Measurements and Analysis

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the performance and lifetime are significantly affected by the indoor propagation and the interference from other technologies using the 2.4 GHz band. Next to an overview of the propagation and coexistence issues in the literature, we present a model for analysing these effects in WSNs. We also present our measurements results on the indoor propagation, the interference of the microwave oven (MWO) and their impact on the performance of the WSN. The propagation measurements reveal significant influence of the multipath: changing a node position with a few centimetres or changing the communication channel can lead up to 30 dB difference in the received power. The power leakage of MWO has been observed around $-$ 20 dBm at 1 m distances to the oven. This leads to extra retries of the 802.15.4 messages which matches our simulation results: the packet success ratio at first try decreases to 30–40 %, which increases the average active time of the sensor, closely located to the MWO. We observe that the ON–OFF pattern of the MWO could be exploited by WSNs to improve the performance.     

Cluster-Head Restricted Energy Efficient Protocol (CREEP) for Routing in Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

A magnanimous number of collaborative sensor nodes make up a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). These sensor nodes are outfitted with low-cost and low-power sensors. The routing protocols are responsible for ensuring communications while considering the energy constraints of the system. Achieving a higher network lifetime is the need of the hour in WSNs. Currently, many network layer protocols are considering a heterogeneous WSN, wherein a certain number of the sensors are rendered higher energy as compared to the rest of the nodes. In this paper, we have critically analysed the various stationary heterogeneous clustering algorithms and assessed their lifetime and throughput performance in mobile node settings also. Although many newer variants of Distributed Energy-Efficiency Clustering (DEEC) scheme execute proficiently in terms of energy efficiency, they suffer from high system complexity due to computation and selection of large number of Cluster Heads (CHs). A protocol in form of Cluster-head Restricted Energy Efficient Protocol (CREEP) has been proposed to overcome this limitation and to further improve the network lifetime by modifying the CH selection thresholds in a two-level heterogeneous WSN. Simulation results establish that proposed solution ameliorates in terms of network lifetime as compared to others in stationary as well as mobile WSN scenarios.     

Antipodal Linear Tapered Slot Antenna Based Radio Link Characterization in Narrow Hallway Environment at 60 GHz

The performance of wireless communication systems is predominantly dependent on propagation environment and respective radiating antennas. Due to the shorter wavelength at millimeter wave (MmW) frequencies, the propagation loss through the objects in indoor environments is typically very high. To improve the channel capacity and to reduce inter-user interference, a high gain directional antenna is desired at MmW frequencies. Traditional antennas used in MmW devices are not suitable for low-cost commercial devices due to their heavy and bulky configurations. This paper focuses on design and development of a very compact (44.61?×?9.93?×?0.381 mm) high gain antipodal linear tapered slot antenna (ALTSA) utilizing substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) technology at 60 GHz. Received signal strength (RSS), path loss, and capacity are studied for MmW indoor applications utilizing ALTSA with radio frequency (RF) measurement equipment in narrow hallway environment.     

Low-power sensor signal monitoring and impulse radio architecture for biomedical applications

Remote diagnostics of the vital information of a patient and the initiation of necessary actions by the healthcare professionals have resulted in the development of wireless body area network (WBAN). With little to no maintenance, each sensor node within a WBAN must operate with less than 100 μW of power consumption. Impulse radio architecture can be utilized to achieve this goal. This paper reports a low-power transmitter unit consisting of a Data Generator Block, an Impulse Generator Block and a Buffer. The Data Generator Block converts any electrochemical sensor current ranging from 0.2 to 2 μA to digital data. This block consumes a power in the range of 2.575–4.29 μW. The Impulse Generator Block utilizes an RC network to generate impulses of approximately 55 ns duration. Both the Data Generator Block and the Impulse Generator Block can operate with a 1 V supply. Finally, a Buffer circuit, which operates with a 2 V supply, is used to drive a standard 50 Ω load such as an external antenna. The peak current consumption of the impulses is 2.11 mA with a peak output voltage of 72 mV, making it extremely suitable for short range wireless communication. The entire system has been designed and fabricated using a 90 nm standard CMOS process. The average power consumption of the system is only 22.10 μW.     

Smart error-control strategy for low-power communication in wireless networked control system

We consider a Wireless Networked Control System (WNCS) in an indoor environment and discuss the impact of wireless channel characteristics on the stability and performance of wireless feedback control-loop system. The presence of mobile/static obstacles and other radio interferences in indoor space causes random transmission errors and therefore, it becomes challenging to establish timely and reliable communication among distributed WNCS nodes (sensor, controller and actuator). To overcome communication errors in an energy-efficient way, we propose a novel Forward Error Correction (FEC) based smart error control mechanism which at its core employs a cascaded fuzzy inference system. The proposed strategy unifies three heterogeneous metrics, e.g. Signal-to-Noise Ratio, Line-of-Sight/Non-Line-of-Sight detection and packet ACK/NACK information, to accurately estimate the radio links quality and to select an appropriate error correction code. The performance of the proposed approach have been evaluated in simulated environment that includes realistic indoor fading channel model and IEEE 802.15.4 2.4 GHz modulation format for the network nodes. Based on obtained results, we conclude that the proposed smart error control scheme not only offers better trade-off in terms of packet error rate and energy efficiency as compared to static FEC codes and IEEE802.15.4 ARQ (Automatic Repeat-reQuest) mechanism, but also achieves increased stability of WNCS.     

Collision avoidance slot allocation scheme for multi-cluster wireless sensor networks

This paper introduces a collision avoidance slot allocation scheme for Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) based Medium Access Control (MAC) in multi-cluster wireless sensor networks. TDMA MAC protocols have built-in active-sleep duty cycle that can be leveraged for limiting idle listening. Also, they can overcome the overhearing problem, thus have better energy efficiency. Enabling concurrent intra-cluster communications using a single radio channel is a key issue in TDMA MAC protocols. Using orthogonal frequency channels or different Code Division Multiple Access codes for different adjacent clusters can solve the problem at the expense of cost. In this paper, we propose a new distributed slot allocation protocol called  Coordinated   Time   Slot   Allocation (CTSA) that can reduce collisions significantly using a single radio channel. We use simulations to study the effects of different system parameters on the performance of our proposed protocol. Simulation results show that applying CTSA over clustering protocols can significantly reduce collisions. It also shows fast convergence for our proposed CTSA protocol. In this paper we apply our CTSA scheme to the Low Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy protocol which forms the basis for many cluster based routing protocols. CTSA is also compared with the SRSA algorithm proposed by Wu and Biswas (Wirel Netw 13(5):691–703, 2007) by means of simulation.     

A CMOS Ripple Detector for Voltage Regulator Testing

This paper presents an RMS based ripple sensor for testing of fully integrated voltage regulators. A DC signal which is proportional to the input ripple amplitude is generated. Final digital pass/fail signal is obtained with a clocked comparator. The sensor can detect a peak-to-peak ripple voltage of up to 50 millivolts on the 1.2 V supply rail and has 220 MHz bandwidth. The sensor is designed using IBM 90 nm CMOS technology and its functionality is verified in Cadence Virtuoso simulation environment.     

Low-Power Based Coherent Acoustic Modem for Emerging Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Smart, small, inexpensive sensor nodes are used to construct underwater acoustic sensor networks. In addition, with the recent increase in the importance of underwater applications, the need for underwater communication has become more important. Hence, an acoustic modem capable of effective underwater communications has become more necessary for the sensor nodes to obtain underwater data. To develop an acoustic modem for effective underwater communications, some limitations must be overcome, such as the very short transmission range of radio waves, limited power supply, and high cost of commercial acoustic modems. Recently, low-power, low-cost acoustic modems have been developed. However, the data rates of these modems are so slow that sensor nodes cannot perform energy-efficient protocols. The objective of this work is to develop an acoustic modem capable of supporting high data rates. We introduce a coherent acoustic modem that uses waterproof ultrasonic sensors to process acoustic waves. The proposed modem is based on a low-power, low-cost, short-range concept, and it also supports a high data rate for energy-efficient MAC and routing protocols. Underwater experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance improvements of our modem. Experimental results show that our modem has the best performance among all recently developed low-power modems and that it is preferable to develop a coherent modem able to perform effective underwater communications.     

Wireless loops: What are they?

Several loop applications of wireless technology are aimed at reducing the cost of deploying communications services ranging from telephone to wideband video. In these applications, wireless links replace a portion of a wireline loop from a central location (a central office or cable headend) to a subscriber. The replacement of labor-intensive wireline technology by complex mass-produced integrated electronics in wireless transceivers is projected to reduce the overall cost of the resulting loop. These wireless loop applications attempt to provide existing communications services or small modifications to existing communications services. A different interpretation of a wireless loop makes use of low-power digital radio technology to provide the last thousand feet or so of a loop. Low-power low-complexity wireless loop technology in small base units can be integrated with network intelligence to provide the fixed-infrastructure network needed to support economical personal communications services (PCS) to small, lightweight, low-power personal voice and/or data communicators. Low-complexity communicators can provide many hours of “talk time” or data transmission time and perhaps several days of standby time from small batteries (≤ 1.5 oz). Because this application of wireless loop technology can reduce the inherent costs in several parts of a wireline loop, it has the potential to provide convenient widespread PCS at less costs than providing telephone services over conventional wireline loops. This low-power wireless loop application does not fit into any existing communications system paradigm. Wireless technology with tetherless access and wide-ranging mobility, e.g., the personal access communications system (PACS), does not fit the accumulated wisdom of the wireline telephony paradigm. It also does not fit the paradigm of existing cellular radio that has sparsely distributed expensive cell sites, and it is not targeted at fixed video services as is wireless cable. Because a significant change in thinking is required in addressing this new low-power low-complexity widespread wireless loop paradigm, its large economic advantages and service benefits have not yet been embraced by many of the existing communications providers, who appear to be more comfortable pursuing the better-known paradigms of video using wireless cable, or of cellular radio in the guise of high-tier PCS, or in the guise of rapid economical deployment of telephone services in developing nations. This paper discusses the inherent economic advantages and service benefits of low-power low-complexity wireless loop technology integrated with network intelligence aimed at providing economical low-tier PCS to everyone.     

UWB radio module design for wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we describe an impulse-based ultra wideband (UWB) radio system for wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. Different architectures have been studied for base station and sensor nodes. The base station node uses coherent UWB architecture because of the high performance and good sensitivity requirements. However, to meet complexity, power and cost constraints, the sensor module uses a novel non-coherent architecture that can autonomously detect the UWB signals. The radio modules include a transceiver block, a baseband processing unit and a power management block. The transceiver block includes a Gaussian pulse generator, a multiplier, an integrator and timing circuits. For long range applications, a wideband low noise amplifier (LNA) is included in the transceiver of the sensor module, whereas in short range applications it is simply eliminated to further reduce the power consumption. In order to verify the proposed system concept, circuit level implementation is studied using 1.5 V 0.18 μm CMOS technology. Finally, the UWB radio modules have been designed for implementation in liquid-crystal-polymer (LCP) based System-on-Package (SoP) technology for low power, low cost and small size integration. A small low cost, double-slotted, Knight’s helm antenna is embedded in the LCP substrate, which shows stable characterization and a return loss better than ?10 dB over the UWB band.     

Near ground path gain measurements at 433/868/915/2400 MHz in indoor corridor for wireless sensor networks

Near to ground radio frequency (RF) propagation path gain (PG) measurements at short distances at antenna height of 50 cm from the ground/floor were made in typical narrow and wide straight indoor corridors at 433/868/915/2400 MHz in a modern multi-storied building. The measurement was performed utilizing RF equipment and comparisons were made with Matlab simulations of ray tracing technique, free space model and ITU-R model along with Full-3D ray tracing model of Wireless Insite (WI) software. Measured PG values showed good agreement with WI in all cases. Path loss exponent (PE) values ranging from 1.22 to 2.13 were observed from the measured data. The research work reported in this paper is predominately geared towards characterizing radio link for wireless sensor networks in typical indoor corridor environments.     

IDRA: A flexible system architecture for next generation wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks consist of embedded devices (sensor nodes), equipped with a low-power radio. They are used for many applications: from wireless building automation to e-health applications. However, due to the limited capabilities of sensor nodes, designing network protocols for these constrained devices is currently very challenging. Therefore, this paper presents the IDRA platform: an information driven architecture designed to support next-generation applications on resource constrained networked objects. IDRA supports simple but useful optimizations at an architectural level. These include support for cross-protocol interactions, energy efficiency optimizations, QoS optimizations (packet priorities, dynamic protocol selection), mobility support and heterogeneous network support. The paper shows how the development of protocols is improved by using an architecture which delegates specific tasks to a central system, decreasing the memory requirements of associated network protocols. A thorough experimental performance analysis demonstrates that IDRA is much more scalable in terms of memory requirements, energy requirements and processing overhead than traditional system architectures. Finally, the paper discusses how the optimizations presented in this paper can be used for the clean-slate design of architectures for other wireless or wired network types.     

Performance enhancement of PEMC liquid level sensor subjected to environmental temperature variation

In this paper, the performance of a resonant Piezoelectric-excited Millimeter-sized Cantilever (PEMC) used as liquid level sensor has been studied. The sensitivity of this sensor affected by environmental temperature variation is investigated via theoretical and Finite Element Models (FEM). In order to validate this FEM, first, simulation results are compared with the theoretical and experimental ones for a sensor operating at constant room temperature. The simulation results are in a good agreement with experimental ones. Then, proposed theoretical model and FEM are used to study the dynamic behavior of the device when the environmental temperature is changed. The results indicate that although natural frequencies of sensor change due to temperature variation, the resultant shift remains almost the same regardless of specific immersion depths. Also, it can be concluded that temperature variation of about 50 °C affects the liquid level measurement accuracy up to 29 μm which is significant compared to a minimum detectable liquid level change of about 8 μm by this sensor reported previously in literature.     

Large Scale Indoor Localization System Based on Wireless Sensor Networks for Ubiquitous Computing

The task of formulating an efficient system for determining the location of an object, results in the creation of a wide number of applications and services. For this reason, most wireless sensor network applications assume the availability of sensor location information. In this paper, an indoor localization scheme, which is based on synchronized sensor nodes, is proposed. It is efficient in terms of power consumption and location update rate. Furthermore, it resolves the scalability problem usually found in most conventional indoor localization systems in large scale indoor environments. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated through experimental implementation and is compared with the Cricket system. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is a promising and feasible localization system for a large scale indoor environment.     

An ultra-low power energy-efficient microsystem for hydrogen gas sensing applications

This paper presents a fully integrated power management and sensing microsystem that harvests solar energy from a micro-power photovoltaic module for autonomous operation of a miniaturized hydrogen sensor. In order to measure H₂ concentration, conductance change of a miniaturized palladium nanowire sensor is measured and converted to a 13-bit digital value using a fully integrated sensor interface circuit. As these nanowires have temperature cross-sensitivity, temperature is also measured using an integrated temperature sensor for further calibration of the gas sensor. Measurement results are transmitted to the base station, using an external wireless data transceiver. A fully integrated solar energy harvester stores the harvested energy in a rechargeable NiMH microbattery. As the harvested solar energy varies considerably in different lighting conditions, the power consumption and performance of the sensor is reconfigured according to the harvested solar energy, to guarantee autonomous operation of the sensor. For this purpose, the proposed energy-efficient power management circuit dynamically reconfigures the operating frequency of digital circuits and the bias currents of analog circuits. The fully integrated power management and sensor interface circuits have been implemented in a 0.18 μm CMOS process with a core area of 0.25 mm². This circuit operates with a low supply voltage in the 0.9–1.5 V range. When operating at its highest performance, the power management circuit features a low power consumption of less than 300 nW and the whole sensor consumes 14.1 μA.     

Investigation of wireless sensor node power consumption profile powered by heterogeneous hybrid energy harvesters with EPDD management algorithm

Node lifetime is the major challenge in the WSN design, which is directly related to the power consumption optimisation. Therefore, there is a necessity to investigate the node power profile so that the hardware designers will have a full picture about the system demand in an early stage of the design. Likewise, it helps the software designers in developing suitable energy-aware operating/routing protocols. This paper profiles an enhanced wireless sensor node called ‘WSN_{_3_HHEH}’ power consumption powered by heterogeneous hybrid energy harvesting and equipped with an improved energy-aware Event-Priority-Driven Dissemination (EPDD) algorithm. The extensive real-world empirical power profiling measurements for each unit and node system level during active and sleep modes are presented, which it provides data on the wireless sensor node architectural design that is applicable for low-power and IoT applications. The results point out that within the WSN_{_3_HHEH} the RF transceiver consumed the highest power of 24 mW, followed by the MCU with 7.5 mW, and the sensor module with 0.16 mW throughout the active period. During the sleeping period however, the MCU unit consumed a noticeable amount of power of 1.8 mW compared to the other sensor node units.