Low-rate Wireless Personal Area Networks Research Articles

A novel scheme to improve lifetime and real-time support for IEEE 802.15.4 based wireless personal area networks

IEEE 802.15.4 defines the working of physical and media access layers of a Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Network (LR-WPAN). A LR-WPAN is a low cost, low power, and low data-rate network that offers reasonable lifetime and reliable data transfer within a limited range. However, it faces several challenges whilst dealing with applications that are having strict timeliness, energy, and bandwidth requirements. This paper proposes an efficient superframe structure for the MAC layer of IEEE 802.15.4 networks that intends to deal with these challenges by varying the functionalities of Guaranteed Time Slot (GTS) bits. Simulations of different GTS allocation techniques show that our enhanced scheme outperforms the original standard as well as previous techniques in terms of energy consumption, average delay, maximum GTS allocation and reliability.

Energy aware Load Balanced Clustering using Golden Eagle Optimization in MS based LR-WPAN

Escalation in the real world applications using Internet of Things (IoT) now demands low cost and minimum power consuming devices having sensing, communicating, and computing capabilities. Low-rate Wireless Personal Area Network (LR-WPAN) is an emerging solution which can provide these capabilities with low data rate and less complexity. The longevity and connectivity of the network is a critical issue during the data collection in LR-WPAN. An Energy aware Load Balanced Clustering (ELBC) approach is proposed in this paper that enhances the network life time by minimizing the energy consumption. Clustering is done using the Golden Eagle Optimization (GEO) and by taking connectivity, Average energy of cluster, balancing factor and cohesion as parameters for optimal cluster head selection. Mobile Sink based data collection strategy using Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA) is used to collect data from clusters. The simulation is done in network simulator-3 and the result shows that, the performance of ELBC-GEO is better in terms of network lifetime, average energy of nodes, and data collection delay.

Localization for V2X communication with noisy distance measurement

Mobile sensor network localization is a growing research topic after IEEE 802.15.4 specified the procedure of low-rate wireless personal area networks (LR-WPANs), which further helps localize vehicles in the automobile industry. This paper presents a new localization scheme based on flying anchors deployed in vehicular infrastructure. The mobile anchor nodes follow a random C-shaped trajectory. A global positioning system (GPS) is attached to each anchor node, transmitting beacons with ID and location to all other vehicles in a network. Distance calculation is facilitated through link quality induction, employing the centroid method to compute localization error. Mobile anchor localization, particularly when employing a C-shaped trajectory commonly adopted by various topologies, consistently yields optimal positioning outcomes. However, this approach can be susceptible to the impact of noisy measurements, potentially reducing overall localization performance. To overcome this problem, we proposed a framework based on extended Kalman filtering (EKF), which is used to refine the coordinates of the vehicles. To compute the lower bounding of the vehicular node, an analytical framework is also proposed to enhance the localization error accuracy. Simulation results show that the EKF framework provides better positioning accuracy compared to the existing C-shaped solution, irrespective of noise statistics, topology selection, and anchor node density. With the help of the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) framework, we achieved a comprehensive localization error of 0.99 m, accompanied by a standard deviation of 0.47.

Developing of Bluetooth mesh flooding between source-destination linking of nodes in wireless sensor networks

Bluetooth uses 2.4 GHz in ISM (industrial, scientific, and medical) band, which it shares with other wireless operating system technologies like ZigBee and WLAN. The Bluetooth core design comprises a low-energy version of a low-rate wireless personal area network and supports point-to-point or point-to-multipoint connections. The aim of the study is to develop a Bluetooth mesh flooding and to estimate packet delivery ratio in wireless sensor networks to model asynchronous transmissions including a visual representation of a mesh network, node-related statistics, and a packet delivery ratio (PDR). This work provides a platform for Bluetooth networking by analyzing the flooding of the network layers and configuring the architecture of a multi-node Bluetooth mesh. Five simulation scenarios have been presented to evaluate the network flooding performance. These scenarios have been performed over an area of 200×200 meters including 81 randomly distributed nodes including different Relay/End node configurations and source-destination linking between nodes. The results indicate that the proposed approach can create a pathway between the source node and destination node within a mesh network of randomly distributed End and Relay nodes using MATLAB environment. The results include probability calculation of getting a linking between two nodes based on Monte Carlo method, which was 88.7428 %, while the Average-hop-count linking between these nodes was 8. Based on the conducted survey, this is the first study to examine and demonstrate Bluetooth mesh flooding and estimate packet delivery ratio in wireless sensor networks

Potential Security Vulnerabilities of the IEEE 802.15.4 Standard and a Proposed Solution Against the Dissociation Process

Many different networks that rely on short-distance wireless technology for their functions utilize the IEEE 802.15.4 Standard, especially in the case of systems that experience a low level of traffic. The networks using this standard are typically based on the Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Network, herein called the LR-WPAN; this network is used for the provision of both the physical layer, herein referred to as the PHY, and the media access control, herein abbreviated as the MAC. There are four security features in the IEEE 802.15.4 Standard that are designed to ensure the safe and secure transmission of data through the network. Disconnection from the network is managed and controlled by the message authentication code, herein referred to as the MAC, while the coordinator personal area network, herein abbreviated as the PAN, is also able to trigger the disconnection. However, the process of disconnection from the network is one area of vulnerability to denial-of-service attacks, herein referred to as DoS; this highlights a major shortcoming of the IEEE 802.15.4 Standard’s security features. This paper is intended to contribute to the improvement of security for the IEEE network by conducting a specific and in-depth review of available literature as well as conducting an analysis of the disassociation process. In doing so, potential new threats will be highlighted, and this data can be used to improve the security of the IEEE 802.15.4 Standard. Overall, in this paper, the role of the Castalia tool in the OMNET++ environment is analysed and interpreted for these potential new threats. Also, this paper proposes a solution to such threats to improve the security IEEE 802.15.4 disassociation process. Keywords: Disassociation vulnerability of IEEE 802.15.4 Standard, DoS attack, IoT security.

GSA-RPI: GSA based Rendezvous Point Identification in a two-level cluster based LR-WPAN for uncovering the optimal trajectory of Mobile Data Collection Agent

Energy efficient data collection with minimum delay is very essential for IoT applications using sensors attached to Low Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (LR-WPAN). The nature and position of the data collection and processing point, termed as Sink, plays a vital role in the data reliability, delay, and network lifetime. The static sink causes hot-spot problem to occur in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), since the nodes nearer to the sink may die quickly. The Mobile Data Collection Agent (MDCA), commonly known as Mobile Sink (MS), can be used to mitigate this problem. A two level clustering scheme with an optimal data collection strategy is proposed in this work. In the first level, hierarchical clusters are formed and the Cluster Heads (CHs) are selected based on the residual energy and connectivity of the devices. The CHs are partitioned into disjoint sets and each set is represented by a Rendezvous Point (RP) that covers every element in the set. In the second level clustering, a deterministic approach is used for the RP identification followed by a meta-heuristic approach known as Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA) for RP optimization. Finally, the MDCA collects data by visiting RPs along the path obtained using Simulated Annealing (SA). The proposed method is compared with Particle Swarm Optimization based path finding, SPT-GDA, and BR-CTR algorithms. The algorithms are analyzed for number of CHs, RPs, path length, Average Residual Energy, and Network Lifetime in LR-WPAN.

FD-OMAC: A Novel Full-Duplex Optical Media Access Control for IEEE 802.15.7

Optical wireless communication (OWC), the IEEE 802.15.7 standard (revised 2018) is developed in normative reference to low-rate wireless personal area networks IEEE 802.15.4 standard. One significant difference between the two standards is the highly directional transmitters in the OWC networks. This difference opens up the possibility of adding full-duplex communication to wireless networks. Our work proposes adding full-duplex functionality in the contention-free period (CFP) of the OWC media access control (MAC) layer. We justify the significance of our proposal by implementing IEEE 802.15.7 resource allocation scheme for both our proposed full-duplex optical MAC (FD-OMAC) and the IEEE 802.15.7 MAC. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed work improves the spectral efficiency in the CFP without compromising delays. We also discuss the minor changes required in the IEEE 802.15.7 MAC for implementing FD-OMAC. We further extend the FD-OMAC to a multiple access point network and evaluate its performance in comparison with IEEE 802.15.7 MAC.

Developing new connectivity architectures for local sensing and control IoT systems

While improvement can be done in every component of the Internet of Things (IoT) as an evolving technology, this work focuses on connectivity. Currently, the main in-building connectivity technology for IoT enterprise deployments is the low rate wireless personal area network (LR-WPAN). However, despite the low power and complexity, the two main issues of the LR-WPAN are very slow data access and short coverage range. To address these issues, 802.11ax can be a promising alternative due to its new IoT-oriented features that explicitly target the resource-constraint requirements. This work proposes and implements two IoT connectivity architectures to deploy the 11ax protocol stack in the sensor motes for sensing the environment and also in the backhaul link to collect and relay the sensed data to the remote processing server. The LR-WPAN is also implemented to be utilized as the baseline and reference point for comparison purposes. Furthermore, a decision model with two integrated modules is proposed to measure and evaluate the performance of the proposed architectures on the basis of the IoT requirement factors that directly contribute to IoT efficiency. The model includes an extensive set of IoT use cases to demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed architectures and determine their contribution to performance enhancement of the IoT systems.

Distributed Reliable and Energy-Efficient Scheduling for LR-WPANs

Pervasiveness of wireless networks drives the heterogeneity and density of devices in a vast diversity of environments. To achieve high reliability and low energy consumption while enabling pervasiveness is inherently a resource allocation problem. In low-rate wireless personal area networks, multi-frequency time-division multiple access methods are identified as compelling solutions to resource allocation via scheduling transmissions in time and frequency. This work presents the TREE (TRaffic-aware Energy Efficient) algorithm, an adaptive and distributed scheduling algorithm, designed to provide high reliability in terms of packet reception ratio while optimizing the energy consumption of each device. This algorithm schedules communications according to the packets in the queue and short-memory performance. Decisions are made locally, and low-interference scheduling emerges at the network level. TREE is an adaptive threshold-based model that allocates more network resources (e.g., timeslots) when the communication queue size crosses a threshold and frees resources if the resource was underutilized. Implemented over IEEE-802.15.4-TSCH and extensively tested in simulation and on real deployments up to 81 devices, the algorithm is compared to MSF, Alice, and Orchestra, the state of the art in time-slotted channel hopping scheduling. Results highlight a high reliability regarding packet reception ratio and a lower energy consumption compared to the state of the art.

Energy efficient robust scheduling of periodic sensor packets for discrete rate based wireless networked control systems

Wireless networked control systems (WNCSs) require the design of a robust scheduling algorithm that meets the stringent timing and reliability requirements of control systems, despite the limited battery resources of sensor nodes and adverse properties of wireless communication for delay and packet errors. In this article, we propose a robust delay and energy constrained scheduling algorithm based on the exploitation of the mostly pre-known periodic data generation nature of sensor nodes in control systems. We first formulate the joint optimization of scheduling, power control and rate adaptation for discrete rate transmission model, in which only a finite set of transmission rates are supported, as a Mixed-Integer Non-linear Programming problem and prove its NP-hardness. Next, we propose an optimal polynomial-time power control and rate adaptation algorithm for minimizing the transmission time of a node subset. We then design a novel polynomial-time heuristic scheduling algorithm based on first determining the concurrently transmitting node subsets and then distributing them uniformly over time by a modified Karmarkar-Karp algorithm. We demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed scheduling algorithm in terms of robustness, delay and runtime on the Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Network (LR-WPAN) simulation platform, which we developed in network simulator-3 (ns3).

A fully CMOS RF down-converter with 81.88 dB SFDR for IEEE 802.15.4 based wireless systems

In this paper, the challenges of dense integration, low power, low-cost, low-noise and high spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) required by the RF front-end (RFE) circuits for low-rate wireless personal area networks are addressed. The proposed RF down-converter circuit utilizes a low-noise transconductance amplifier stage to improve the noise performance of the highly noisy switching stage of the down-converter. The nonlinearity of the low-noise stage is compensated by employing post-distortion based harmonic cancellation for dynamic range improvement of the RF front-end circuit. The proposed RFE is designed and realised in UMC 180 nm CMOS process technology. The post-layout characterization of the circuit shows an third-order intercept point with reference to the input (IIP3) of 11.83 dBm, double-sideband noise figure of 5.9 dB, conversion gain of 17.87 dB and offers a SFDR of 81.88 dB while consuming 5 mA current from 1.8 V. The proposed circuit consumes an area of 0.1 mm2. The proposed RF down-converter boasts a 17 dB improvement in SFDR over the recently proposed RFE in the literature. The proposed RFE is also correlated with the other existing state-of-art RFE circuits recorded in the literature for Zigbee applications.

An Efficient Resource Allocation Scheme for Applications in LR-WPANs Based on a Stable Matching With Externalities Approach

This paper deals with an efficient resource allocation algorithm for Wide-Area Low Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (LR-WPANs), based on the IEEE 802.15.4 m standard. The proposed scheme aims at lowering the spectrum congestion problems and optimizing performance in terms of data packets dropping probability for all the active clusters of end-devices. The algorithm realizes a many-to-one mapping between the sets of LR-WPANs and available access bands (i.e., TV white space bands). It is based on a matching game with externalities and involves two-side preferences, i.e., clusters over bands and bands over clusters, respectively. The procedure provides high resource reuse, adaptation to changes of system conditions, and improvements on quality of service. Furthermore, a post-matching procedure is also discussed to ensure stability of the provided many-to-one matching. Finally, the good behavior of the matching approach is validated by providing performance comparisons with alternative schemes based on the random assignment, the Brelaz graph coloring algorithm applied in a modified form, and potential game strategy.

Noise Reduction Scheme for Parametric Loop Division 3D Wireless Localization Algorithm Based on Extended Kalman Filtering

Thanks to IEEE 802.15.4 defining the operation of low-rate wireless personal area networks (LR-WPANs), the door is open for localizing sensor nodes using tiny, low power digital radios such as Zigbee. In this paper, we propose a three-dimensional (3D) localization scheme based on well-known loop invariant for division algorithm. Parametric points are proposed by using the reference anchor points bounded in an outer region named as Parametric Loop Division (PLD) algorithm. Similar to other range-based localization methods, PLD is often influenced by measurement noise which greatly degrades the performance of PLD algorithm. We propose to adopt extended Kalman filtering (EKF) to refine node coordinates to mitigate the measurement noise. We provide an analytical framework for the proposed scheme and find the lower bound for its localization accuracy. Simulation results show that compared with the existing PLD algorithm, our technique always achieves better positioning accuracy regardless of network topology, communication radius, noise statistics, and the node degree of the network. The proposed scheme PLD-EKF provides an average localization accuracy of 0.42 m with a standard deviation of 0.26 m.

Performance Evaluation and Delay-Power Trade-off Analysis of ZigBee Protocol

In this paper, we analyze the superframe structure of the Medium Access Control (MAC) sublayer of IEEE 802.15.4 protocol (ZigBee), designed for Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (LR-WPANs), and evaluate the effects of the inactive portion of a superframe on average delay, and average power consumption. The four-dimensional Markov chain-based analysis of the slotted Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) algorithm presented in this work considers backoff freezing and acknowledged packet transmission that are not studied in the existing works. The analytical results prove that the performance of LR-WPANs depends significantly on the length of a superframe's active portion. We introduce a variable-Superframe duration-Beacon interval Ratio (SBR), which is utilized by tuning a few MAC parameters to achieve 35 percent reduced delay, on an average, compared to the existing state of the art. The results show that the proposed model also yields improved performance in terms of power consumption, for short and medium contention windows. In addition to the proposed analysis, this work provides optimized superframe order values that achieve trade-offs between delay and power consumption as demanded by user-provided QoS requirements corresponding to different contexts.

Design of wide band printed monopole antenna for low rate wireless personal area networks

AbstractA dual‐band printed monopole antenna useful in low‐rate wireless personal area networks (LR‐PAN) and GPS operation for tablet devices is presented. Antenna has monopole strips arranged in planar configuration on substrate suitable to match standard tablet computer display size. The overall antenna dimension is 150 × 50 × 1.6 mm3. The long and short strips of monopole are separated by notch to increase the bandwidth of antenna. The operating impedance bandwidths of 14.97% and 5.09% are obtained across LR‐PAN band and GPS band, respectively. The presented monopole antenna provides significant gain in order of 4.48 dBi for lower resonant mode and 3.26 dBi for higher resonant mode. The antenna covers LR‐WPAN frequency bands of 868.3 MHz, 915/920 MHz, GSM 850, UMTS/LTE 850, 1.57 GHz GPS bands.

Performance evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4 with real time queueing analysis

To provide a tool for performance evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4 with sleep mode enabled, a novel model based on real time queueing analysis is proposed in this paper. A low-rate wireless personal area network (LR-WPAN), composed of multiple nodes which send packets to the coordinator, is considered. The queueing behaviour of IEEE 802.15.4 node with sleep mode enabled differs from others because the packet arrivals in sleep period accumulate at the beginning of the active period, which makes a heavier load in the beginning than at any other time. This model analyses this behaviour by dividing the active portion of the superframe into backoff slots and then using an embedded discrete-time Markov chain model. The concept of virtual service time is introduced into this model which makes the proposed queueing model novel and different from typical ones. The accuracy of the proposed model is validated by Monte Carlo simulations in existing typical application scenarios, which indicates that the proposed queueing model can accurately evaluate the performance of IEEE 802.15.4 in the context of the application scenarios described in the simulations.

A Simulation Model of IEEE 802.15.4 GTS Mechanism and GTS Attacks in OMNeT++ / MiXiM + NETA

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard defines the PHY and MAC layer specifications for Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (LR-WPANs). With the proliferation of many time-critical applications with real-time delivery, low latency, and/or specific bandwidth requirements, Guaranteed Time Slots (GTS) are increasingly being used for reliable contention-free data transmission by nodes within beacon-enabled WPANs. To evaluate the performance of the 802.15.4 GTS management scheme, this paper introduces a new GTS simulation model for OMNeT++ / MiXiM. Our GTS model considers star-topology WPANs within the 2.4 GHz frequency band, and is in full conformance with the IEEE 802.15.4 – 2006 standard. To enable thorough investigation of the behaviors and impacts of different attacks against the 802.15.4 GTS mechanism, a new GTS attacks simulation model for OMNeT++ is also introduced in this paper. Our GTS attacks model is developed for OMNeT++ / NETA, and is integrated with our GTS model to provide a single inclusive OMNeT++ simulation model for both the GTS mechanism and all known-to-date attacks against it.

A CoAP-Based Network Access Authentication Service for Low-Power Wide Area Networks: LO-CoAP-EAP.

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) landscape is expanding with new radio technologies. In addition to the Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Network (LR-WPAN), the recent set of technologies conforming the so-called Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LP-WAN) offers long-range communications, allowing one to send small pieces of information at a reduced energy cost, which promotes the creation of new IoT applications and services. However, LP-WAN technologies pose new challenges since they have strong limitations in the available bandwidth. In general, a first step prior to a smart object being able to gain access to the network is the process of network access authentication. It involves authentication, authorization and key management operations. This process is of vital importance for operators to control network resources. However, proposals for managing network access authentication in LP-WAN are tailored to the specifics of each technology, which could introduce interoperability problems in the future. In this sense, little effort has been put so far into providing a wireless-independent solution for network access authentication in the area of LP-WAN. To fill this gap, we propose a service named Low-Overhead CoAP-EAP (LO-CoAP-EAP), which is based on previous work designed for LR-WPAN. LO-CoAP-EAP integrates the use of Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) infrastructures and the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) protocol. For this integration, we use the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) to design a network authentication service independent of the type of LP-WAN technology. LO-CoAP-EAP represents a trade-off between flexibility, wireless technology independence, scalability and performance in LP-WAN.

Lightweight Security Protocol for ECG Bio-Sensors

Securing biomedical information is a critical issue in wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs). However, since sensors used in a WBSN tend to have limited processing capabilities and energy sources, minimizing the overhead imposed by security protocol is a challenging problem. This paper proposes a scheme that uses the electrocardiogram (ECG) features to provide a lightweight protocol that can be used to provide several security properties for biomedical sensors, in particular, those that have the ability to capture ECG waveforms. The security of the proposed scheme relies on the operation of the Pan Tompkins algorithm where certain information is extracted from ECG that cannot be reversed back. The implementation is based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, which specifies the physical layer for low-rate wireless personal area network. As a result, the proposed security protocol utilizes the effectiveness of several security techniques, such as nonce and hash at the biosensor side by relying on the characteristics of ECG. This reduces the overhead caused by providing security layer to the operation of the sensor. Formal analysis methods were used to demonstrate the suitability of the proposed protocol for WBSNs and prove its security.

Performance of Direct-Oversampling Correlator-Type Receivers in Chaos-Based DS-CDMA Systems Over Frequency Non-selective Fading Channels

In this paper, we present a study on the performance of direct-oversampling correlator-type receivers in chaos-based direct-sequence code division multiple access systems over frequency non-selective fading channels. At the input, the received signal is sampled at a sampling rate higher than the chip rate. This oversampling step is used to precisely determine the delayed-signal components from multipath fading channels, which can be combined together by a correlator for the sake of increasing the SNR at its output. The main advantage of using direct-oversampling correlator-type receivers is not only their low energy consumption due to their simple structure, but also their ability to exploit the non-selective fading characteristic of multipath channels to improve the overall system performance in scenarios with limited data speeds and low energy requirements, such as low-rate wireless personal area networks. Mathematical models in discrete-time domain for the conventional transmitting side with multiple access operation, the generalized non-selective Rayleigh fading channel, and the proposed receiver are provided and described. A rough theoretical bit-error-rate (BER) expression is first derived by means of Gaussian approximation. We then define the main component in the expression and build its probability mass function through numerical computation. The final BER estimation is carried out by integrating the rough expression over possible discrete values of the PFM. In order to validate our findings, PC simulation is performed and simulated performance is compared with the corresponding estimated one. Obtained results show that the system performance get better with the increment of the number of paths in the channel.