Low-power Wireless Communication Technology Research Articles

Inner External DQN LoRa SF Allocation Scheme for Complex Environments

In recent years, with the development of Internet of Things technology, the demand for low-power wireless communication technology has been growing, giving rise to LoRa technology. A LoRa network mainly consists of terminal nodes, gateways, and LoRa network servers. As LoRa networks often deploy many terminal node devices for environmental sensing, the limited resources of LoRa technology, the explosive growth in the number of nodes, and the ever-changing complex environment pose unprecedented challenges for the performance of the LoRa network. Although some research has already addressed the challenges by allocating channels to the LoRa network, the impact of complex and changing environmental factors on the LoRa network has yet to be considered. Reasonable channel allocation should be tailored to the situation and should face different environments and network distribution conditions through continuous adaptive learning to obtain the corresponding allocation strategy. Secondly, most of the current research only focuses on the channel adjustment of the LoRa node itself. Still, it does not consider the indirect impact of the node’s allocation on the entire network. The Inner External DQN SF allocation method (IEDQN) proposed in this paper improves the packet reception rate of the whole system by using reinforcement learning methods for adaptive learning of the environment. It considers the impact on the entire network of the current node parameter configuration through nested reinforcement learning for further optimization to optimize the whole network’s performance. Finally, this paper evaluates the performance of IEDQN through simulation. The experimental results show that the IEDQN method optimizes network performance.

REAL-TIME HIDDEN DATA TRANSMISSION USING LORA

Nowadays, it has become a crucial task in transferring confidential data for military departments, many multinational companies, etc. The important requirement is that the data that has been transmitted should not be visible to hackers or third parties from another end. To satisfy this requirement LoRa technology is used. Long-distance and low-power wireless communication technologies such as LoRa, Sigfox, and Narrowband-Internet of Things (NB- IoT) were developed in recent years. These technologies can contribute to indoor and outdoor smart applications with minimal power consumption. In this study, the LoRa wireless communication technique was used as the primary data communication method, enabling the device to communicate without requiring an Internet connection or a SIM card. This technology can be implemented in military and defense areas. KEYWORDS: Lora, Arduino Nano, Bluetooth, Zigbee, Wi-Fi

Real-Time Hidden Data Transmission Using Lora

Nowadays, it has become a crucial task in transferring confidential data for military departments, many multinational companies, etc. The important requirement is that the data that has been transmitted should not be visible to hackers or third parties from another end. To satisfy this requirement a wireless technology LoRa is used. Long-distance and low-power wireless communication technologies such as LoRa, Sigfox, and Narrowband-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) were developed in recent years. These technologies can contribute to indoor and outdoor smart applications with minimal power consumption. In this study, the LoRa wireless communication technique was used as the primary data communication method, enabling the device to communicate without requiring an Internet connection or a SIM card. This technology can be implemented in military and defense areas.

Real-Time Hidden Data Transmission Using Lora

Nowadays, it has become a crucial task in transferring confidential data for military departments, many multinational companies, etc. The important requirement is that the data that has been transmitted should not be visible to hackers or third parties from another end. To satisfy this requirement a wireless technology LoRa is used. Long-distance and low-power wireless communication technologies such as LoRa, Sigfox, and Narrowband-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) were developed in recent years. These technologies can contribute to indoor and outdoor smart applications with minimal power consumption. In this study, the LoRa wireless communication technique was used as the primary data communication method, enabling the device to communicate without requiring an Internet connection or a SIM card. This technology can be implemented in military and defense areas.

Smart System Using Lora Technology to Connect Rural Areas Underserved By Existing Internet and Telecommunication Technologies

LoRa, Sigfox, and Narrowband-Internet of Things (NB-IoT) are some of the long-distance, low-power wireless communication technologies developed in the recent past. The proposed system consists of mainly nodes and a gateway as the fundamental system architecture. Nodes only communicate with the gateway individually and the gateway communicates with all the nodes separately and wirelessly. System in this proposed study, uses long range low power RF wireless communication technique for primary data communication, where an Internet connection will not be required for the communication between the gateway and the nodes. Any number of nodes can be paired with the gateway, and the gateway can individually communicate with each and every node. Furthermore, gateways have the ability of storing real-time data. Due to its unique design, the proposed system in this study, can achieve addressable, bidirectional, and continuous data communication even without the Internet connection. The bidirectional communication design of this proposed system facilitates real time and uninterrupted simultaneous handling of monitoring/sensor devices and controller devices without the need of a separate controlling system. As this system consists of those unique features, it is recommended to use in the rural areas underserved by current internet and telecommunication technologies. With the in-built option to get connected to the Internet, this system can be further expanded to an IoT based addressable data communication, processing, and visualization systems by eliminating the major technical problems in typical IoT systems such as interrupted communication and data losses during an Internet connection failure, power concerns and customization issues.

Near-Field Communication in Biomedical Applications.

Near-field communication (NFC) is a low-power wireless communication technology used in contemporary daily life. This technology contributes not only to user identification and payment methods, but also to various biomedical fields such as healthcare and disease monitoring. This paper focuses on biomedical applications among the diverse applications of NFC. It addresses the benefits of combining traditional and new sensors (temperature, pressure, electrophysiology, blood flow, sweat, etc.) with NFC technology. Specifically, this report describes how NFC technology, which is simply applied in everyday life, can be combined with sensors to present vision and opportunities to modern people.

Bluetooth Low Energy: A Comprehensive Wireless Technology

BLE, Bluetooth low energy is low power wireless communication technology that is used to connect a number of devices like smartphones, smart watches, wireless speakers, fitness watches, etc. at the same instance of time. Apple was the first phone to introduce BLE into their smartphone iphone4s back in 2011 and after that most of the companies started to include BLE into their devices for a faster reliable and secure connection. The technology was made in 2010 named Bluetooth smart also Bluetooth version 4.0 and then BLE5 was introduced in 2016 and the device versions which could run BLE are windows 8 or above, android 4.0 and above, IOS 5.0 and later, Linux 3.4, and mac OS 10.10 and above.

Experimental Analysis of IoT Networks Based on LoRa/LoRaWAN under Indoor and Outdoor Environments: Performance and Limitations

Nowadays, Internet of Things (IoT) has multiple applications in different fields. This concept allows physical devices to connect to the internet in order to establish a strong infrastructure that facilitates many device control and monitoring tasks. Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) communication protocols become widely used for IoT networks because of their low power consumption and the broad range communication. LPWA enables devices to transmit small amounts of data in a long distance. Among LPWA protocols, LoRa technology gained a lot of interest recently from the research community and many companies. LoRa is a long range and low power wireless communication technology regulated by the LoRaWAN standard. It can be o good candidate to deploy node network where long distance and extended battery life is required. A LoRaWAN architecture is deployed in a star-of-stars topology and based on a systematic evaluation of a long-term operation of the network monitoring. This works describes experimental results of testing LoRa in indoor and outdoor environments to understand how it works, evaluate its performance, and limitations. As expected, results show that LoRa performs better outdoor. It is also interesting to note that elevating the gateway in order to have a free line of sight with the IoT node, or close to it, increases the signal quality received by the end-node devices, and consequently, longer distances can be achieved.

Smart Parking System with Dynamic Pricing, Edge-Cloud Computing and LoRa.

A rapidly growing number of vehicles in recent years cause long traffic jams and difficulty in the management of traffic in cities. One of the most significant reasons for increased traffic jams on the road is random parking in unauthorized and non-permitted places. In addition, managing of available parking places cannot achieve the expected reduction in traffic congestion related problems due to mismanagement, lack of real-time parking guidance to the drivers, and general ignorance. As the number of roads, highways and related resources has not increased significantly, a rising need for a smart, dynamic and effective parking solution is observed. Accordingly, with the use of multiple sensors, appropriate communication network and advanced processing capabilities of edge and cloud computing, a smart parking system can help manage parking effectively and make it easier for the vehicle owners. In this paper, we propose a multi-layer architecture for smart parking system consisting of multi-parametric parking slot sensor nodes, latest long-range low-power wireless communication technology and Edge-Cloud computation. The proposed system enables dynamic management of parking for large areas while providing useful information to the drivers about available parking locations and related services through near real-time monitoring of vehicles. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic pricing algorithm to yield maximum possible revenue for the parking authority and optimum parking slot availability for the drivers.

Error probability performance of chirp modulation in uncoded and coded LoRa systems

This paper focuses on the error probability performance of LoRa, a long-range low-power wireless communication technology suited for the Internet of Things (IoT). We propose accurate approximations for the bit error probability of the uncoded LoRa chirp modulation in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. Our approach, which is based on a smart modification of a union bound on the error probability, is applied to both coherent and noncoherent detection. Simulation results show that the proposed theoretical bit error rate (BER) expressions are more accurate than the existing BER approximations that use similar complexity. We show that the proposed BER expressions are valid for both orthogonal and quasi-orthogonal LoRa, and are easier to compute than the exact BER for orthogonal signaling. Moreover, we extend the theoretical performance analysis to coded LoRa systems and we propose analytical BER expressions for Hamming-coded LoRa signals with hard-decision decoding. In addition, we analyze by simulation the error probability of coded LoRa systems with soft-decision decoding in multipath channels. The obtained results (both theoretical and simulated) quantify the performance gains of channel coding with respect to uncoded transmissions, in both AWGN and multipath channels, for coded LoRa systems that use the same bandwidth (with lower bit rate) of the uncoded LoRa system.

Drone-Enabled Internet-of-Things Relay for Environmental Monitoring in Remote Areas Without Public Networks

Advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT) have led to the revolutionary potential to achieve intelligent environmental monitoring. However, extreme conditions across hard-to-reach areas, where public ground networks do not provide sufficient coverage, have resulted in the difficult backhaul of monitoring data from remote areas of interest. Because of the urgent demand for low-cost data collection in such areas, this article proposes a novel drone-enabled IoT relay system to provide high-speed data collection to support remote environmental monitoring. The high-speed ability of 5-GHz communication technology was exploited to reduce the time required for data transmission between ground monitoring devices and drone. Meanwhile, the long-range (LoRa) technology, as a low-power and long-distance wireless communication technology, is adopted as a wake-up strategy for waking up the high-power 5-GHz module. Based on 5 GHz and LoRa technology, a drone-based onboard relay and ground intelligent terminal are designed. An application is used to demonstrate the feasibility of the designed system. Numerous real-world experiments validate the effectiveness of the designed drone-enabled IoT relay system and show its capability for high-speed data collection. The field experiments demonstrate that the system collects cached data with a stable 3.5-MB/s throughput at an altitude of 140 m. The breakthroughs in the drone-enabled IoT relay facilitate intelligent environmental monitoring in remote areas without public networks and provide a new perspective on data backhaul over areas of interest.

Energy-Efficient Information and Communication System for Smart Meter

The objective of this work is to develop an electricity Smart Meter, allowing the bi-directional energy flow in the Low Voltage (LV) grid. The developed prototype can be deployed in a Photovoltaic (PV) micro-production installation, being able to cooperate with the Distribution System Operator (DSO) regarding remote readings and dynamic voltage control procedures, while keeping the prosumer informed about the active power, as well as odd or faulty situations (e.g., no production). To accomplish the result proposed with functionalities that are useful in the distributed energy grid, this paper offers a device that is standard compliant by using DLMS, providing specific technical information to the DSO. Additionally, it has two low power wireless communication technologies: Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), for short range local readings and configuration by the prosumer or maintenance teams; and Sigfox, a long range low power technology, which has a permanent storage and facilitates consultation of past and current records. The latter can be accessed by an Android application from a remote location.

Fast Feedback Control over Multi-hop Wireless Networks with Mode Changes and Stability Guarantees

Closing feedback loops fast and over long distances is key to emerging cyber-physical applications; for example, robot motion control and swarm coordination require update intervals of tens of milliseconds. Low-power wireless communication technology is preferred for its low cost, small form factor, and flexibility, especially if the devices support multi-hop communication. Thus far, however, feedback control over multi-hop low-power wireless networks has only been demonstrated for update intervals on the order of seconds. To fill this gap, this article presents a wireless embedded system that supports dynamic mode changes and tames imperfections impairing control performance (e.g., jitter and message loss), and a control design that exploits the essential properties of this system to provably guarantee closed-loop stability for physical processes with linear time-invariant dynamics in the presence of mode changes. Using experiments on a cyber-physical testbed with 20 wireless devices and multiple cart-pole systems, we are the first to demonstrate and evaluate feedback control and coordination with mode changes over multi-hop networks for update intervals of 20 to 50 milliseconds.

PPM: Preamble and Postamble-Based Multi-Packet Reception for Green ZigBee Communication

ZigBee, a low-power wireless communication technology, has been used in various applications, such as smart health/home/buildings. The proliferation of ZigBee-based applications (and thus devices), however, makes the concurrent transmissions—i.e., multiple transmitters send packets to the same receiver at the same time—common in practice, leading to inevitable collisions. Either retransmissions caused by collisions or the collision avoidance mechanism, e.g., CSMA/CA, introduces plenty of energy consumption. To facilitate the green and concurrent transmissions of ZigBee, we design pre/post-amble-based multi-packet reception (PPM), a method that recovers the collided ZigBee messages by exploiting their collision-free chips and the overlapped chips in their pre/post-ambles. We elaborately attach short postamble to standard ZigBee packet by manipulating the ZigBee payload, which can be compatible with standard ZigBee and only introduce negligible energy overhead. We further propose two design enhancements, cross-validation and reference chips calibration, to ensure the accuracy of PPM. Such a collision recovery of PPM reduces the retransmissions caused by collisions and eliminates the energy overhead of CSMA/CA simultaneously, facilitating the realization of green ZigBee. We have prototyped and evaluated PPM with USRP, showing PPM recovers the collided messages with bit-error-rates in the order of ${10}^{-6}$ , which is magnitudes lower than state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results show that PPM can achieve packet reception ratio more than 90% and less than 20 retransmissions in a concurrent transmission experiment with 400 packets resulting in negligible packet retransmission cost of energy.

An Improved Roadside Parking Space Occupancy Detection Method Based on Magnetic Sensors and Wireless Signal Strength.

Smart Parking Management Systems (SPMSs) have become a research hotspot in recent years. Many researchers are focused on vehicle detection technology for SPMS which is based on magnetic sensors. Magnetism-based wireless vehicle detectors (WVDs) integrate low-power wireless communication technology, which improves the convenience of construction and maintenance. However, the magnetic signals are not only susceptible to the adjacent vehicles, but also affected by the magnetic signal dead zone of high-chassis vehicles, resulting in a decrease in vehicle detection accuracy. In order to improve the vehicle detection accuracy of the magnetism-based WVDs, the paper introduces an RF-based vehicle detection method based on the characteristics analysis of received signal strengths (RSSs) generated by the wireless transceivers. Since wireless transceivers consume more energy than magnetic sensors, the proposed RF-based method is only activated to extract the data characteristics of RSSs to further judge the states of vehicles when the data feature of magnetic signals is not sufficient to provide accurate judgment on parking space status. The proposed method was evaluated in an actual roadside parking lot and experimental results show that when the sampling rate of magnetic sensor is 1 Hz, the vehicle detection accuracy is up to 99.62%. Moreover, compared with machine-learning-based vehicle detection method, the experimental results show that our method has achieved a good compromise between detection accuracy and power consumption.

Structure health monitoring using wireless sensor networks on structural elements

This paper presents a system that monitors the health of structural elements in Reinforced Concrete (RC), concrete elements and/or masonry buildings and warn the authorities in case of physical damage formation. Such rapid and reliable detection of impairments enables the development of better risk management strategies to prevent casualties in case of earthquake and floods. Piezoelectric (PZT) sensors with lead zirconate titanate material are the preferred sensor type for fracture detection. The developed sensor mote hardware triggers the PZT sensors and collects the responses they gather from the structural elements. It also sends the collected data to a data center for further processing and analysis in an energy-efficient manner utilizing low-power wireless communication technologies. The access and the analysis of the collected data can be remotely performed via a web interface. Performance results show that the fractures serious enough to cause structural problems can be successfully detected with the developed system.

Security of LoRaWAN v1.1 in Backward Compatibility Scenarios

We present security vulnerabilities of LoRaWAN v1.1 in backward compatibility scenarios and propose countermeasures. Novel low-power wireless communication technologies are continuously introduced into the IoT ecosystem, while the existing ones continue their evolution by adding new features and fixing known problems. Since most of IoT-based applications involve communication of sensitive data with remote users, it is crucial to scrutinize the security of the emerging low-power wireless communication technologies. LoRaWAN is a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) protocol that is optimized for wireless battery-powered IoT devices. The current LoRaWAN v1.1 states only one possible backward compatibility scenario without defining all the associated security behaviors and their implications for the system’s overall security. This work examines the applicability of v1.0.2 attacks in fall-back cases by consolidating the vulnerabilities of v1.0.2 and the resulting attacks. After determining the possible attacks, countermeasures to prevent DoS attacks that target the join procedure, replay of data, and eavesdropping in backward compatibility scenarios are proposed.

几种常见的物联网通讯方式及其技术特点

在当今万物互联的时代，现有的通信网络已经由人与人、人与物、发展到物与物形成的互联网。低功耗无线通讯是当今物联网接入网技术的主要热点之一，由于具备低功耗、低成本的特点，可以很好地与物联网应用需求相匹配。低功耗无线通讯主要分为低功耗广域网和低功耗局域网，本文针对LoRa，NB-IOT，Sigfox，Weightless的低功耗广域网，和Zigbee，蓝牙4.0的低功耗局域网，分别从技术简介和关键技术等方面进行讨论，并对未来该技术提出展望。 In today’s Internet era, the existing wireless communication networks have been developed from the interconnection between people and people or people and things to the interconnection between things and things. Low power wireless communication is one of the main hot spot of today’s Internet network technology. With the characteristics of low power consumption and low cost, the low power wireless communication is a good technology to match the application requirements of the Internet of things. The low-power wireless communication technologies include the low-power wide area network (WAN) and the low-power local area network (LAN). The low-power wide area network includes LoRa, NB-IOT, Sigfox, Weightless, and the Low-power local area network includes Zigbee and bluetooth 4.0, the technical introduction and the key techniques of each communication are discussed respectively, and the prospect of the low-power network technology is discussed.

CUIDATS: An RFID–WSN hybrid monitoring system for smart health care environments

The continuous development and improvement of low-power wireless communication technologies is enabling the emergence of many new applications in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT). One of the main areas of research within the Smart City context is smart health, which engages novel IoT initiatives to improve both quality and access to health care and smart services in general. In this paper we present CUIDATS, an IoT hybrid monitoring system for health care environments which integrates RFID and WSN technologies in a single platform providing location, status, and tracking of patients and assets. After its performance validation in a suitable testbed, CUIDATS has been deployed and evaluated with a high degree of success in a real hospital.

When Scavengers Meet Industrial Wireless

Recent standardization efforts on industrial low-power wireless communication technologies clearly bet for the Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) medium access control (MAC) layer as it proved to achieve 99.999% reliability while ensuring deterministic behavior. Standards such as WirelessHART, ISA100.11a, and IEEE802.15.4e rooted at the TSCH MAC layer are used to connect millions of industrial devices today, enabling the emergence of the Industrial Internet paradigm. At that point and due to the ultralow energy profile of TSCH networks, scavengers come into play, enabling autonomously powered control and monitoring systems on industries. However, putting these systems together requires a clear understanding of their behavior. Therefore, this paper presents a methodology and a model to reliably dimension scavenger properties to network requirements and application needs, allowing industries to optimize the adoption of that technologies while keeping technical risks low.