No Arabic abstract
Monitoring of civil infrastructures is critically needed to track aging, damages and ultimately to prevent severe failures which can endanger many lives. The ability to monitor in a continuous and fine-grained fashion the integrity of a wide variety of buildings, referred to as structural health monitoring, with low-cost, long-term and continuous measurements is essential from both an economic and a life-safety standpoint. To address these needs, we propose a low-cost wireless sensor node specifically designed to support modal analysis over extended periods of time with long-range connectivity at low power consumption. Our design uses very cost-effective MEMS accelerometers and exploits the Narrowband IoT protocol (NB-IoT) to establish long-distance connection with 4G infrastructure networks. Long-range wireless connectivity, cabling-free installation and multi-year lifetime are a unique combination of features, not available, to the best of our knowledge, in any commercial or research device. We discuss in detail the hardware architecture and power management of the node. Experimental tests demonstrate a lifetime of more than ten years with a 17000 mAh battery or completely energy-neutral operation with a small solar panel (60 mm x 120 mm). Further, we validate measurement accuracy and confirm the feasibility of modal analysis with the MEMS sensors: compared with a high-precision instrument based on a piezoelectric transducer, our sensor node achieves a maximum difference of 0.08% at a small fraction of the cost and power consumption.
A new class of sensing paradigm known as lab-onskin where stretchable and flexible smart sensor devices are integrated into the skin, provides direct monitoring and diagnostic interfaces to the body. Distributed lab-on-skin wireless sensors have the ability to provide continuous long term assessment of the skin health. This paper proposes a distributed skin health monitoring system using a wireless body area network. The system is responsive to the dynamic changes in the skin health, and remotely reports on the same. The proposed algorithm detects the abnormal skin and creates an energy efficient data aggregation tree covering the affected area while putting the unnecessary sensors to sleep mode. The algorithm responds to the changing conditions of the skin by dynamically adapting the size and shape of the monitoring trees to that of the abnormal skin areas thus providing a comprehensive monitoring. Simulation results demonstrate the application and utility of the proposed algorithm for changing wound shapes and sizes.
To support Machine Type Communications (MTC) in next generation mobile networks, NarrowBand-IoT (NB-IoT) has been released by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) as a promising solution to provide extended coverage and low energy consumption for low cost MTC devices. However, the existing Orthogonal Multiple Access (OMA) scheme in NB-IoT cannot provide connectivity for a massive number of MTC devices. In parallel with the development of NB-IoT, Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA), introduced for the fifth generation wireless networks, is deemed to significantly improve the network capacity by providing massive connectivity through sharing the same spectral resources. To leverage NOMA in the context of NB-IoT, we propose a power domain NOMA scheme with user clustering for an NB-IoT system. In particular, the MTC devices are assigned to different ranks within the NOMA clusters where they transmit over the same frequency resources. Then, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the total throughput of the network by optimizing the resource allocation of MTC devices and NOMA clustering while satisfying the transmission power and quality of service requirements. We prove the NP-hardness of the proposed optimization problem. We further design an efficient heuristic algorithm to solve the proposed optimization problem by jointly optimizing NOMA clustering and resource allocation of MTC devices. Furthermore, we prove that the reduced optimization problem of power control is a convex optimization task. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed scheme.
The introduction of Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) as a cellular IoT technology aims to support massive Machine-Type Communications applications. These applications are characterized by massive connections from a large number of low-complexity and low-power devices. One of the goals of NB-IoT is to improve coverage extension beyond existing cellular technologies. In order to do that, NB-IoT introduces transmission repetitions and different bandwidth allocation configurations in uplink. These new transmission approaches yield many transmission options in uplink. In this paper, we propose analytical expressions that describe the influence of these new approaches in the transmission. Our analysis is based on the Shannon theorem. The transmission is studied in terms of the required Signal to Noise Ratio, bandwidth utilization, and energy per transmitted bit. Additionally, we propose an uplink link adaptation algorithm that contemplates these new transmission approaches. The conducted evaluation summarizes the influence of these approaches. Furthermore, we present the resulting uplink link adaptation from our proposed algorithm sweeping the devices coverage.
As network size continues to grow exponentially, there has been a proportionate increase in the number of nodes in the corresponding network. With the advent of Internet of things (IOT), it is assumed that many more devices will be connected to the existing network infrastructure. As a result, monitoring is expected to get more complex for administrators as networks tend to become more heterogeneous. Moreover, the addressing for IOTs would be more complex given the scale at which devices will be added to the network and hence monitoring is bound to become an uphill task due to management of larger range of addresses. This paper will throw light on what kind of monitoring mechanisms can be deployed in internet of things (IOTs) and their overall effectiveness.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has started to empower the future of many industrial and mass-market applications. Localization techniques are becoming key to add location context to IoT data without human perception and intervention. Meanwhile, the newly-emerged Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) technologies have advantages such as long-range, low power consumption, low cost, massive connections, and the capability for communication in both indoor and outdoor areas. These features make LPWAN signals strong candidates for mass-market localization applications. However, there are various error sources that have limited localization performance by using such IoT signals. This paper reviews the IoT localization system through the following sequence: IoT localization system review -- localization data sources -- localization algorithms -- localization error sources and mitigation -- localization performance evaluation. Compared to the related surveys, this paper has a more comprehensive and state-of-the-art review on IoT localization methods, an original review on IoT localization error sources and mitigation, an original review on IoT localization performance evaluation, and a more comprehensive review of IoT localization applications, opportunities, and challenges. Thus, this survey provides comprehensive guidance for peers who are interested in enabling localization ability in the existing IoT systems, using IoT systems for localization, or integrating IoT signals with the existing localization sensors.