Engineering Commons^™

Analysis Of Localization Algorithms For Wireless Sensor Networks Using Binary Data, Alexander Joseph Hart

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

The detection, localization, and tracking of environmental and physical conditions can be accomplished using wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Recent advancements in sensors, processors, and wireless communications have improved the quality and acquisition speed of data in WSNs. However, the data gathered by a WSN is inherently random due to component and environmental variations. Thus, statistical signal processing algorithms are needed to analyze the random data in a robust way. Though many algorithms for the analysis of random data are established and available, they are problem-specific and must be adapted to the application. This thesis provides an analysis of established localization …

Machine Learning For Target Detection Using Uwb Radar Sensor Networks, Dheeral Naresh Bhole

Electrical Engineering Dissertations

Machine learning (ML) has recently been used to solve critical problems. This dissertation focuses on developing systems using Ultra-Wideband (UWB) wireless sensor networks and machine learning to solve critical tasks such as target detection in various challenging scenarios. These tasks have been researched for several years and efforts have been made to achieve universal solutions. In the first part of this dissertation, we have proposed a system to detect metallic targets in foliage environment. Mission critical systems need to be ready for the harsh working environment such as dense foliage, water bodies, rain, heavy winds and other natural challenges. Extreme …

Holistic Control For Cyber-Physical Systems, Yehan Ma

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) are transforming industries through emerging technologies such as wireless networks, edge computing, and machine learning. However, IIoT technologies are not ready for control systems for industrial automation that demands control performance of physical processes, resiliency to both cyber and physical disturbances, and energy efficiency. To meet the challenges of IIoT-driven control, we propose holistic control as a cyber-physical system (CPS) approach to next-generation industrial automation systems. In contrast to traditional industrial automation systems where computing, communication, and control are managed in isolation, holistic control orchestrates the management of cyber platforms (networks and computing platforms) …

Wireless Sensor Network Optimization For Radio Tomographic Imaging, Grant T. Nafziger

Theses and Dissertations

Radio tomographic imaging (RTI) is a form of device-free, passive localization (DFPL) that uses a wireless sensor network (WSN) typically made up of affordable, low-power transceivers. The intent for RTI is to have the ability to monitor a given area, localizing and tracking obstructions within. The specific advantages rendered by RTI include the ability to provide imaging, localization, and tracking where other well developed methods like optical surveillance fall short. RTI can function through optical obstructions such as smoke and even physical obstructions like walls. This provides a tool that is particularly valuable for tactical operations like emergency response and …

Scheduling For Cooperative Energy Harvesting Sensor Networks, Ahmed Ammar

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

In cooperative communication networks, the source node transmits its data to the destination either directly or cooperatively with a cooperating node. When using energy harvesting technology, where nodes collect their energy from the environment, the energy availability at the nodes becomes unpredictable due to the stochastic nature of energy harvesting processes. As a result, when the source has a transmission, it cannot immediately transmit its data cooperatively with the cooperating node. It first needs to determine whether the cooperating node has sufficient energy to forward its transmission or not. Otherwise, its transmitted data may get lost. Therefore, when using energy …

Current Implementation Of The Flooding Time Synchronization Protocol In Wireless Sensor Networks, Asma Khalil

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Time synchronization is an issue that affects data accuracy within wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This issue is due to the complex nature of the wireless medium and can be mitigated with accurate time synchronization. This research focuses on the Flooding Time Synchronization Protocol (FTSP) since it is considered as the gold standard for accuracy in WSNs. FTSP minimizes the synchronization error by executing an algorithm that creates a unified time for the network reporting micro-second accuracy. Most synchronization protocols use the FTSP implementation as a benchmark for comparison. The current and only FTSP implementation runs on the TinyOS platform and …

Wireless Sensors For Health Monitoring Of Marine Structures And Machinery, Francisco David Rojas Calvente

PhDs

Remote structural and machinery health monitoring (SMHM) of marine structures such as ships, oil and gas rigs, freight container terminals, and marine energy platforms can ensure their reliability. However, the wired sensors currently used in these applications are difficult and expensive to install and maintain. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) can potentially replace them but there are significant capability gaps that currently prevent their long-term deployment in the harsh marine environment and the structurally-complex, compartmentalised, all-metal scenarios with high volume occupancy of piping, ducting and operational machinery represented by marine structures. These gaps are in sensing, processing and communication hardware and …

An Empirical Path Loss Model For Wireless Sensor Network Deployment In A Library Environment, Thomas John Misilo

Theses and Dissertations

Wireless networks are becoming more commonplace which has necessitated the know-how to optimally place the devices. There have been studies using wireless sensor networks inside of libraries and museums. However, extensive research has not been completed on propagation modeling for use in the library environment. The main aim of this research is to provide a propagation path loss model for a typical library environment, while comparing two types of antennas (wire and small dipole antenna). This research develops path loss models for a peer-to-peer 2.4 GHz system, where both the transmitter and the receiver are located at the same elevated …

Efficient Control Message Dissemination In Dense Wireless Lighting Networks, Conrad Dandelski

PhDs

Modern lighting systems using LED light sources lead to dense lighting installations. The control of such systems using wireless Machine-to-Machine (M2M) where standard LED light sources are replaced by wirelessly controllable LED light sources create new problems which are investigated in this thesis. Current approaches for control message transmission is such networks are based on broadcasting messages among luminaires. However, adequate communication performance - in particular, sufficiently low latency and synchronicity - is difficult to ensure in such networks, in particular, if the network is part of a wireless building management system and carries not only low-latency broadcast messages but …

Optimal Sensing And Transmission In Energy Harvesting Sensor Networks, Xianwen Wu

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Sensor networks equipped with energy harvesting (EH) devices have attracted great attentions recently. Compared with conventional sensor networks powered by batteries, the energy harvesting abilities of the sensor nodes make sustainable and environment-friendly sensor networks possible. However, the random, scarce and non-uniform energy supply features also necessitate a completely different approach to energy management.

A typical EH wireless sensor node consists of an EH module that converts ambient energy to electrical energy, which is stored in a rechargeable battery, and will be used to power the sensing and transmission operations of the sensor. Therefore, both sensing and transmission are subject …

Comparison Of Methods For Radio Position Of Non-Emitting Dismounts, Collin J. Seanor

Theses and Dissertations

Radio Tomographic Imaging (RTI) is a form of Device Free Passive Localization (DFPL) that utilizes the Received Signal Strength (RSS) values from a collection of wireless transceivers to produce an image in order to localize a subject within a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). Radio Mapping is another form of DFPL that can utilize the same RSS values from a WSN to localize a subject by comparing recent values to a set of calibration data. RTI and Radio Mapping have never been directly compared to one another as a means of localization within a WSN. The goal of this research is …

Exploitation Of Data Correlation And Performance Enhancement In Wireless Sensor Networks, Tianqi Yu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

With the combination of wireless communications and embedded system, lots of progress has been made in the area of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The networks have already been widely deployed, due to their self-organization capacity and low-cost advantage. However, there are still some technical challenges needed to be addressed. In the thesis, three algorithms are proposed in improving network energy efficiency, detecting data fault and reducing data redundancy.

The basic principle behind the proposed algorithms is correlation in the data collected by WSNs. The first sensor scheduling algorithm is based on the spatial correlation between neighbor sensor readings. Given the …

Unmanned Ground Vehicle Navigation And Coverage Hole Patching In Wireless Sensor Networks, Guyu Zhang

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation presents a study of an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) navigation and coverage hole patching in coordinate-free and localization-free Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Navigation and coverage maintenance are related problems since coverage hole patching requires effective navigation in the sensor network environment. A coordinate-free and localization-free WSN that is deployed in an ad-hoc fashion and does not assume the availability of GPS information is considered. The system considered is decentralized and can be self-organized in an event-driven manner where no central controller or global map is required.

A single-UGV, single-destination navigation problem is addressed first. The UGV is equipped …

Energy Harvesting-Aware Design Of Wireless Networks, Fabio Iannello

Dissertations

Recent advances in low-power electronics and energy-harvesting (EH) technologies enable the design of self-sustained devices that collect part, or all, of the needed energy from the environment. Several systems can take advantage of EH, ranging from portable devices to wireless sensor networks (WSNs). While conventional design for battery-powered systems is mainly concerned with the battery lifetime, a key advantage of EH is that it enables potential perpetual operation of the devices, without requiring maintenance for battery substitutions. However, the inherent unpredictability regarding the amount of energy that can be collected from the environment might cause temporary energy shortages, which might …

The Effects Of Cognitive Jamming On Wireless Sensor Networks Used For Geolocation, Michael A. Huffman

Theses and Dissertations

The increased use of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) for geolocation has led to an increased reliance on this technology. Jamming, protecting jamming, and detecting jamming in a WSN are areas of study that have greatly increased in interest. This research uses simulations and data collected from hardware experiments to test the effects of jamming on a WSN. Hardware jamming was tested using a Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) Version 2 to assess the effects of jamming on a cooperative network of Java Sun SPOTs. The research combines simulations and data collected from the hardware experiments to see the effects of …

Distributed Localization Of Active Transmitters In A Wireless Sensor Network, Oba L. Vincent

Theses and Dissertations

In today's military environment, emphasis has been placed on bandwidth efficiency and total use of the available spectrum. Current communication standards divide the spectrum into several different frequency bands, all of which are assigned to one or multiple primary users. Cognitive Radio utilizes potential white spaces that exist between currently defined channels or in time. One under-explored dimension of white space exploration is spatial. If a frequency band is being used in one region, it may be underutilized, or not occupied in another. Using an active localization method can allow for the discovery of spatial white; trying to spatially map …

Wireless Sensor Network For Health Monitoring, Jin Soo Choi

Dissertations

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is becoming a significant enabling technology for a wide variety of applications. Recent advances in WSN have facilitated the realization of pervasive health monitoring for both homecare and hospital environments. Current technological advances in sensors, power-efficient integrated circuits, and wireless communication have allowed the development of miniature, lightweight, low-cost, and smart physiological sensor nodes. These nodes are capable of sensing, processing, and communicating one or more vital signs. Furthermore, they can be used in wireless personal area networks (WPANs) or wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) for health monitoring. Many studies were performed and/or are under way …

Design Of A Low Noise Amplifier For Wireless Sensor Networks, Ting Liu

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

CMOS technology becomes important in Radio Frequency (RF) communication systems which include both a receiver and a transmitter. In a high performance radio receiver, the Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) is the first circuit, and its noise performance dominates the entire receiver. Depending upon the system in which they are used, LNAs can be designed according to various topologies and structures. The LNA needs to have matched input impedance, and at the same time it should amplify the small amplitude input signal without adding too much noise and still have the minimal power consumption. It also needs a good interface with …

Efficient Time Of Arrival Calculation For Acoustic Source Localization Using Wireless Sensor Networks, Prashanth G. Reddy

ETD Archive

Acoustic source localization is a very useful tool in surveillance and tracking applications. Potential exists for ubiquitous presence of acoustic source localization systems. However, due to several significant challenges they are currently limited in their applications. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) offer a feasible solution that can allow for large, ever present acoustic localization systems. Some fundamental challenges remain. This thesis presents some ideas for helping solve the challenging problems faced by networked acoustic localization systems. We make use of a low-power WSN designed specifically for distributed acoustic source localization. Our ideas are based on three important observations. First, sounds emanating …

Wireless Sensor Network Approach To Aeronautical Telemetry, Oluwasegun Babatunde Tinubi

Theses and Dissertations

Wireless sensor networks have become a rapidly growing research field in recent years. They are envisioned to have a wide range of applications in military, environmental and many other fields. We examine the performance of wireless sensor network applications to aeronautical telemetry. To date, test ranges have relied on a single telemetry ground station for the reception of packets from all air borne transmitters. We researched an alternate means of achieving this same goal with fewer resources. It is a well known fact that communication power and bandwidth are the most expensive commodities in wireless communications. The telemetry world is …

Evaluation And Comparison Of Mac Protocols In Wireless Sensor Networks, Sharmila Kollipara

ETD Archive

Wireless sensor network applications call for different kinds of network protocols at different levels of the network stack based on application requirements. A number of medium access control (MAC) protocols have been proposed in the literature. Evaluation of most of these MAC protocols have typically been based on simulation, and while such simulation provides interesting insight into the behavior of these protocols, artifacts caused by behavior of hardware is ignored. Further more, MAC protocols are usually evaluated by comparing the new protocol with others based on one or two metrics, the ones that determined the design decisions for the protocol …

Adaptive Quantization In Wireless Sensor Networks With Encryption, Niharika Konakalla

LSU Master's Theses

We consider the estimation of a deterministic unknown parameter in an encrypted wireless sensor networks. Adaptive quantization is used on the sensor's observation and the outputs of the sensors are then encrypted using a probabilistic cipher. In a conventional fixed quantization scheme, estimation error grows exponentially with the difference between the threshold and the unknown parameter to be estimated. Hence, to avoid this, we used and adaptive quantization scheme where each sensor adaptively adjusts its quantization threshold. We find the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound for the Ally Fusion Center (AFC) and then find the optimal estimate of the unknown parameter for …

Clustered Wireless Sensor Networks, Renita Margaret Machado

Dissertations

The study of topology in randomly deployed wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is important in addressing the fundamental issue of stochastic coverage resulting from randomness in the deployment procedure and power management algorithms. This dissertation defines and studies clustered WSNs, WSNs whose topology due to the deployment procedure and the application requirements results in the phenomenon of clustering or clumping of nodes. The first part of this dissertation analyzes a range of topologies of clustered WSNs and their impact on the primary sensing objectives of coverage and connectivity. By exploiting the inherent advantages of clustered topologies of nodes, this dissertation presents …

The Evaluation Of Rekeying Protocols Within The Hubenko Architecture As Applied To Wireless Sensor Networks, Cory J. Antosh

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the impact of using three different rekeying protocols–pair-wise, hierarchical, and Secure Lock within a wireless sensor network (WSN) under the Hubenko architecture. Using a Matlab computer simulation, the impact of the three rekeying protocols on the number of bits transmitted across the network and the amount of battery power consumed in WSN nodes during rekey operations is investigated. Baseline pair-wise rekeying performance can be improved by using either Secure Lock or hierarchical rekeying. The best choice depends on the size of the WSN and the size of the key used. Hierarchical rekeying is the best choice for …

Uncertainty Management Of Intelligent Feature Selection In Wireless Sensor Networks, Sanchita Mal-Sarkar

ETD Archive

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are envisioned to revolutionize the paradigm of monitoring complex real-world systems at a very high resolution. However, the deployment of a large number of unattended sensor nodes in hostile environments, frequent changes of environment dynamics, and severe resource constraints pose uncertainties and limit the potential use of WSN in complex real-world applications. Although uncertainty management in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is well developed and well investigated, its implications in wireless sensor environments are inadequately addressed. This dissertation addresses uncertainty management issues of spatio-temporal patterns generated from sensor data. It provides a framework for characterizing spatio-temporal pattern in …

Wireless Personal Area Network-Based Assistance For The Visually Impaired, Kurt Matthew Peters

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

In this dissertation, a system allowing a visually impaired person to interact with his environment is developed using modern, low-power wireless communications techniques. With recent advances in wireless sensor networks, open-source operating systems, and embedded processing technology, low-cost devices have become practically feasible as a personal notification system for impaired people. Additionally, text-to-speech capabilities can now be employed without special application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), allowing low-cost, general-purpose processors to fill a niche that once required expensive semiconductors.

The system takes advantage of 802.15.4 and media access control (MAC) protocols offered by the open source operating system TinyOS. Important characteristics …

Wireless Sensor Network Modeling Using Modified Recurrent Neural Network: Application To Fault Detection, Azzam Issam Moustapha

Doctoral Dissertations

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of a large number of sensors, which in turn have their own dynamics. They interact with each other and the base station, which controls the network. In multi-hop wireless sensor networks, information hops from one node to another and finally to the network gateway or base station. Dynamic Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) consist of a set of dynamic nodes that provide internal feedback to their own inputs. They can be used to simulate and model dynamic systems such as a network of sensors.

In this dissertation, a dynamic model of wireless sensor networks and its …

A Wrapper-Based Approach To Sustained Time Synchronization In Wireless Sensor Networks, Dheeraj Reddy Bheemidi

ETD Archive

Time synchronization is an important service for wireless sensor network applications. Nodes in the network stay synchronized by exchanging periodic messages that carry local timestamps. Several algorithms have been proposed in the literature that are suited to different kinds of application scenarios. A common problem across these time synchronization algorithms is that the energy cost of message exchange is high. In fact, the cost of radio communication far outstrips the cost of performing local operations on the processor. If the message exchanges were stopped, nodes will fall out of sync, and may no longer be able to meet application requirements. …

Detecting Compromised Nodes In Wireless Sensor Networks, Mary Lisa Mathews

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

While wireless sensor networks are proving to be a versatile tool, many of the applications in which they are utilized have sensitive data. Therefore, security is crucial in many of these applications. Once a sensor node has been compromised, the security of the network degrades quickly if measures are not taken to deal with this event. There have been many approaches researched to tackle the issue. In this thesis, an anomaly-based intrusion detection protocol is developed to detect compromised nodes in wireless sensor networks.

The proposed protocol is implemented after the sensors are deployed into the environment in which they …

Sigma-Delta Modulation Based Distributed Detection In Wireless Sensor Networks, Dimeng Wang

LSU Master's Theses

We present a new scheme of distributed detection in sensor networks using Sigma-Delta modulation. In the existing works local sensor nodes either quantize the observation or directly scale the analog observation and then transmit the processed information independently over wireless channels to a fusion center. In this thesis we exploit the advantages of integrating modulation as a local processor into sensor design and propose a novel mixing topology of parallel and serial configurations for distributed detection system, enabling each sensor to transmit binary information to the fusion center, while preserving the analog information through collaborative processing. We develop suboptimal fusion …