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2023 | Book

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Concepts, Applications, Experimentation and Analysis of Wireless Sensor Networks

Author: Hossam Mahmoud Ahmad Fahmy

Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland

Book Series : Signals and Communication Technology

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

The third edition of this hands-on textbook pursues the focus on the principles of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), their applications, their protocols and standards, and their analysis and test tools; a meticulous care has been accorded to the definitions and terminology. To make WSNs felt and seen, the adopted technologies as well as their manufacturers are presented in detail. In introductory computer networking books, chapters sequencing follows the bottom up or top down architecture of the seven layers protocol. This book is some more steps after, both horizontally and vertically, the view and understanding are getting clearer, chapters ordering is based on topics significance to the elaboration of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) concepts and issues.

This book is intended for a wide audience, it is meant to be help and motivate, for both the senior undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers, and practitioners; concepts and WSNs related applications are laid out, research and practical issues are backed by appropriate literature, and new trends are put under focus. For senior undergraduate students, it familiarizes with conceptual foundations, applications and practical projects implementations. For graduate students and researchers, energy-efficient routing protocols, transport layer protocols and cross-layering protocols approach are presented. Testbeds and simulators provide a must follow emphasis on the analysis methods and tools for WSNs. For practitioners, besides applications and deployment, the manufacturers and components of WSNs at several platforms and testbeds are fully explored.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter

WSNs Concepts and Applications

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Introduction
Abstract
Sensing is life; WSNs are acquiring snowballing interests in research and industry; they are infiltrated in day-to-day use. Owing to their requirement of low device complexity as well as slight energy consumption, proper standards are devised to ensure impeccable communication and meaningful sensing. This chapter takes care of enlightening the special features of WSNs and differentiates WSNs from MANETs and mesh networks. Care is also accorded to the different WSN standards that adapt to home and industry applications.
The critical requirement of any WSN deployment strategy is to gather and export the collected into an enterprise application or a spreadsheet. Embedded WSN-to-Internet integration is implemented via some kind of gateway device seated between the IEEE 802.15.4 network and the IP network. The gateway server’s role is to translate the sensor network traffic and provide it in a consumable form for another network, either IP or an industrial network. Also, the 6LoWPAN working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) submitted the implementation of IP for low-power, low-bandwidth networks. 6LoWPAN defines IP communication over low-power wireless IEEE 802.15.4 personal area networks. The proposed standard, approved by the IETF in March 2007, incorporates IPv6 version of the IP protocol. Because of IP pervasiveness as a global communication standard across industries, vendors can create sensor nodes that can communicate directly with other IP devices, whether those devices are wired or wireless, local or across the Internet, on Ethernet, WiFi, 6LoWPAN, or other networks. Network managers are thus able to gain direct real-time access to sensor nodes and are able to apply a broad range of Internet management and security tools. More important, the WSN can be viewed and managed as just another IP device, making it accessible and familiar to many more people and applications.
WSN standards are tailored to suit typical applications; they vary accordingly from manufacturer to another depending on their main line of activity, whether it is pointed toward industry, military, environment, health, daily life, etc. As such there is no default standard, but there is a standard that fits in a given type of application and that characterizes a given producer.
This chapter offers an in-depth exhibition of the types of WSNs, the performance metrics of WSNs, and the different WSN standards.
Hossam Mahmoud Ahmad Fahmy
Chapter 2. Protocol Stack of WSNs
Abstract
Several considerations must be taken when developing protocols for wireless sensor networks. Traditional thinking where the focus is on quality of service is somehow revised. In WSNs, QoS is compromised to conserve energy and preserve the life of the network. Concern must be accorded at every level of the protocol stack to conserve energy and to allow individual nodes to reconfigure the network and modify their set of tasks according to the resources available.
The protocol stack for WSNs consists of five standard protocol layers trimmed to satisfy typical sensors features, namely, application layer, transport layer, network layer, data link layer, and physical layer. These layers address network dynamics and energy efficiency. Functions such as localization, coverage, storage, synchronization, security, and data aggregation and compression are network services that enable proper sensor functioning. Implementation of WSNs protocols at different layers in the protocol stack aims at minimizing energy consumption, and end-to-end delay, and maintaining system efficiency. Traditional networking protocols are not designed to meet these WSN requirements; hence, new energy-efficient protocols have been proposed for all layers of the protocol stack. These protocols employ cross-layer optimization by supporting interactions across the protocol layers. Specifically, protocol state information at a particular layer is shared across all the layers to meet the specific requirements of the WSN.
Hossam Mahmoud Ahmad Fahmy
Chapter 3. WSNs Applications
Abstract
WSNs are infiltrating the environment in its wide sense, indoors and outdoors, in the human body, in unapproachable emplacements; they have found their way into a wide variety of applications and systems with vastly varying requirements and characteristics. Guardian angels? Watchdogs? Whatever, they are intended to work properly, faultlessly, no matter when and where. As a consequence, it is becoming increasingly difficult to forge unique requirements regarding hardware issues and software support. This is particularly important in a multidisciplinary research and practice area such as WSNs, where close collaboration between users, application domain experts, hardware designers, and software developers is needed to implement efficient systems.
In this chapter, who is who in WSNs are identified, motes, building blocks, producers, techniques, applications. A categorization of WSN applications according to their intended use is presented considering deployment, mobility, resources, cost, energy, heterogeneity, modality, infrastructure, topology, coverage, connectivity, size, lifetime, and QoS. The considered application categories, though non-exclusive, are branded as military, industrial, environmental, healthcare, daily life, and multimedia. Typical applications tasks are as follows:
  • Performance monitoring.
  • Surveillance.
  • Environmental monitoring.
  • Process control.
  • Tracking of personnel and goods.
  • Emergency management.
  • Robotics.
When compared with conventional mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), WSNs have different characteristics and present different engineering challenges and considerations.
Hossam Mahmoud Ahmad Fahmy

Network and Transport Layers, Cross-Layering

Frontmatter
Chapter 4. Energy and Lifetime Aware Routing Protocols for WSNs
Abstract
WSNs have several restrictions that impact the design of the protocols that maintain their functioning, such as limited energy supply, reduced computing power, and small bandwidth of the wireless links connecting sensor nodes. One of the main design goals of WSNs is to carry out data communication while targeting to prolong the lifetime of the network and prevent connectivity degradation by employing aggressive energy management techniques. Depending on the application and the size of the WSN, different architectures and design goals constraints have been considered; clearly, the performance of a routing protocol is closely related to the architectural model.
Multiple critical factors influence the selection or design of a routing protocol. Explicitly, they are the WSN dynamics, the nodes deployment, the nodes mobility, the energy considerations, the data delivery models, the nodes capabilities, and the data aggregation/fusion.
After designing energy-efficient routing protocols for WSNs, several questions are to be answered to check the capabilities of the protocols and to which extent did they satisfy the application needs:
  • Is the protocol energy-balanced?
  • Does the protocol consider network security?
  • How is the performance on real environment?
  • Are both real-time application and QoS considered?
  • How is QoS considered and which metrics are adopted?
  • Are fixed and mobile WSNs integrated?
An elaboration on the factors that influence and guide the design of energy and lifetime aware routing protocols for WSNs is amply detailed throughout this chapter. Care is also accorded to typical routing protocols categories and to their sub-classifications.
Hossam Mahmoud Ahmad Fahmy
Chapter 5. Transport Protocols for WSNs
Abstract
Transport layer protocols in WSNs should support multiple applications, variable reliability, packet-loss recovery, and congestion control. A transport layer protocol should be generic and independent of the application. Transport protocols are quite abundant, with varying design goals to match their intended use.
Depending on their functions, WSN applications can tolerate different levels of packet loss. Packet loss may be due to bad radio communication, congestion, packet collision, full memory capacity, and node failures. Packet loss can result in wasted energy and degraded quality of service (QoS) in data delivery. Detection of packet loss and correctly recovering missing packets can improve throughput and energy expenditure. There are two approaches to packet recovery: hop-by-hop and end-to-end. Hop-by-hop retransmission requires that an intermediate node cache the packet information in its memory. This method is more energy efficient since the retransmission distance is shorter. For end-to-end retransmission, the source caches all the packet information and performs retransmission when there is a packet loss. End-to-end retransmission allows for variable reliability, whereas hop-by-hop retransmission performs better when reliability requirements are high.
A congestion control mechanism monitors and detects congestion, thereby conserving energy. Before congestion occurs, the source is notified to reduce its sending rate. Congestion control helps reduce retransmission and prevents sensor buffer overrun. As in packet-loss recovery, there are two approaches to congestion control: hop-by-hop and end-to-end. The hop-by-hop mechanism requires every node along the path to monitor buffer overflow and lessens congestion at a faster rate than the end-to-end mechanism. When a sensor node detects congestion, all nodes along the path change their behavior. The end-to-end mechanism relies on the end nodes to detect congestion. Congestion is flagged when timeouts or redundant acknowledgments are received. There are tradeoffs between hop-by-hop and end-to-end approaches for packet-loss recovery and congestion control mechanisms. Depending on the type, reliability, and time sensitivity of the application, one approach may be better than the other. As presented in detail all over this chapter, transport layer protocols in WSNs address, with different interests, the above design issues.
Hossam Mahmoud Ahmad Fahmy
Chapter 6. Cross-Layer Protocols for WSNs
Abstract
Most of the proposed communication protocols exploiting the collaborative nature of WSNs and its correlation characteristics improve energy efficiency. However, they follow the traditional layered protocol architectures; specifically, the majority of these communication protocols are individually developed for different networking layers, i.e., transport, network, medium access control (MAC), and physical layers. While they may realize high performance in terms of the metrics related to each of these individual layers, they are not jointly optimized to maximize the overall network performance while minimizing the energy expenditure. Considering the scarce energy and processing resources of WSNs, joint optimization and design of networking layers, i.e., cross-layer design, stands as the most promising alternative to inefficient traditional layered protocol architectures.
The basic principle of cross-layer design is to make information available to all levels of the protocol stack. It allows the definition of protocols or mechanisms that do not meet the isolation layers of the OSI model (van der Schaar and Shankar, Wirel Commun 12(4):50–58, 2005; Srivastava and Motani, Commun Mag 43(12):112–119, 2005). In fact, cross-layer integration and design techniques result in significant improvement in terms of energy conservation in WSNs (van Hoesel et al., Wirel Commun 11(6):78–86, 2004; Yetgin et al., Trans Vehicul Technol 64(8):3795–3803, 2015). Several research works started by focusing on the cross-layer interaction and design to develop new communication protocols (Melodia et al., The State of the Art in Cross-Layer Design for Wireless Sensor Networks, In M Cesana, L Fratta (Eds) Lecture Notes in Computer Science-Wireless Systems and Network Architectures in Next Generation Internet (EuroNGI) (vol 3883). Springer Nature, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2005, 78–92). Yet these works either provide analytical results without communication protocol design or perform pairwise cross-layer design within limited scope, e.g., only MAC and network layers, which do not consider all of the networking layers involved in WSN communication, such as transport, network, MAC, and physical layers.
Considering the scarce energy and processing resources of WSNs, joint optimization and design of networking layers, i.e., cross-layer design, stands as the most promising alternative to inefficient traditional layered protocol architectures. There are considerable benefits of rethinking the protocol functions of networking layers in a unified way so as to provide a single communication module for efficient communication in WSNs.
Hossam Mahmoud Ahmad Fahmy

WSNs Experimentation and Analysis

Frontmatter
Chapter 7. Testbeds for WSNs
Abstract
Testbeds are representative of WSNs, they support the diversity of their hardware and software constituents, they are deployed in the same conditions and would-be environment, and they make use of the protocols to be used at a larger scale. Testbeds are intended to safeguard would-be implemented WSNs from malfunctions that may not be seen in theoretical simulations. Malfunctions may be in inconvenient hardware, buggy software, and deployment prone to energy depletion and radio interferences. By momentarily tolerating faults, which cannot be accepted in everyday actual WSNs, testbeds find the curing solutions.
In the literature many testbeds are reported, not all are typically implemented, and not all are available now. Knowledge is to be acquired from who got it by researching, trying, and experimenting; this chapter considers testbeds with authentic information even if they ceased to subsist. Pioneering testbeds, as fully illustrated, continue to offer models in concepts, implementation, and applications. Some of the testbeds are built for general use, while others are meant for typical applications such as visual surveillance.
As fully detailed in this chapter, based on the researchers’ and practitioners’ interests, testbeds can be classified under several categories. They may be full-scale or miniaturized, deployed on a 2D or 3D pattern, mobile or static, provide Web services or are just accessible from the deployment location, limited to homogeneous platforms or they are extended to support heterogeneity, provide for hybrid simulation as a tool for enhanced analysis or are contented with experimentation analysis.
Testbeds and simulators are complementary; ideally, getting benefits from both of them is the best option. Theoretical simulation studies provide numerical metrics that are truly needed for practical testbed implementation and deployment. But is the topmost approach always possible? Not all the wishes are usually attainable. Testbeds are the expensive choice, both in money and effort; simulation is realistically the less risky resort when budgets and time are short and when typical deployment is not insisting.
Simulators are the inevitable tools for analysis; they help in previewing the performance metrics needed for proper testbed deployment.
The next chapter considers and compares in full details the most common WSN simulators.
Hossam Mahmoud Ahmad Fahmy
Chapter 8. Simulators and Emulators for WSNs
Abstract
In this chapter, an in-depth study and comparisons of simulators and emulators have been presented, with care accorded to their features, implementation, and use. Since emulators are hardware dependent, selecting one to use is straightforward. On the other hand, with the wide variety of simulators, the choice is rather complex and is subject mainly to how is the simulator easy to use, and fulfilling the model requirements. Remarkably, different simulators do not give similar results for the same model due to their different underlying features and implementations.
Simulation has proven to be a valued tool in many areas where analytical methods are not applicable and experimentation is not feasible. Researchers generally use simulation to analyze system performance prior to physical design or to compare multiple alternatives over a wide range of conditions. Notably, errors in simulation models or improper data analysis often produce incorrect or misleading results. Although there exists an extensive row of performance evaluation tools for WSNs, it is impractical to have an all-in-one integrated tool that simultaneously supports simulation, emulation, and testbed implementation.
In fact, there is no all-in-one stretchy simulator for WSNs. Each simulator exhibits different features and models, and each has advantages and weaknesses. Different simulators are appropriate and most effective in typical conditions, so in choosing a simulation tool from available picks, it is fruitful to elect a simulator that is best suited for the intended study and targeted application. Also, it is recommended to weigh the pros and cons of different simulators that do the same job: the level of complexity of each simulator, availability, extensibility, and scalability. Usually, WSN applications consist of a large number of sensor nodes; therefore it is recommended to settle on the simulation tool capable of simulating large-scale WSNs. Essentially, the reported use, besides the simulation results of a simulator, should not be ignored before deciding which simulator to prefer. The exercises at the end of the chapter are designed to pinpoint the simulator comparison and selection criteria suitable to the model under study.
When bottom-up building a simulator, many decisions need to be made. Developers must consider the pros and cons of different programming languages, whether simulation is event-based or time-based, component-based, or object-oriented architecture, the level of complexity of the simulator, features to include and to not include, use of parallel execution, ability to interact with real nodes, and other design choices that are pertinent to a typical application.
For researchers, choosing which simulator to use is not an easy duty. A full understanding of one’s own model is however the first major step before looking into the bookshelf of simulators. Then follows a survey of the available simulators that can do the job. A major step comes after, the careful weighting of the simulator features against the model under study and the programming capabilities of the researcher.
Hossam Mahmoud Ahmad Fahmy

WSNs Manufacturers and Datasheets

Frontmatter
Chapter 9. WSN Manufacturers
Abstract
WSNs are continuously evolving in an unbounded technology space. This chapter focused thoroughly on the basics and concepts, as well as on applications and analysis tools. For students, researchers, and industry professionals, it is pointless to stress on such wealth of topics without watchfully looking at the main players and components, the producers and their products. Hence, this chapter is a not-to-be-evaded knowledge that surveys the manufacturers of wireless sensors and highlights their activities and lines of products.
Hossam Mahmoud Ahmad Fahmy
Chapter 10. Datasheets
Abstract
WSNs are continuously evolving in an unbounded technology space. This chapter focused thoroughly on the basics and concepts, as well as on applications and analysis tools. For students, researchers, and industry professionals, it is pointless to stress on such wealth of topics without watchfully looking at the main players and components, the producers and their products. So, this chapter is a not-to-be-skipped knowledge that surveys the components that make WSNs a continuously expanding and pervasive realm.
Hossam Mahmoud Ahmad Fahmy

Ignition

Frontmatter
Chapter 11. Third Takeoff
Abstract
This book is a helper and mentor at more than one level. It is for senior undergraduates willing to understand WSNs and build their graduation projects. Also,  It is intended for graduate students making a thesis and in need for specific knowledge on WSNs protocols and the related emulators and simulators. Moreover, it targets practitioners interested in the features and applications of WSNs and the available testbeds.
WSNs are not just theories, a broad spectrum of WSN industry products and technologies are available, as well as a wide diversity of manufacturers engage in the market with astounding innovations. The leading manufacturers and the full range of WSN industry products are highlighted with due clarity.
Hossam Mahmoud Ahmad Fahmy
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Concepts, Applications, Experimentation and Analysis of Wireless Sensor Networks
Author
Hossam Mahmoud Ahmad Fahmy
Copyright Year
2023
Electronic ISBN
978-3-031-20709-9
Print ISBN
978-3-031-20708-2
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20709-9