Publications
246 results found
Calder M, Dobson S, Fisher M, et al., 2018, Making sense of the world: Framing models for trustworthy sensor-driven systems, Computers, Vol: 7, ISSN: 2073-431X
Sensor-driven systems provide data and information that facilitate real-time decision-making and autonomous actuation, as well as enable informed policy choices. However, can we be sure that these systems work as expected? Can we model them in a way that captures all the key issues? We define two concepts: frames of reference and frames of function that help us organise models of sensor-based systems and their purpose. Examples from a smart water distribution network illustrate how frames offer a lens through which to organise and balance multiple views of the system. Frames aid communication between modellers, analysts and stakeholders, and distinguish the purpose of each model, which contributes towards our trust that the system fulfils its purpose.
Shi F, Qin Z, Wu D, et al., 2018, Effective truth discovery and fair reward distribution for mobile crowdsensing, Pervasive and Mobile Computing, Vol: 51, Pages: 88-103, ISSN: 1574-1192
By leveraging the sensing capabilities of consumer mobile devices, mobile crowdsensing (MCS) systems enable a number of new applications for Internet of Things (IoT), such as traffic management, environmental monitoring, and localisation. However, the sensing data collected from the crowd workers are of various qualities, making it difficult to discover the ground truth and maintain the fairness of incentivisation schemes. In this paper, we propose a truth discovery algorithm based on a two-stage Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE), which explicitly characterises the heterogeneous sensing capabilities of the crowd and is able to estimate ground truth accurately using only a small amount of data from IoT infrastructures. Moreover, based on the truth discovery algorithm, two reward distribution schemes, LRDS and MRDS, are proposed to ensure fairness of rewarding the crowd according to their effort levels. We evaluate the estimation accuracy of the truth discovery algorithm and the fairness of the reward distribution schemes using both simulations and real-world MCS campaigns. The evaluation results indicate that the proposed methods achieve superior performance compared with state-of-the-art methods in terms of estimation accuracy and fairness of reward distribution.
Bhatia L, Tomic I, McCann J, 2018, LPWA-MAC - a low power wide area network MAC protocol for cyber-physical system, The 16th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2018), Publisher: ACM, Pages: 361-362
Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWANs) are being successfully used for the monitoring of large-scale systems that are delay-tolerant and which have low-bandwidth requirements. The next step would be instrumenting these for the control of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) distributed over large areas which require more bandwidth, bounded delays and higher reliability or at least more rigorous guarantees therein. This paper presents LPWA-MAC, a novel Low Power Wide-Area network MAC protocol, that ensures bounded end-to-end delays, high channel utility and supports many of the different traffic patterns and data-rates typical of CPS.
Bhatia L, Boyle D, McCann J, 2018, Aerial interactions with wireless sensors, The 16th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2018), Pages: 373-374
Sensing systems incorporating unmanned aerial vehicles have the potential to enable a host of hitherto impractical monitoring applications using wireless sensors in remote and extreme environments. Their use as data collection and power delivery agents can overcome challenges such as poor communications reliability in difficult RF environments and maintenance in areas dangerous for human operatives. Aerial interaction with wireless sensors presents some interesting new challenges, including selecting or designing appropriate communications protocols that must account for unique practicalities like the effects of velocity and altitude. This poster presents a practical evaluation of the effects of altitude when collecting sensor data using an unmanned aerial vehicle. We show that for an otherwise disconnected link over a long distance (70m), by increasing altitude (5m) the link is created and its signal strength continues to improve over tens of metres. This has interesting implications for protocol design and optimal aerial route planning.
Kartakis S, Fu A, Mazo M, et al., 2018, Communication schemes for centralized and decentralized event-triggered control systems, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, Vol: 26, Pages: 2035-2048, ISSN: 1063-6536
Energy constraint long-range wireless sensor/actuator-based solutions are theoretically the perfect choice to support the next generation of city-scale cyber-physical systems. Traditional systems adopt periodic control which increases network congestion and actuations while burdens the energy consumption. Recent control theory studies overcome these problems by introducing aperiodic strategies, such as event-triggered control (ETC). In spite of the potential savings, these strategies assume actuator continuous listening, while ignoring the sensing energy costs. In this paper, we fill this gap, by enabling sensing and actuator listening duty cycling and proposing two innovative medium access control protocols for three decentralized ETC approaches. A laboratory experimental test bed, which emulates a smart water network, was modeled and extended to evaluate the impact of system parameters and the performance of each approach. Experimental results reveal the predominance of the decentralized ETC against the classic periodic control either in terms of communication or actuation by promising significant system lifetime extension.
Shi F, Wu D, Arkhipov D, et al., 2018, ParkCrowd: Reliable crowdsensing for aggregation and dissemination of parking space information, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Vol: 20, Pages: 4032-4044, ISSN: 1524-9050
The scarcity of parking spaces in cities leads to a high demand for timely information about their availability. In this paper, we propose a crowdsensed parking system, namely ParkCrowd, to aggregate on-street and roadside parking space information reliably, and to disseminate this information to drivers in a timely manner. Our system not only collects and disseminates basic information, such as parking hours and price, but also provides drivers with information on the real time and future availability of parking spaces based on aggregated crowd knowledge. To improve the reliability of the information being disseminated, we dynamically evaluate the knowledge of crowd workers based on the veracity of their answers to a series of location-dependent point of interest control questions. We propose a logistic regression-based method to evaluate the reliability of crowd knowledge for real-time parking space information. In addition, a joint probabilistic estimator is employed to infer the future availability of parking spaces based on crowdsensed knowledge. Moreover, to incentivise wider participation of crowd workers, a reliability-based incentivisation method is proposed to reward workers according to their reliability and expertise levels. The efficacy of ParkCrowd for aggregation and the dissemination of parking space information has been evaluated in both real-world tests and simulations. Our results show that the ParkCrowd system is able to accurately identify the reliability level of the crowdsensed information, estimate the potential availability of parking spaces with high accuracy, and be successful in encouraging the participation of more reliable crowd workers by offering them higher monetary rewards.
Tomic I, Bhatia L, Breza MJ, et al., 2018, The limits of LoRaWAN in event-triggered wireless networked control systems, Control 2018: The 12th International UKACC Conference on Control, Publisher: IEEE
Wireless sensors and actuators offer benefits to largeindustrial control systems. The absence of wires for commu-nication reduces the deployment cost, maintenance effort, andprovides greater flexibility for sensor and actuator location andsystem architecture. These benefits come at a cost of a highprobability of communication delay or message loss due to theunreliability of radio-based communication. This unreliabilityposes a challenge to contemporary control systems that aredesigned with the assumption of instantaneous and reliable com-munication. Wireless sensors and actuators create a paradigmshift in engineering energy-efficient control schemes coupled withrobust communication schemes that can maintain system stabilityin the face of unreliable communication. This paper investigatesthe feasibility of using the low-power wide-area communicationprotocol LoRaWAN with an event-triggered control schemethrough modelling in Matlab. We show that LoRaWAN is capableof meeting the maximum delay and message loss requirements ofan event-triggered controller for certain classes of applications.We also expose the limitation in the use of LoRaWAN whenmessage size or communication range requirements increase orthe underlying physical system is exposed to significant externaldisturbances.
Tomic I, Chen PY, Breza MJ, et al., 2018, Antilizer: run time self-healing security for wireless sensor networks, 15th EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services (MobiQuitous 2018), Publisher: ACM, Pages: 107-116
Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications range from domesticInternet of Things systems like temperature monitoring of homesto the monitoring and control of large-scale critical infrastructures.The greatest risk with the use of WSNs in critical infrastructure istheir vulnerability to malicious network level attacks. Their radiocommunication network can be disrupted, causing them to lose ordelay data which will compromise system functionality. This paperpresents Antilizer, a lightweight, fully-distributed solution to enableWSNs to detect and recover from common network level attackscenarios. In Antilizer each sensor node builds a self-referencedtrust model of its neighbourhood using network overhearing. Thenode uses the trust model to autonomously adapt its communica-tion decisions. In the case of a network attack, a node can makeneighbour collaboration routing decisions to avoid affected regionsof the network. Mobile agents further bound the damage caused byattacks. These agents enable a simple notification scheme whichpropagates collaborative decisions from the nodes to the base sta-tion. A filtering mechanism at the base station further validatesthe authenticity of the information shared by mobile agents. Weevaluate Antilizer in simulation against several routing attacks. Ourresults show that Antilizer reduces data loss down to 1% (4% onaverage), with operational overheads of less than 1% and providesfast network-wide convergence.
Ren X, Yu C-M, Yu W, et al., 2018, LoPub: high-dimensional crowdsourced data publication with local differential privacy, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Vol: 13, Pages: 2151-2166, ISSN: 1556-6013
High-dimensional crowdsourced data collected from numerous users produces rich knowledge about our society; however, it also brings unprecedented privacy threats to the participants. Local differential privacy (LDP), a variant of differential privacy, is recently proposed as a state-of-the-art privacy notion. Unfortunately, achieving LDP on high-dimensional crowdsourced data publication raises great challenges in terms of both computational efficiency and data utility. To this end, based on the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm and Lasso regression, we first propose efficient multi-dimensional joint distribution estimation algorithms with LDP. Then, we develop a local differentially private high-dimensional data publication algorithm (LoPub) by taking advantage of our distribution estimation techniques. In particular, correlations among multiple attributes are identified to reduce the dimensionality of crowdsourced data, thus speeding up the distribution learning process and achieving high data utility. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our multivariate distribution estimation scheme significantly outperforms existing estimation schemes in terms of both communication overhead and estimation speed. Moreover, LoPub can keep, on average, 80% and 60% accuracy over the released datasets in terms of support vector machine and random forest classification, respectively.
Shi F, Qin Z, McCann JA, 2018, EventMe: Location-Based Event Content Distribution through Human Centric Device-to-Device Communications, IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), pp. 1-7. IEEE, 2018., Publisher: IEEE, ISSN: 1550-3607
Location-based information dissemination has become increasingly popular in the recent years. Extensive research work has been done on the matching of interested parties to event information via publish/subscribe systems. However, the rich content types of such location-specific data, especially when the data are presented in multimedia form, requires efficient methods with low cost to transfer the content to the subscribers. In this paper, the potential of utilising human centric device-to-device (D2D) communications to disseminate location-based event content is investigated. The human centric D2D data dissemination process is formulated as a task assignment problem, which can be modelled as a Integer Quadratically Constrained Quadratic Programming (IQCQP) problem. Since the IQCQP problem is in general NP-hard, a sub- optimal polynomial framework named EventMe is proposed, which is able to compute a solution with guaranteed lower bounds on data distribution capacity in terms of throughput. Through extensive evaluation using several real world datasets, it has shown that EventMe is able to improve the network throughput by 100%-500% compared to baseline methods. A prototype is developed and shows that it is practical to implement EventMe on mobile devices by generating minimal control data overhead.
Shi F, Qin Z, Wu D, et al., 2018, MPCSToken: Smart contract enabled fault-tolerant incentivisation for mobile P2P crowd services, 2018 IEEE 38th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), Publisher: IEEE, Pages: 961-971
Mobile peer to peer (P2P) networks offer a huge potential for distributed mobile P2P crowd services (MPCS), which enable data and computational tasks to be offloaded and executed directly between mobile devices. Similar to centralised mobile crowd services, such as mobile crowdsensing, incentivisation mechanisms are core to encouraging mobile users to participate in MPCS systems. However, due to the impact of task execution failures and unreliable behaviours of mobile users (particularly task requesters), it is a daunting task to design and implement an incentivisation mechanism to cater for the needs of MPCS systems. In this paper, we propose a fault-tolerant incentivisation mechanism (FTIM) for MPCS systems. With conditional payment strategies, FTIM is proven to accommodate the requirements of two important application scenarios by achieving mechanism properties such as incentive compatibility, economic efficiency, individual rationality, and weak budget balance. Moreover, to tackle the practical challenges in implementing FTIM in the real world, we design a MPCSTo-ken smart contract to facilitate its service auction, task execution and payment settlement process. We implement the MPCSToken contract on Ethereum blockchain. Both real-world experiment and simulation results show that the system is cost effective for deployments and improves the overall mobile users' utility by exploring the opportunities offered by MPCS.
Zhao C, Yang S, Yan P, et al., 2018, Data quality guarantee for credible caching device selection in mobile crowdsensing systems, IEEE Wireless Communications, Vol: 25, Pages: 58-64, ISSN: 1536-1284
CrowdsensingSystems(MCSs)present a flexible and economical alternative to traditionalinfrastructure based large-scale sensing through therecruitment of personal mobile devices as data sources.As this becomes a popular sensing approach it will impactthe capacity of typical centralized cellular communicationinfrastructures widely adopted by MCS applicationsand any costs accrued. Following the trend towardsedge processing, Mobile Edge Caching offloads data andservices from the system core to reduce service latency andbandwidth occupation. However, in the MCS case the edgedevice is owned by the general public and are thereforemore vulnerable to data or calculation manipulation bythe user. We now better understand sensor data anduser trustworthiness but have no way to determine whichof devices could also be trusted, i.e. act as a crediblecaching device. In this article, we treat the quality ofsensing data reported by each user as an indication oftheir possibility of providing credible caching services.Specifically, we conduct a comprehensive study of the dataquality problem with regards to cache-enabled MCSs, anddevelop an incentivization method to encourage users toactively provide high quality data. That is, quality-awarebehavior evaluation is core to the credible caching deviceselection process. Results of extensive simulations basedon real-world data verify the effectiveness of our design.We also highlight several promising research directionsthat remain open for further elaborations.
Breza MJ, Tomic I, McCann J, 2018, Failures from the environment, a Report on the First FAILSAFE workshop, ACM SenSys 2017, Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery, ISSN: 0146-4833
This document presents the views expressed in the submissions and discussions at the FAILSAFE workshop about the common problems that plague embedded sensor system deployments in the wild. We present analysis gathered from the submissions and the panel session of the FAILSAFE 2017 workshop held at the SenSys 2017 conference. The FAILSAFE call for papers specifically asked for descriptions of wireless sensor network (WSN) deployments and their problems and failures. The submissions, the questions raised at the presentations, and the panel discussion give us a sufficient body of work to review, and draw conclusions regarding the effect that the environment has as the most common cause of embedded sensor system failures.
Babazadeh M, Kartakis S, McCann JA, 2018, Highly-Distributed Sensor Processing using IoT for Critical Infrastructure Monitoring, 9th Annual Summit and Conference of the Asia-Pacific-Signal-and-Information-Processing-Association (APSIPA ASC), Publisher: IEEE, Pages: 1065-1074, ISSN: 2309-9402
Highly-distributed signal processing for critical monitoring infrastructures has been a main research topic over the last decade. Under this context, we show the three phases of the joint "Cyber-physical control system" project; a collaboration between Imperial College London and NEC Corp. Japan. First, the implementation of edge processing with multiple tasks including data mining and communication, developed on a lightweight single core low-powered MCU system is presented. This algorithm has been effectively customized to be implemented on resource-constrained embedded systems. The developed sensor network is coupled with a low-powered wide range LoRa platform for transmission of the minimized payload. The work explores the node-to-node communication limitations and discusses how edge processing can be used for water network control and we present the overview of a Cyber-physical control system which is concerned with the event-triggered control of a water network. Finally, the results of the LoRa communication tests are given.
Jackson G, Ciocoiu S, McCann JA, 2018, Solar Energy Harvesting Optimization for Wireless Sensor Networks, IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), Publisher: IEEE, ISSN: 2334-0983
The energy optimization of resource constrained energy harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have constituted a major research topic in recent years in areas such as environmental monitoring, hazard detection and industrial applications. Current approaches leverage techniques such as adaptive duty cycling, transmission power adaptation, and data reduction methods to minimize energy consumption. However, the majority of the state of the art approaches with WSN research assume that energy generation, although variable, is not controllable in-situ to optimize energy generation. In this paper, we design a low power, low cost, open source solar tracking mechanism for energy harvesting wireless sensors. Furthermore, we formulate the dynamic energy generation system as an optimization problem and from this design an adaptive, lightweight, distributed, prediction free algorithm to maximize the energy generation of the system. Moreover, we evaluate the proposed method using a combination of real trace-driven real solar data based simulation, comparison to a centralized globally optimum solution and real world experimentation. From our evaluation, an improvement of up to 165% in energy generation has been seen when compared to traditional tracking methodologies and that the lightweight distributed implementation is, on average, 99.1% as efficient as the globally optimum solution across 28 distinct testing scenarios.
Qin Z, McCann JA, 2018, Resource efficiency in low-power wide-area networks for IoT applications, IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), Publisher: IEEE, ISSN: 2334-0983
It is predicated that the Internet of Things (IoT) brings together a massive number of devices connected to implement applications such as smart cities. Therefore, efficiency in allocating limited resources to a huge number of devices becomes a critical challenge. In many IoT applications, e.g. smart infrastructure monitoring, the amount of data generated by each device can be relatively small even though the number of connected devices are large. This feature of IoT enables the potential of massive connectivity and low-power wide-area (LPWA) networks have been proposed as a promising solution for such types of IoT applications [1]–[2][3]. Compared with traditional wireless techniques, LPWA techniques aim to offer a trade-off between power consumption, coverage, and data rates to address the more diverse needs of IoT applications. To achieve long range transmission with low energy consumption, LPWA technologies can normally operate with low data rates, which makes them more suitable for delay-tolerant applications with small amounts of data.
Tahir YS, Yang S, McCann, 2018, BRPL: backpressure RPL for high-throughput and mobile IoTs, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, Vol: 17, Pages: 29-43, ISSN: 1536-1233
RPL, an IPv6 routing protocol for Low power Lossy Networks (LLNs), is considered to be the de facto routing standard for the Internet of Things (IoT). However, more and more experimental results demonstrate that RPL performs poorly when it comes to throughput and adaptability to network dynamics. This significantly limits the application of RPL in many practical IoT scenarios, such as an LLN with high-speed sensor data streams and mobile sensing devices. To address this issue, we develop BRPL, an extension of RPL, providing a practical approach that allows users to smoothly combine any RPL Object Function (OF) with backpressure routing. BRPL uses two novel algorithms, QuickTheta and QuickBeta, to support time-varying data traffic loads and node mobility respectively. We implement BRPL on Contiki OS, an open-source operating system for the Internet of Things. We conduct an extensive evaluation using both real-world experiments based on the FIT IoT-LAB testbed and large-scale simulations using Cooja over 18 virtual servers on the Cloud. The evaluation results demonstrate that BRPL not only is fully backward compatible with RPL (i.e. devices running RPL and BRPL can work together seamlessly), but also significantly improves network throughput and adaptability to changes in network topologies and data traffic loads. The observed packet loss reduction in mobile networks is, at a minimum, 60% and up to 1000% can be seen in extreme cases.
Liu Y, Qin Z, Elkashlan M, et al., 2017, Non-orthogonal multiple access in large-scale heterogeneous networks, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Vol: 35, Pages: 2667-2680, ISSN: 0733-8716
In this paper, the potential benefits of applying non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique in K -tier hybrid heterogeneous networks (HetNets) is explored. A promising new transmission framework is proposed, in which NOMA is adopted in small cells and massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is employed in macro cells. For maximizing the biased average received power for mobile users, a NOMA and massive MIMO based user association scheme is developed. To evaluate the performance of the proposed framework, we first derive the analytical expressions for the coverage probability of NOMA enhanced small cells. We then examine the spectrum efficiency of the whole network by deriving exact analytical expressions for NOMA enhanced small cells and a tractable lower bound for massive MIMO enabled macro cells. Finally, we investigate the energy efficiency of the hybrid HetNets. Our results demonstrate that: 1) the coverage probability of NOMA enhanced small cells is affected to a large extent by the targeted transmit rates and power sharing coefficients of two NOMA users; 2) massive MIMO enabled macro cells are capable of significantly enhancing the spectrum efficiency by increasing the number of antennas; 3) the energy efficiency of the whole network can be greatly improved by densely deploying NOMA enhanced small cell base stations; and 4) the proposed NOMA enhanced HetNets transmission scheme has superior performance compared with the orthogonal multiple access-based HetNets.
Yu W, Lin X, Zhang W, et al., 2017, Dynamical SimRank search on time-varying networks, VLDB JOURNAL, Vol: 27, Pages: 79-104, ISSN: 1066-8888
SimRank is an appealing pair-wise similarity measure based on graph structure. It iteratively follows the intuition that two nodes are assessed as similar if they are pointed to by similar nodes. Many real graphs are large, and links are constantly subject to minor changes. In this article, we study the efficient dynamical computation of all-pairs SimRanks on time-varying graphs. Existing methods for the dynamical SimRank computation [e.g., LTSF (Shao et al. in PVLDB 8(8):838–849, 2015) and READS (Zhang et al. in PVLDB 10(5):601–612, 2017)] mainly focus on top-k search with respect to a given query. For all-pairs dynamical SimRank search, Li et al.’s approach (Li et al. in EDBT, 2010) was proposed for this problem. It first factorizes the graph via a singular value decomposition (SVD) and then incrementally maintains such a factorization in response to link updates at the expense of exactness. As a result, all pairs of SimRanks are updated approximately, yielding O(r4n2) time and O(r2n2) memory in a graph with n nodes, where r is the target rank of the low-rank SVD. Our solution to the dynamical computation of SimRank comprises of five ingredients: (1) We first consider edge update that does not accompany new node insertions. We show that the SimRank update ΔΔS in response to every link update is expressible as a rank-one Sylvester matrix equation. This provides an incremental method requiring O(Kn2) time and O(n2) memory in the worst case to update n2 pairs of similarities for K iterations. (2) To speed up the computation further, we propose a lossless pruning strategy that captures the “affected areas” of ΔΔS to eliminate unnecessary retrieval. This reduces the time of the incremental SimRank to O(K(m+|AFF|)), where m is the number of edges in the old graph, and |AFF| (≤n2) is the size of “affected areas” in ΔΔS, and in practice, |AFF|≪n2. (3) We also consider edge updates that accomp
Jackson G, Wilson D, Gallacher S, et al., 2017, Tales from the Wild: Lessons Learned from Creating a Living Lab, FAILSAFE'201, Pages: 62-62
Wireless sensor networks in the past decade have become prevalent in areas such as environmental monitoring, hazard detection, and industrial IoT applications. Current research focuses on improving the energy efficiency, throughput, robustness, and resilience of such networks. Within this work, failures are rarely held up as something to be explored and discussed, as improvements and novelty are the traditionally highlighted outcomes. However, in order to undertake effective research, highlighting failures can help mitigate against them occurring in the future. In this paper, we wish to highlight failures in our work, times when engineering and social challenges were barriers to the completion of world class research. Three stakeholder driven case studies from the London Living Lab are chosen namely air quality, microclimate and urban bat monitoring. From these deployments, challenges are highlighted and the subsequent methods developed to overcome said challenges are explored with the view that future work may benefit from the outcomes of these experiences.
McCann JA, Qin Z, Cai Y, et al., 2017, Modulation and multiple access for 5G Networks., Communications Surveys and Tutorials, IEEE Communications Society, Vol: 20, Pages: 629-646, ISSN: 1553-877X
Fifth generation (5G) wireless networks face various challenges in order to support large-scale heterogeneous traffic and users, therefore new modulation and multiple access (MA) schemes are being developed to meet the changing demands. As this research space is ever increasing, it becomes more important to analyze the various approaches, therefore, in this paper we present a comprehensive overview of the most promising modulation and MA schemes for 5G networks. Unlike other surreys of 5G networks, this paper focuses on multiplexing techniques, including modulation techniques in orthogonal MA (OMA) and various types of non-OMA (NOMA) techniques. Specifically, we first introduce different types of modulation schemes, potential for OMA, and compare their performance in terms of spectral efficiency, out-of-band leakage, and bit-error rate. We then pay close attention to various types of NOMA candidates, including power-domain NOMA, code-domain NOMA, and NOMA multiplexing in multiple domains. From this exploration, we can identify the opportunities and challenges that will have the most significant impacts on modulation and MA designs for 5G networks.
Yadav P, McCann JA, Pereira T, 2017, Self-Synchronization in Duty-Cycled Internet of Things (IoT) Applications, IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL, Vol: 4, Pages: 2058-2069, ISSN: 2327-4662
In recent years, the networks of low-power devices have gained popularity. Typically, these devices are wireless and interact to form large networks such as the machine to machine networks, Internet of Things, wearable computing, and wireless sensor networks. The collaboration among these devices is a key to achieving the full potential of these networks. A major problem in this field is to guarantee robust communication between elements while keeping the whole network energy efficient. In this paper, we introduce an extended and improved emergent broadcast slot (EBS) scheme, which facilitates collaboration for robust communication and is energy efficient. In the EBS, nodes communication unit remains in sleeping mode and are awake just to communicate. The EBS scheme is fully decentralized, that is, nodes coordinate their wake-up window in a partially overlapped manner within each duty-cycle to avoid message collisions. We show the theoretical convergence behavior of the scheme, which is confirmed through real test-bed experimentation.
Tomic I, McCann JA, 2017, A Survey of Potential Security Issues in Existing Wireless Sensor Network Protocols, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, Vol: 4, Pages: 1910-1923, ISSN: 2327-4662
The increasing pervasiveness of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in diverse application domains including critical infrastructure systems, sets an extremely high security bar in the design of WSN systems to exploit their full benefits, increasing trust while avoiding loss. Nevertheless, a combination of resource restrictions and the physical exposure of sensor devices inevitably cause such networks to be vulnerable to security threats, both external and internal. While several researchers have provided a set of open problems and challenges in WSN security and privacy, there is a gap in the systematic study of the security implications arising from the nature of existing communication protocols in WSNs. Therefore, we have carried out a deep-dive into the main security mechanisms and their effects on the most popular protocols and standards used in WSN deployments i.e. IEEE 802.15.4, B-MAC, 6LoWPAN, RPL, BCP, CTP, and CoAP, where potential security threats and existing countermeasures are discussed at each layer of WSN stack. This work culminates in a deeper analysis of network layer attacks deployed against the RPL routing protocol. We quantify the impact of individual attacks on the performance of a network using the Cooja network simulator. Finally, we discuss new research opportunities in network layer security and how to use Cooja as a benchmark for developing new defenses for WSN systems.
Kartakis S, Yang S, Mccann JA, 2017, Reliability or Sustainability: Optimal Data Stream Estimation and Scheduling in Smart Water Networks, ACM TRANSACTIONS ON SENSOR NETWORKS, Vol: 13, ISSN: 1550-4859
As a typical cyber-physical system (CPS), smart water distribution networks require monitoring of underground water pipes with high sample rates for precise data analysis and water network control. Due to poor underground wireless channel quality and long-range communication requirements, high transmission power is typically adopted to communicate high-speed sensor data streams, posing challenges for long-term sustainable monitoring. In this article, we develop the first sustainable water sensing system, exploiting energy harvesting opportunities from water flows. Our system does this by scheduling the transmission of a subset of the data streams, whereas other correlated streams are estimated using autoregressive models based on the sound-velocity propagation of pressure signals inside water networks. To compute the optimal scheduling policy, we formalize a stochastic optimization problem to maximize the estimation reliability while ensuring the system’s sustainable operation under dynamic conditions. We develop data transmission scheduling (DTS), an asymptotically optimal scheme, and FAST-DTS, a lightweight online algorithm that can adapt to arbitrary energy and correlation dynamics. Using more than 170 days of real data from our smart water system deployment and conducting in vitro experiments to our small-scale testbed, our evaluation demonstrates that Fast-DTS significantly outperforms three alternatives, considering data reliability, energy utilization, and sustainable operation.
Qin Z, Liu Y, Li GY, et al., 2017, Modelling and analysis of low-power wide-area networks, IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Publisher: IEEE, ISSN: 1550-3607
We investigate the uplink transmission performance of low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) with regards to coexisting radio modules using LoRa as an example. In doing so we adopt a new topology to model the network where the node locations of the network of focus (LoRa) follow a Poisson cluster process (PCP) while other coexisting interfering radio modules follow a Poisson point process (PPP). To characterize the performance of the proposed model as well as obtain insights, both analytical and closed-form approximated expressions for coverage probability are derived. Based on this, area spectrum efficiency, and energy efficiency are further characterized. These results demonstrate the degree to which the performance, with regard to the aforementioned metrics, is capable of being enhanced through varying the density of the deployment of LoRa nodes around each LoRa receiver. Moreover, simulation results unveil that an optimal value of active LoRa nodes in each cluster exists that maximizes area spectrum efficiency.
McCann JA, 2017, From IoT to Ephemeral Computing: understanding cyber-physical interactions, International Conference on Future Networks and Distributed Systems (ICFNDS), Publisher: ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY
Jackson G, Qin Z, mccann J, 2017, Long term sensing via battery health adaptation, IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2017), Publisher: IEEE, Pages: 2240-2245
Energy Neutral Operation (ENO) has created the ability to continuously operate wireless sensor networks in areas such as environmental monitoring, hazard detection and industrial IoT applications. Current ENO approaches utilise techniques such as sample rate control, adaptive duty cycling and data reduction methods to balance energy generation, storage and consumption. However, the state of the art approaches makes a strong and unrealistic assumption that battery capacity is fixed throughout the deployment time of an application. This results in scenarios where ENO systems over allocate sensing tasks, therefore as battery capacity degrades it causes the system to no longer be energy neutral and then fail unexpectedly. In this paper, we formulate the problem to maximise the quality-of-service in terms of duty cycle and the battery capacity to extend the deployment lifetime of a sensing application. In addition, we develop a lightweight algorithm to solve the formulated problem. Moreover, we evaluate the proposed method using real sensor energy consumption data captured from micro-climate sensors deployed in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London. Results show that a 307% extension of deployment lifetime can be achieved when compared to a traditional ENO solution without a reduction in the duty cycle of the sensor.
Wu D, Arkhipov DI, Przepiorka T, et al., 2017, DeepOpp: context-aware mobile access to social media content on underground metro systems, 37th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Pages: 1219-1229, ISSN: 1063-6927
Social media and social networks have changed the way information is disseminated and provide live coverage of developing events. Accessing media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube has become a constant part of people's daily routines. Managing social interactions and obtaining up-to-the-minute bulletins via mobile devices is commonplace [1]. For example, 703 million of Facebook's 1.35 billion regular users access the application on their mobile devices every day. Growing mobile network coverage and speeds, combined with decreased costs make users ever more likely to access social media content on their mobile devices. A market study in 2015 reports that mobile social media penetration in the Americas and Europe is around 41% and 34% respectively. This level of penetration demonstrates that people have become accustomed to accessing content through their mobile devices as a key way to receive updates and interact with others.
Shi F, Qin Z, McCann JA, 2017, OPPay: Design and Implementation of A Payment System for Opportunistic Data Services, 37th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), Publisher: IEEE, Pages: 1618-1628, ISSN: 1063-6927
The large number of personal wireless devices in the urban areas could be used to provide various opportunistic data services, such as WiFi sharing, content-based file sharing and opportunistic networking. In order to facilitate these services, it is essential to incentivise the device owners to become service providers. However, previous research failed to deliver any practical payment systems for opportunistic data services. Inspired by smart contracts functionalities of bitcoin, this paper proposes a payment system named OPPay for opportunistic data services, which implements a micropayment communication protocol for mobile devices to perform data transactions and make payments using bitcoin. The system is designed to make incremental payments and thus resilient to interrupted communications caused by human mobility in the mobile network. By implementing and evaluating the system for three different applications, we show that the system is able to work in heterogeneous hardware and software environments and can achieve fast transactions confirmation with small fee overhead and low faulty payment value.
Breza M, McCann J, 2017, Polite Broadcast Gossip for IOT Configuration Management
In this paper we present a protocol which can be used to form the basis of an Internet of Things (IOT) configuration management system. We motivate this discussion by focusing on a large and definitive class of IOT systems, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and some important applications. We present a polite broadcast gossip dissemination algorithm which focuses on using a minimal amount of communication to update the configuration of a network of sensor nodes. We present analysis that the politeness of the algorithm does not inhibit its ability to function. The message savings of the algorithm is evaluated in simulation. We present test-bed results which show that our algorithm can disseminate metadata with roughly half of the communication overhead of a dissemination mechanism based on the one used by the IETF proposed standard Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL).
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