Data Muling Research Articles

A Novel Simulation Platform for Underwater Data Muling Communications Using Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are seen as a safe and cost-effective platforms for performing a myriad of underwater missions. These vehicles are equipped with multiple sensors which, combined with their long endurance, can produce large amounts of data, especially when used for video capturing. These data need to be transferred to the surface to be processed and analyzed. When considering deep sea operations, where surfacing before the end of the mission may be unpractical, the communication is limited to low bitrate acoustic communications, which make unfeasible the timely transmission of large amounts of data unfeasible. The usage of AUVs as data mules is an alternative communications solution. Data mules can be used to establish a broadband data link by combining short-range, high bitrate communications (e.g., RF and wireless optical) with a Delay Tolerant Network approach. This paper presents an enhanced version of UDMSim, a novel simulation platform for data muling communications. UDMSim is built upon a new realistic AUV Motion and Localization (AML) simulator and Network Simulator 3 (ns-3). It can simulate the position of the data mules, including localization errors, realistic position control adjustments, the received signal, the realistic throughput adjustments, and connection losses due to the fast SNR change observed underwater. The enhanced version includes a more realistic AML simulator and the antenna radiation patterns to help evaluating the design and relative placement of underwater antennas. The results obtained using UDMSim show a good match with the experimental results achieved using an underwater testbed. UDMSim is made available to the community to support easy and faster evaluation of underwater data muling oriented communications solutions and to enable offline replication of real world experiments.

Flash Flood Early Warning System in Colima, Mexico.

This paper presents a system of sensors used in flash flood prediction that offers critical real-time information used to provide early warnings that can provide the minutes needed for persons to evacuate before imminent events. Flooding is one of the most serious natural disasters humans confront in terms of loss of life and results in long-term effects, which often have severely adverse social consequences. However, flash floods are potentially more dangerous to life because there is often little or no forewarning of the impending disaster. The Emergency Water Information Network (EWIN) offers a solution that integrates an early warning system, notifications, and real-time monitoring of flash flood risks. The platform has been implemented in Colima, Mexico covering the Colima and Villa de Alvarez metropolitan area. This platform consists of eight fixed riverside hydrological monitoring stations, eight meteorological stations, nomadic mobile monitoring stations called “drifters” used in the flow, and a sniffer with data muling capability. The results show that this platform effectively compiles and forwards information to decision-makers, government officials, and the general public, potentially providing valuable minutes for people to evacuate dangerous areas.

A Simple Data-Muling Protocol

More and more industrial infrastructures consider the use of industrial wireless sensor network (IWSN) technology to perform control activities in industry. The benefits stemmed from IWSNs include flexible access (no wires are required) to elements that may interact with the factory floor. However, this support introduces new challenges: muling the almost permanent connectivity given by wired infrastructures is no longer available in IWSNs. To address this challenge, this paper explores data muling as the ability of transferring data between different elements within an industrial infrastructure. The proposed data-muling protocol uses a dual discovery and update (D&U) strategy. The prototype evaluation carried out on 6LowPan over IEEE 802.15.4 motes provides some insights on the performance that this type of infrastructure may offer within an industrial context. This paper also offers an extensive benchmark that may be used to test bounds and limitations of the proposed D&U protocol on the industrial use-cases.

Linear regression-based delay-bounded routing protocols for VANETs

Routing protocols for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have attracted a lot of attention recently. Most of the researches emphasize on minimizing the end-to-end delay without paying attention to reducing the usage of radio. This paper focuses on delay-bounded routing, whose goal is to deliver messages to the destination within user-defined delay and to minimize the usage of radio because radio spectrum is a limited resource. The messages can be delivered to the destination by the hybrid of data muling (carried by the vehicle) and forwarding (transmitted through radio). In the existing protocol, a vehicle may only switch the delivery strategy (muling or forwarding) at an intersection according to the available time of the next road segment, which is between the current intersection and the next intersection. To improve previous works, our protocol uses linear regression to predict the available time and the traveling distance, and thus, the vehicle can switch to a proper delivery strategy at a proper moment and can reduce the number of relays by radio. Our protocol contains two schemes: the greedy and centralized schemes. The greedy scheme uses only the current sampling data to predict the available time and decide when to switch the delivery strategy, whereas the centralized scheme uses the global statistical information to choose a minimum-cost path. Simulation results justify the efficiency of the proposed protocol. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Delay-bounded data gathering in urban vehicular sensor networks

Vehicular sensor networks are an emerging network paradigm, suitable for various applications in vehicular environment making use of vehicles’ sensors as data sources and Inter-Vehicle Communication systems for the transmissions. We present a solution, based on vehicular sensor networks, for gathering data from a certain geographic area while satisfying with a specific delay bound. The method leverages the time interval during which the query is active in order to make the gathering process efficient, properly alternating data muling and multi-hop forwarding strategies like in delay-bounded routing protocols. Simulations show that our proposed solution succeeds in performing efficient data gathering outperforming other solutions.

Vehicular communications: emergency video streams and network coding

Vehicular communications are becoming a reality driven by various applications. Among those applications safe navigation support is of most significance. In designing such navigation safety applications, reliable dissemination of data, i.e., every affected vehicle receives data, is the key issue. Past research focused on the reliable dissemination problem of plain media type (e.g., text) safety messages, whereas we look at the problem of reliable and efficient dissemination of multimedia type (e.g., video, audio) safety information. Considering the potential volume of multimedia traffic in a large metropolis and the unpredictability of vehicular networks (e.g., high speed, partitions, obstacles, radio propagation anomalies, radio interference, etc.), reliable and efficient multimedia dissemination is non-trivial. By using a recently developed technique, network coding, we describe a method for reliable dissemination of video streams in case of emergencies. Simulation results show that in a typical setting, with representative channel errors/losses, our approach yields near 100% delivery ratio as compared to 92% delivery ratio by traditional multicasting. More importantly, the overhead is reduced by as much as 60%. Another important benefit is robustness to temporary disconnections. If the column of vehicles on the road has gaps, network coding jointly with “data muling” using vehicles in the opposite directions can deliver the multimedia files even to intermittently connected components.

AMOUR V: A Hovering Energy Efficient Underwater Robot Capable of Dynamic Payloads

In this paper we describe the design and control algorithms of AMOUR, a low-cost autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) capable of missions of marine survey and monitoring. AMOUR is a highly maneuverable robot capable of hovering and carrying dynamic payloads during a single mission. The robot can carry a variety of payloads. It uses internal buoyancy and balance control mechanisms to achieve power efficient motions regardless of the payload size. AMOUR is designed to operate in synergy with a wireless underwater sensor network (WUSN) of static nodes. The robot’s payload was designed in order to deploy, relocate and recover the static sensor nodes. It communicates with the network acoustically for signaling and localization and optically for data muling. We present control algorithms, navigation algorithms, and experimental data from pool and ocean trials with AMOUR that demonstrate its basic navigation capabilitrials with AMOUR that demonstrate its basic navigation capabilities, power efficiency, and ability to carry dynamic payloads.