Critical Data Packets Research Articles

An intelligent MAC protocol for mission critical applications in wireless sensor networks

SummaryIn the current age, wireless sensor networks (WSN) are growing the attention of researchers. WSNs are significantly used in a broad scope of real‐time monitoring applications. With ongoing advances and requirements in industrial emerging time‐critical applications, WSNs have been accordingly stretched out to help the reliable, time‐bound data delivery. In WSNs, node organization, resource limitations, topology varieties, providing delay guarantees for channel access, and transmission time barrier are the most significant challenges in real‐time handling traffic. Suppose critical data packets arrive from sensor nodes simultaneously. In that case, finding the optimal path for the transmission of data packets so that data are reached within time bounds, taking into account the current network scenario, is a more inspiring task. With this perspective, in order to provide a priority‐based transmission scheme, an improved adaptive media access control (MAC) protocol is proposed to support priority‐based channel access considering the current network scenario, which ensures time‐bounded reliable transfer of critical data packets. The proposed system uses an adaptive learning‐centered approach to find the optimum path for sending critical data packets in varying network scenarios. The proposed mission‐critical MAC (MC‐MAC) protocol is assessed arithmetically to offer reliable and time‐bounded transmission for emergency data packets.

Enhanced Probabilistic Route Stability (EPRS) Protocol for Healthcare Applications of WBAN

Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is among the most promising technologies for enhancing life quality. WBANs enable constant monitoring of physiological processes by implanting or wearing small, low-power, intelligent sensor nodes in or on the human body. These sensor nodes may be placed either invasively or non-invasively. Patient data must be disseminated reliably and promptly for WBAN’s healthcare apps to function. For this reason, medical teams may use real-time apps for sharing vital information like blood pressure, an ECG, and an EEG. Critical data packets are delay-sensitive and must arrive at sink nodes within the time constraints that satisfy QoS for WBAN. However, networks’ unpredictable and dynamic nature (node mobility, link partitioning) makes reliable data transfer a challenging task. Additionally, postural mobility and ultra-short wireless range cause rapid topology changes, resulting in network partitioning. The network partitioning causes failure of data delivery to the sink or coordinator and causes a delay as well. In the case of normal data, it is not a big issue, but it is not tolerable for emergency data because it may be life-threatening. Consequently, compromising the link reliability and stability results in higher delays, increased packet re-transmissions, and decreased throughput performance. Therefore, we propose an Enhanced Probabilistic Route Stability (EPRS) scheme to address these issues. The proposed EPRS scheme introduces a cost function called Link Assessment Cost (LAC) that makes coherent decisions regarding route reliability in determining whether an active route is a good candidate for routing and satisfying QoS requirements. The LAC is based on two critical factors about link status, i.e., Route Stability Factor (RSF) and Expected Probability of link <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$E(p)$ </tex-math></inline-formula> . Based on these factors, a score is assigned to a link that determines the status (likelihood) of a link, either connected or disconnected. In this way, the multi-facet EPRS selects the most stable and reliable routes despite the disconnection in the networks, thereby improving the route stability and throughput, minimizing the end-to-end delay, route discovery calls, and re-transmissions as depicted by simulation results.

Novel Fuzzy Logic Scheme for Push-Based Critical Data Broadcast Mitigation in VNDN.

Vehicular Named Data Networking (VNDN) is one of the potential and future networking architectures that allow Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV) to exchange data by simply disseminating the content over the network. VNDN only supports a pull-based data forwarding model, where the content information is forwarded upon request. However, in critical situations, it is essential to design a push-based data forwarding model in order to broadcast the critical data packets without any requests. One of the challenges of push-based data forwarding in VNDN is the broadcasting effect, which occurs when every vehicle broadcasts critical information over the network. For instance, in emergency situations such as accidents, road hazards, and bad weather conditions, the producer generates a critical data packet and broadcasts it to all the nearby vehicles. Subsequently, all vehicles broadcast the same critical data packet to each other, which leads to a broadcast storm on the network. Therefore, this paper proposes a Fuzzy Logic-based Push Data Forwarding (FLPDF) scheme to mitigate the broadcast storm effect. The novelty of this paper is the suggestion and application of a fuzzy logic approach to mitigate the critical data broadcast storm effect in VNDN. In the proposed scheme, vehicles are grouped into clusters using the K-means clustering algorithm, and then Cluster Heads (CHs) are selected using a fuzzy logic approach. A CH is uniquely responsible for broadcasting the critical data packets to all other vehicles in a cluster. A Gateway (GW) has the role of forwarding the critical data packets to the nearest clusters via their GWs. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the naive method in terms of transmitted data packets and efficiency. The proposed scheme generates five times fewer data packets and achieves six times higher efficiency than the naive scheme.

User Utility Maximization in Narrowband Internet of Things for Prioritized Healthcare Applications.

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a promising technology for healthcare applications since it reduces the latency necessary in acquiring healthcare data from patients, as well as handling remote patients. Due to the interference, limited bandwidth, and heterogeneity of generated data packets, developing a data transmission framework that offers differentiated Quality of Services (QoS) to the critical and non-critical data packets is challenging. The existing literature studies suffer from insufficient access scheduling considering heterogeneous data packets and relationship among them in healthcare applications. In this paper, we develop an optimal resource allocation framework for NB-IoT that maximizes a user’s utility through event prioritization, rate enhancement, and interference mitigation. The proposed Priority Aware Utility Maximization (PAUM) system also ensures weighted fair access to resources. The suggested system outperforms the state-of-the-art works significantly in terms of utility, delay, and fair resource distribution, according to the findings of the performance analysis performed in NS-3.

Multiconstraint-Aware Routing Mechanism for Wireless Body Sensor Networks

The merger of wireless sensor technologies, pervasive computing, and biomedical engineering has resulted in the emergence of wireless body sensor network (WBSN). WBSNs assist human beings in various monitoring applications such as health-care, entertainment, rehabilitation systems, and sports. Life-critical health-care applications of WBSNs consider both reliability and delay as major Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. In addition to the common limitations and challenges of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), WBSNs pose distinct constraints due to the behavior and chemistry of the human body. The biomedical sensor nodes (BMSNs) adopt multihop communication while reporting the heterogeneous natured physiological parameters to the nearby base station also called local coordinator. Routing in WBSNs becomes a challenging job due to the necessary QoS considerations, overheated in-body BMSNs, and high and dynamic path loss. To the best of our knowledge, none of the existing routing protocols integrate the aforementioned issues in their designs. In this research work, a multiconstraint-aware routing mechanism (modular-based) is proposed which considers the QoS parameters, dynamic and high path loss, and the overheated nodes issue. Two types of network frameworks, with and without relay/forwarder nodes, are being used. The data packets containing physiological parameters of the human body are categorized into delay-constrained, reliability-constrained, critical (both delay- and reliability-constrained), and nonconstrained data packets. NS-2 is being used to carry out the simulations of the proposed mechanism. The simulation results reveal that the proposed mechanism has improved the QoS-aware routing for WBSNs by adopting the proposed multiconstraint-aware strategy.

Temperature and Reliability-Aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Body Area Networks

The Wireless Body Sensor Network (WBSN) can be envisioned as a cost-effective solution to provide monitoring and reporting services in medical and non-medical applications to improve quality of life. The dissemination of patient data in a timely and reliable manner is one of the necessities of healthcare applications of WBSN. The critical data packets are highly delay-sensitive. However, these packets reaching the destination beyond timelines undermine the benefit of such networks. To provide real-time health monitoring an adequate link (in terms of reliability, stability, and QoS) has to be maintained. However, the distinguishing characteristics of WBSN pose several challenges to be countered such as limited resources, transmission range, and unreliable wireless links in terms of QoS as low-power radios are sensitive to interference and noise. Consequently, some portions of the network experience a significant level of congestion thereby strain the communication links, available bandwidth, insufficient buffer space, increased number of collisions, packet losses, and transmission disruption. Therefore, importing QoS awareness in routing decisions is important to improve the performance of WBSN. This paper proposes a QoS-aware routing protocol named TLD-RP (Temperature, Link-reliable, and Delay-aware Routing Protocol) for WBSN. Most of the temperature-aware routing protocols proposed for the WBSN incorporate either single or composite routing metrics (temperature, hop count, or energy). However, optimized route discovery has been overlooked in most of the previous studies on QoS requirements such as link reliability, stability, and link delay. Keeping in view these limitations, the proposed TLD-RP makes use of a multi-facet composite routing metric by carefully considering the critical QoS requirements for the WBAN. The design of the proposed TLD-RP scheme centers on the link’s reliability, path delay, and link’s asymmetric property. These design factors enable the proposed TLD-RP scheme to make more informed decisions regarding dynamic channel conditions. The optimized links satisfying the QoS requirements are selected for routing data packets. The simulation results confirm the effectiveness and efficacy of the proposed TLD-RP strategy by improving WBSN performance along with throughput, packet delivery, network overhead, and link stability.

Differentiated Service Model-Supported Cluster-Based Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Network finds its extensive use in healthcare applications for the transfer of time-critical data through wireless connectivity. The primary cause of network failure is the transfer of time-critical multimedia data. The article presents a new differentiated service modelsupported (DSM) cluster-based routing in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that overcomes the above issue. DSM prioritizes the transfer of different flow types based on packet type and packet size. The employment of computational offloading minimizes delay for critical and small-sized data packets and by carrying out data reduction of large-sized packets at proxy server. It outperforms the existing protocols in terms of energy efficiency, throughput, and reliability by prioritizing the transfer of time-critical health application data

Mutual Aid Among Sensors: An Emergency Function for Sensor Networks

A large number of wireless sensor nodes in a certain area results in high contention. Inevitably, the transmissions of any possible critical data packets may fail due to collisions. In this letter, we introduce an aspect of human intelligence in wireless sensor networks, influenced by cooperative networking, which enhances the timely delivery of critical data. Mutual aid among sensors is an emergency out-of-the-box medium access control function for IEEE 802.15.4-2020. Specifically, the network coordinator detects critical data packets and sets an emergency flag to its next beacon to inform the nodes that they may overhear data packets. When a node overhears a critical data packet from a neighboring node, it switches to sleep mode and stays idle until the end of the superframe. Thus, interference is mitigated locally and temporarily. Simulation results, using the CC2650 radio parameters in OMNeT++, show that interference is reduced significantly, in favor of the timely delivery of critical data packets.

The limitations in the state-of-the-art counter-measures against the security threats in H-IoT

Internet of Things (IoT) technology is anticipated to pave the way for groundbreaking applications in a number of areas of current healthcare systems. Given the significant number of connected medical devices, the vital data generated by the patient is under several security threats. Selective Forwarding (SF) and Wormhole (WH) attacks are two critical threats that cause information deficit in the network. The SF attack drops critical data packets at compromised nodes while the WH attack creates fallacious routing tables due to the introduction of malicious routes in the network. In this paper, we focus on the security aspects of Healthcare-IoT and review the proposed counter-measures against the SF and WH attacks. We weigh the recently postulated counter-measures based on their significance and identify their limitations. Additionally, we propose a blockchain-based cryptographic framework for mitigating SF and WH attacks in H-IoT. We explore future research directions in mitigating these threats.

WETRP: Weight Based Energy &amp; Temperature Aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Body Sensor Networks

The technological advancements in wireless communication and miniaturization of sensor nodes have resulted in the development of Wireless Medical Sensor Networks (WMSNs) which can be effectively used for remote patient monitoring. Remote patient monitoring is one such application of wireless sensor networks which is becoming increasingly prevalent in healthcare. The healthcare applications of the WMSNs are delay-sensitive and require timely delivery of patient-critical data. However, the frequent exchange of critical data packets results in higher delays, collisions, packet drop, and re-transmissions. Consequently, it brings a detrimental impact on the performance of the WMSNs. In addition, the implanted biomedical sensor nodes produce electromagnetic radiations, pose a serious threat of damaging sensitive tissues in the human body. Protecting tissue damage requires thermal-aware routing protocols. However, most of the thermal-aware routing protocols developed for the WBSNs primarily focused on minimizing temperature, while overlooking the energy conservation goal and optimization of route selection. In this paper, we propose a weighted, QoS-based, energy and temperature-aware routing protocol, referred to as (WETRP), for the WMSNs that utilizes a composite routing metric by keeping in view temperature, remaining node energy, and link-delay estimation during route selection decisions. The simulation results presented in the paper demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed scheme in terms of preventing temperature rise, dealing with hotspot nodes, and maximizing network's lifetime.

Traffic Priority Based Channel Assignment Technique for Critical Data Transmission in Wireless Body Area Network.

In recent days, intelligent biomedical sensors and wearable devices are changing the healthcare industry by providing various heterogeneous vital signs of patients to the hospitals, caregivers, and clinicals. This collective form of monitoring sensor devices forms a very short-range Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) and plays a key role in the data gathering process. If any sensor node in the network detects abnormal values that should be transmitted promptly via wireless medium with less delay. A single medium allows one-way delivery of a data packet, and it may not be sufficient to satisfy the high volume of communication demand between the sensor nodes in the network. In the same way, the packet prioritization does not guarantee the packet will get there on time and sometime it may cause priority conflicts among the nodes. It is only mean that the flow of delivery service handles that critical data packet before handling other data packets. However, unexploited time slots and bandwidth wastage will occur due to inefficient backoff management and collisions. To minimize the aforementioned issues, various backoff procedures, adaptive slot allocation mechanisms, priority-based medium access control protocols have been developed but suffer limitations in the context of providing priority-based channel access with less backoff conflicts and dedicated allocation of time slots for critical nodes in all cases. Based on these deliberations, a more effective Traffic Priority-based Channel Access Technique (TP-CAT) is proposed using IEEE 802.15.6 in order to minimize the transmission delay of critical data packet and solve conflicts among other priority nodes during the backoff phases. Firstly, a Low Threshold Criticality-based Adaptive Time slot Allocation algorithm (LT-CATA) is presented to decrease the priority slot conflicts between the low threshold data traffic from the same and different type of user prioritynodes. Secondly, a High Threshold Criticality-based Adaptive Time slot Allocation algorithm (HT-CATA) is developed to reduce the priority slot conflicts between the high threshold data traffic from the same and different types of user prioritynodes. Additionally, a novel Random Overlapping Backoff value Avoidance (ROBA) technique is introduced to eliminate the overlapping issue during the selection of random backoff value among the sensor nodes. Since, the proposed technique greatly reduced the channel access delay and transmissiondelay of critical data packet as well as other types of priority data packet. The Simulation results are verified in the CASTALIA 3.2 framework using omnet++ network simulater to relatively evaluate the performance metrics of the TP-CAT technique with state-of-the-art protocols. From the analysis of the results, it is evident that the TP-CAT technique provides better performance in terms of delay, energy consumption, and throughput in healthcare monitoring environments.

A Statistical Priority-Based Scheduling Metric for M2M Communications in LTE Networks

Resource allocation, or scheduling, is one of the main challenges that face supporting machine-to-machine (M2M) communications on long term evolution networks. M2M traffic has unique characteristics. It generally consists of a large number of small data packets, with specific deadlines, generated by a potentially massive number of devices contending over the scarce radio resources. In this paper, we introduce a novel M2M scheduling metric that we term the “statistical priority”. Statistical priority is a term that indicates the uniqueness of the information carried by certain data packets sent by machine-type communications devices (MTCDs). If an MTCD data unit is significantly dissimilar to the previously sent data, it is considered to carry non-redundant information. Consequently, it would be assigned higher statistical priority, and this MTCD should then be given higher priority in the scheduling process. Using this proposed metric in scheduling, the scarce radio resources would be used for transmitting statistically important information rather than repetitive data, which is a common situation in M2M communications. Simulation results show that our proposed statistical priority-based scheduler outperforms the other baseline schedulers in terms of having the least number of deadline misses (less than 4%) for critical data packets. In addition, our scheduler outperforms the other baseline schedulers in non-redundant data transmission as it achieves a success ratio of at least 70%.

Critical Data Routing (CDR) for Intra Wireless Body Sensor Networks

Recently, Wireless Body Sensor Network (WBSN) has been emerged as a promising technology to provide medical and healthcare monitoring. It can significantly reduce the health-care cost by providing continuous health monitoring facility to the elderly people suffering from chronic diseases. The life critical and real time medical application of WBSNs requires the assurance of the demanded Quality of Service (QoS) both in terms delay and reliability. This paper proposes Critical Data Routing (CDR) that categorizes the sensory data packets as critical and non-critical data packets. Along with the heterogeneous natured data, it also addresses the high and dynamic path loss and the temperature rise issues caused by postural movement of the human body and electromagnetic waves absorption respectively. The simulation results show that the proposed CDR scheme achieves its designed objective of forwarding the critical data packets within certain time limits and with highest reliability while reducing the temperature rise of the in-body sensor nodes.

QPRR: QoS-Aware Peering Routing Protocol for Reliability Sensitive Data in Body Area Network Communication

The reliability, energy efficiency and real-time display of patient's data are important factors for body area network (BAN) communication in indoor hospital environments. In this paper, we propose a novel routing protocol by considering the quality of service (QoS) requirements of BAN data with strict reliability requirements. Our proposed algorithm increases the reliable delivery of critical BAN data at the destination. We have performed extensive simulations in the OMNeT++-based simulator Castalia 3.2 to demonstrate the better performance of the proposed QoS-based routing protocol for reliability sensitive data in terms of lower network routing traffic (Hello packets) overhead, less reliability packets dropped, lower end-to-end delay (latency), less packets dropped due to media access control (MAC) buffer overflow and higher throughput in both stationary and movable patient scenarios. The scalability of the protocol is demonstrated by using two cases that simulate a 24 beds and a 46 beds real hospital environment with a 49 and 93 nodes, respectively. It is shown that, even in the larger real hospital scenarios, simulating a hospital with 24 and 46 beds requiring the transmission of critical data packets with stringent reliability requirements, QPRR outperforms comparable protocols.

An energy-efficient multiconstrained QoS aware MAC protocol for body sensor networks

One of the most challenging jobs in designing a Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) is to achieve QoS requirements for heterogeneous traffics generated from various sensors. Increasing the energy-efficiency of the network should be kept in mind while doing this. Physiological data monitoring applications generate different types of traffic including multimedia data packets. These heterogeneous traffics should be treated differently by an underlying communication protocol, allowing the transmission schedule of these traffic types based on their priorities. In this paper, we present an energy-efficient multiconstrained QoS aware MAC protocol, namely eMC-MAC, wherein the medium access control is designed based on traffic prioritization. We have redefined the superframe structure in such a way that the critical data packets are transmitted earlier than other packets. In our proposed eMC-MAC protocol, we have introduced minislots during CFP (Contention Free Period), where requests for urgent packets are collected to the coordinator node in an energy-efficient way. We also develop an energy-efficient algorithm for preempting allocated data transmission slots to facilitate transmission of packets with higher priority. Thus, the proposed eMC-MAC protocol delivers emergency data packets to the coordinator with reduced delay. We have evaluated the effectiveness of our eMC-MAC protocol through extensive simulations in ns-3. The simulation results have shown that it outperforms a number of state-of-the-art MAC protocols for BSNs.

A MAC Protocol for Critical Data Transmission in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper we present a low-power, low-latency MAC protocol adequate for critical data transmission. For support critical data packet transmission the proposed MAC protocol uses the modified IEEE 802.15.4 beacon frames including priority bit, sender node address, and NAV value fields. A receiver node periodically wakes up, receives sender beacon frames from its neighbor nodes, selects a data sending node, and broadcasts a beacon frame containing the selected sender’s address. Based on the sender’s data transmission urgency, a receiver node selects a data packet sending node. So critical data packet will be considered higher priority packet and be sent preferentially. Our simulations and analytical analysis have shown that our protocol outperforms other protocols in terms of energy consumption and higher priority packet delivery delay.

Design of State-Based Schedulers for a Network of Control Loops

For a closed-loop system, which has a contention-based multiple access network on its sensor link, the Medium Access Controller (MAC) may discard some packets when the traffic on the link is high. We use a local state-based scheduler to select a few critical data packets to send to the MAC. In this paper, we analyze the impact of such a scheduler on the closed-loop system in the presence of traffic, and show that there is a dual effect with state-based scheduling. In general, this makes the optimal scheduler and controller hard to find. However, by removing past controls from the scheduling criterion, we find that certainty equivalence holds. This condition is related to the classical result of Bar-Shalom and Tse, and it leads to the design of a scheduler with a certainty equivalent controller. This design, however, does not result in an equivalent system to the original problem, in the sense of Witsenhausen. Computing the estimate is difficult, but can be simplified by introducing a symmetry constraint on the scheduler. Based on these findings, we propose a dual predictor architecture for the closed-loop system, which ensures separation between scheduler, observer and controller. We present an example of this architecture, which illustrates a network-aware event-triggering mechanism.

Wireless sensor network, Clustering protocol, Chain based routing, Energy efficient, Time critical data

In this paper, we propose an Energy Efficient Cluster-Chain based Protocol for Time Critical applications (ECCPTC) in wireless sensor networks to maximize network lifetime and minimize energy consumption and transmission delay of time critical data. ECCPTC considers higher priority for time critical data than non-time critical data so that time critical data are immediately transmitted to the base station. ECCPTC uses a threshold value for reducing transmission delay of time critical data. ECCPTC organizes sensor nodes into clusters by using multiple metrics and constructs a chain among the sensor nodes within cluster so that each sensor node receives non-time critical data from a previous neighbor and transmits to a next neighbor. ECCPTC also adopts a chain based data transmission mechanism for sending non-time critical data packets from the cluster heads to the base station. Simulation results show that our proposed protocol significantly outperforms LEACH, CBRP and PEGASIS in terms of network lifetime, stability period, instability period, energy consumption, transmission delay of time critical data and the total number of data received at base station. Keywords: Wireless sensor network, Clustering protocol, Chain based routing, Energy efficient, Time critical data

An Energy Efficient Cluster-chain Based Routing Protocol for Time Critical Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose an Energy Efficient Cluster-Chain based Protocol for Time Critical applications (ECCPTC) in wireless sensor networks to maximize network lifetime and minimize energy consumption and transmission delay of time critical data. ECCPTC considers higher priority for time critical data than non-time critical data so that time critical data are immediately transmitted to the base station. ECCPTC uses a threshold value for reducing transmission delay of time critical data. ECCPTC organizes sensor nodes into clusters by using multiple metrics and constructs a chain among the sensor nodes within cluster so that each sensor node receives non-time critical data from a previous neighbor and transmits to a next neighbor. ECCPTC also adopts a chain based data transmission mechanism for sending non-time critical data packets from the cluster heads to the base station. Simulation results show that our proposed protocol significantly outperforms LEACH, CBRP and PEGASIS in terms of network lifetime, stability period, instability period, energy consumption, transmission delay of time critical data and the total number of data received at base station.

Multipoint-to-point communications for SHE surveillance with QoS and QoE management

The bandwidth-hunger applications of SHE (Smart Home Environment) can take advantage of the multipoint-to-point (MPP) connections to aggregate more bandwidth to gain user-perceived Quality of Experience (QoE) and network Quality of Service (QoS). The receiver-centric transport-layer R2CP (Radial Reception Control Protocol) was proposed to resolve the incapability of the MPP communication in conventional TCP and UDP. However, R2CP has no consideration to discriminate the importance in a packet payload which is critical to QoE and brings an issue for critical data packets that may be dropped in great risk of network congestion. In this paper, we thus present P-R2CP (Prioritized R2CP) to effectively decrease the loss ratio of critical data packets in MPP video streaming while the network is congested. P-R2CP is a cross-layer protocol that considers both the transport-layer issues and the media content’s properties in application-layer. Then, an example on MPP-UVS (MPP ubiquitous video surveillance) is presented as UVS is now a very important Internet application that requires QoS/QoE management to protect lives and assets especially in SHE. Our experiments are conducted on different kinds of surveillance videos over MPP links with different bandwidth and packet loss inserted. The experimental results demonstrate that, as the loss of critical packets is decreased by an order and much less critical data packets are dropped, P-R2CP can highly guard not only QoS but also QoE of SHE surveillance video streaming.