Tiny Devices Research Articles

An open framework for translating portable applications into operating system‐specific wireless sensor networks applications

SUMMARYWireless sensor networks (WSNs) are distributed systems integrated by tiny devices, called sensor nodes, with capabilities to monitor the environment and forward their measurements to a special node, the sink, where the results can be collected and further processed. The trend in WSN is moving towards heterogeneous networks that will contain different sensor nodes running different instances of custom operating systems. Given the growing demand of new hardware platforms and operating systems specifically designed for sensor nodes, the applications programming for sensor nodes is becoming a challenging process that needs to be alleviated. Currently, application programming for sensor nodes is a complex, ad hoc, and error‐prone process where the portability among different platforms has been sacrificed. In this paper, we propose an open framework aimed to achieve application portability in heterogeneous sensor networks. Our approach provides the programming abstractions needed to support the application development process for sensor nodes. We have implemented an open framework that provides a set of tools on top of the most popular WSN operating systems to translate portable applications to the native operating system in an automatic, simple, and transparent way for developers. We have also evaluated the applications thus generated in terms of productivity and overhead, by comparing their footprint to those originally developed in each specific operating system. The results show that the overhead is minimal—4% in the worst case—and in some cases, it was even possible to reduce the footprint by using code optimizations. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Microstrip bandpass filters on substrates with high permittivities

A new class of compact microstrip bandpass filters, the stepped-impedance resonators of which are located close together at a gap of 0.1–0.2 mm, is described. Basic two- and three-element sections of microstrip filters, which are designed around stepped-impedance impedance resonators used to implement tiny selective devices with overall sizes and characteristics comparable to those of microwave ceramic filters, are proposed. It is justified that the mentioned filters can be equipped with closely neighboring metallic shields whose heights are equal to the substrate thickness. As a consequence, these filters turn out to be thinner. The frequency responses of experimental microstrip filters operating at frequencies of 1.75–2 GHz and manufactured on the 1-mm-thick substrates with the permittivity ɛ r = 100 have been analyzed. The three-pole microstrip filter with a shield (its operating frequency is 1.96 GHz, and sizes are 5 × 5 × 1.5 mm) has been simulated. It is demonstrated that new microstrip filters can be competitive with low-sized ceramic filters in certain applications.

The Mechanism of Surface Trajectories and Milling Forces in Micro-Milling Processing

In practical industrial processing, in order to make the tiny functional devices assembly accuracy as high as possible, which raises an very high requirement for surface quality of micro workpiece. Some of the important factors in controlling the surface quality with the level of the trajectories and forces of the blade across on the workpiece have a great relationship. This paper presents generalized mathematical models of the trochoid and forces combined with the helix cutter geometry used in the industry. And then from both of these aspects analytical laws in-depth of the trochoidal curves and micro-cutting forces variation. It will be of great reference value for the study of micro-milling mechanism.

SEEDI: Secure and Energy Efficient Approach for Detection of an Intruder in Homogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

 Abstract—Wireless Sensor Networks consists of tiny devices which processes and routes the sensed data. The process of detecting any external and internal intruders entering to a Wireless Sensor Network area is referred to as intrusion detection. An intruder is a moving attacker entering a particular area. In this paper, we propose an algorithm Secure and Energy Efficient Approach for Detection of Intruder (SEEDI) in homogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks. Single sensing and Multi-sensing intruder detection are considered in our algorithm. Simulation results showed that the proposed algorithm resulted in better performance.

Large bandwidth from a tiny device

Large bandwidth from a tiny device

Strong Light Confinement With Periodicity

Photonic crystals were proposed over two decades ago to realize strong light confinement via their perfect photonic bandgaps, but the expected ultrahigh-Q wavelength-sized cavities were achieved just recently in a slightly different system that has only a partial bandgap, more specifically, a modulated mode-gap cavity in a 2-D photonic crystal. It is now possible to store photons for over a nanosecond in a wavelength-sized volume for this type of cavity, which has not been realized in other systems. The same confinement mechanism has provided various interesting cavities including air-core cavities, index-modulation-induced cavities, and dynamic cavities. We discuss the impact and possible applications of the achieved strong light confinement. First, it has a strong impact on photonic integrated circuits and photonic network-on-chip (NoC) applications because these cavities enable us to realize tiny, low-power-consumption, and integratable photonic devices, which are hard to realize conventionally. It is next shown that an ultrahigh- Q cavity system constitutes an extreme slow-light medium. It is also shown that ultrahigh-Q cavities enable the adiabatic tuning of light, which makes it possible to manipulate optical signals very differently from conventional optics. Finally, other possible systems promising for strong light confinement are investigated, such as 1-D photonic crystals and photonic amorphous structures without any periodicity.

Security Threats and its Countermeasures in Wireless Sensor Networks: An Overview

ireless sensor networks (WSN) have lot of interest in research due to their wide range of typical application areas such as environmental, military and commercial enterprises. Sensor network possesses unique challenges to protocol builders, because these tiny wireless devices are often deployed in unattended environment with limited capabilities. Hence these networks are vulnerable to different types of malicious attacks. This paper surveyed the different types of attacks and security related issues in WSN. Moreover an analysis about some of the security protocols in two major domains namely, cryptography based protocols and en-route filtering schemes have been done.

Efficient solution techniques for the integrated coverage, sink location and routing problem in wireless sensor networks

Sensors are tiny electronic devices having limited battery energy and capability for sensing, data processing and communicating. They can collectively behave to provide an effective wireless network that monitors a region and transmits the collected information to gateway nodes called sinks. Most of the applications require the operation of the network for long periods of times, which makes the efficient management of the available energy resources an important concern. There are three major issues in the design of sensor networks: sensor deployment or the coverage of the sensing area, sink location, and data routing. In this work, we consider these three design problems within a unified framework and develop two mixed-integer linear programming formulations. They are difficult to solve exactly. However, it is possible to compute good feasible solutions of the sink location and routing problems easily, when the sensors are deployed and their locations in the sensor field become known. Therefore, we propose a tabu search heuristic that tries to identify the best sensor locations satisfying the coverage requirements. The objective value corresponding to each set of sensor locations is calculated by solving the sink location and routing problem. Computational tests carried out on randomly generated test instances indicate that the proposed hybrid approach is both accurate and efficient.

Matter & energy: Tiny device runs on jitters and jolts: New sensor gets power from motion to send wireless signals

Matter & energy: Tiny device runs on jitters and jolts: New sensor gets power from motion to send wireless signals

A New Vision of Evil System

In Japan, since 2009 many camera manufactures, have focused a tiny but important device: a new generation viewfinder in all digital camera, not only in consumer oriented compact DSC, but highly advanced DSLR. Upon many new system of camera, only one may dwindle the size and weight, cut the budget dramatically (energy saving) successfully, even create a specific market (MILC/EVIL). In fact, the president of Nikon, Makoto Kimura, declared that the EVIL system may “Redefinition of photography” in July. 2010, and will announce its first “counter-back weapon” before the end of 2010 or early in 2011. In our research, we collect more than 300 cases from the telephone survey during Sept,, 2010 and Feb., 2011. Total of 210 cases comply with the conditions. To probe mainly into the relationship between new generation DSC Confidence level and 3 potential customers: Amateur Photographer (AP), Senior Photographer (SP), and college student (CS). The profiles of contingency table were used to explore the potential preference for the camera with EVIL device. That is the reason what we are probe into this highly competitively market with brilliant creative design, and hope to offer an objective suggestion for both industry and education administers.

A Real-Time MAC Protocol with Extended Backoff Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are formed by a great quantity of sensor nodes, which are consisted of battery-powered and some tiny devices. In WSN, both efficient energy management and Quality of Service (QoS) are important issues for some applications. Real-time services are usually employed to satisfy QoS requirements in critical environment. This paper proposes a real-time MAC (Medium Access Control) protocol with extended backoff scheme for wireless sensor networks. The basic idea of the proposed protocol employs (m,k)-firm constraint scheduling which is to adjust the contention window (CW) around the optimal value for decreasing the dynamic failure and reducing collisions DBP (Distant Based Priority). In the proposed protocol, the scheduling algorithm dynamically assigns uniform transmitting opportunities to each node. Numerical results reveal the effect of the proposed backoff mechanism.

Knowledge-Aware and Service-Oriented Middleware for deploying pervasive services

Many applications and services have emerged in the frame of new Internet of Things paradigm. This novel view has opened the Web services to a variety of devices especially to tiny and resource-constrained devices. Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks belong to that kind of devices. Those networks have become one of the more promising technologies to take part in the Future Internet. However, the integration of Sensor and Actuator Networks into the Service Cloud is a hard challenge requiring specific new architectures and protocols. This paper presents a middleware approach addressing this important issue. A Knowledge-Aware and Service-Oriented Middleware (KASOM) for pervasive embedded networks is proposed. The major aim of KASOM is to offer advanced and enriched pervasive services to everyone connected to Internet. In this sense, KASOM implements mechanisms and protocols which allow managing the knowledge generated in pervasive embedded networks in order to expose it to Internet users in a readable way. General functional requirements of embedded sensor and actuator platforms have been taken into account when designing KASOM, with special attention in energy consumption, memory and bandwidth. The KASOM evaluation and validation will be demonstrated through a real Wireless Sensor and Actuator Network deployment based on integral healthcare services in a sanatorium.

Application based Study on Wireless Sensor Network

A wireless sensor network is type of wireless network. Basically it consist a collection of tiny device are called sensor node, sensor node has a resource constraint means battery power, storage and communication capability. These sensor nodes are set with radio interface with which they communicated with one another to form a network. Wireless sensor network has very necessary application like remote has remote environmental monitoring and target tracking. The goal of our survey is to present a comprehensive review of the recent literature on various aspects of WSNs.And also discuss how wireless sensor network works and advantages and disadvantages over the traditional network

An Intelligent Transportation Systems Architecture using Wireless Sensor Networks

city road networks is growing day-by-day, the question of how to obtain information about the roads is becoming more and more challenging. In such an era Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) has emerged as a key candidate that is benefited from the unique features and capabilities of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and Bluetooth technology. WSNs are composed of small tiny devices that work in autonomous manner to sense the surroundings. The Bluetooth protocol can be used for inter- vehicle communication among vehicles equipped with Bluetooth devices. ITSs are a state of art combination of transportation infrastructure and computer and information technology. ITSs can also resolve severe situations like traffic congestion and cope with emergency conditions like major accidents. This paper presents an efficient architecture that will increase the safety of road travel using the concepts of WSN and the Bluetooth protocol. We also discuss the ad-hoc network formation between vehicles and data exchange sensed by sensors. The simulation results show that Bluetooth and sensor networks can be used collaboratively to increase the safety of road travel.

Lifetime elongation for wireless sensor network using queue-based approaches

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is envisioned as a cluster of tiny power-constrained devices with functions of sensing and communications. Sensors closer to a sink node have a larger forwarding traffic burden and consume more energy than nodes further away from the sink. The whole lifetime of WSN is deteriorated because of such an uneven node power consumption patterns, leading to what is known as an energy hole problem (EHP). From open literatures, most research works have focused on how to optimally increase the probability of sleeping states using various wake-up strategies. In this article, we propose a novel power-saving scheme to alleviate the EHP based on the N-policy M/M/1 queuing theory. With little or no extra management cost, the proposed queue-based power-saving technique can be applied to prolong the lifetime of the WSN economically and effectively. A mathematical analysis on the optimal control parameter has been made in detail. Focusing on many-to-one WSN, numerical and network simulation results validate that the proposed approach indeed provides a feasibly cost-effective approach for lifetime elongation of WSN.

Mobile agent approach for efficient network exploration and fault detection

Sensor nodes are tiny, inexpensive and programmable devices which combine an autonomous power supply with computing, sensing, and communication capabilities. These nodes can be deployed in an environment at a large scale to monitor the phenomena of the real world. Wireless sensor networks are an emerging field of research with many potential applications. So far, only few applications have actually been realised due to the lack of appropriate programming support. Mobile agent middleware promises to address this issue by providing higher-level programming abstractions and the ability to use agents into the network. The unique characteristics of wireless sensor networks like resource scarcity demands new algorithms for controlling agent behaviour. This paper deals with one specific behaviour called network exploration. Network exploration is needed by many applications ranging from simple data collection to network behaviour monitoring. We present a mobile agent approach on event-based programming model for fault detection using sensor networks. The goal of our work is to collect the actual sensor data rapidly from a sensor network thereby reduce time delay and improve the data packet delivery ratio.

Towards understanding the nanofluidic reverse electrodialysis system: well matched charge selectivity and ionic composition

The widespread use of tiny electrical devices, from microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) to portable personal electronics, provides a new challenge in the miniaturization and integration of power supply systems. Towards this goal, we have recently demonstrated a bio-inspired nanofluidic energy harvesting system that converts salinity gradient energy from the ambient environment into sustainable electricity with single ion-selective nanopores (Adv. Funct. Mater. 2010, 20, 1339). The nanofluidic reverse electrodialysis system (NREDS) significantly improves the performance of conventional membrane-based reverse electrodialysis systems due to a higher ionic flux and a lower fluidic resistance. However, the fundamental working mechanism of the NREDS has been largely unexplored in the literature. In this work we have systematically investigated the performance of the NREDS in relation to the electrolyte type and the charge selectivity of the nanofluidic channel using both experimental and theoretical approaches. Experimental results show that the short-circuit current, the open-circuit voltage, and the resulting electric power of the NREDS are very sensitive to the ionic composition of the electrolyte solution. Through an in-depth theoretical analysis, two dominant factors that govern the charge separation and ion selectivity of the nanochannels were identified. The results prove that, with well-matched electrolyte types and nanopore charge selectivity, the harvested electric power and energy conversion efficiency can be improved by nearly two orders of magnitude.

차량용 스마트키 시스템을 위한 지그비 기반의 사용자 인증 모듈 설계 및 구현

소형센서 기기들을 다양한 사물에 부착하여 간편하게 사용하기 위해서는 설치가 용이한 무선 네트워크가 필요하고, 컴퓨팅 파워가 약한 프로세서로 이루어진 소형기기는 무선 LAN(Local Area Network) 네트워크를 사용하기에는 무리가 있다. 이를 위해 필요한 네트워크 기기는 간단한 통신 프로토콜로 구성 되어야하고 기기를 연결하면 바로 작동하는 플러그 앤드 플레이 형태의 간편한 설치 기능이 요구된다. 또한 이동성과 휴대가 가능한 기기도 고려해야 하므로 산업적인 측면에서 저전력 및 저가격 특성이 요구된다. 기존의 IEEE 802.11 표준으로부터 WLAN보다 작은 범위를 갖는 WPAN(Wireless Personal Area Network) 기반의 기술은 저전력 소모와 복잡도가 낮은 영역에서 무선 기술을 바탕으로 WPAN WG(Working Group)에서 연구 중이다. 사람의 생활공간인 10m내외에서 통신을 가능하게 할 물리계층과 데이터 링크계층의 표준화가 활발히 진행 중이고 WPAN의 저전력과 저비용의 특정으로 인하여 가까운 미래에 WPAN 장비가 보편화 될 것으로 보인다 따라서 본 논문에서는 차량용 스마트키 시스템을 위한 지그비 기반 사용자 인증 모듈을 설계 및 구현하였다. 차량에 실제 장착하여 테스트한 결과 무선 인식거리는 1~10m에서 가장 원활하게 동작되었고 스마트키 시스템을 통한 차량 제어도 원활하게 동작하는 것을 확인하였다. Using sensor devices applied to various objects will be needed wireless network that it is easy to install in them. Tiny devices configured to processor that bas comparatively low computing ability are inappropriate to use devices that are wireless LAN, etc. In result, network devices needed to not only have simple communication protocol, but have Plug and Play function that it works as soon as it connects without installing any device driver. it also will industrially have both low power and low cost because of mobility of it. From IEEE 802.11 standard, WPAN(Wireless Personal Area Network) included in LAN is being developed by WPAN WG(Working Group) on area with low power consumption and low complexity. In addition to, it is standardizing MAC and PRY of the standard that is expected to wirelessly communicate within 10m. WPAN will be used generally in the more near future because of both low power and low cost of Zigbee. In this paper we designed zigbee based user authentication module for a automotive smart-key system.

Streaming techniques and data aggregation in networks of tiny artefacts

In emerging pervasive scenarios, data is collected by sensing devices in streams that occur at several distributed points of observation. The size of the data typically far exceeds the storage and computational capabilities of the tiny devices that have to collect and process them. A general and challenging task is to allow (some of) the nodes of a pervasive network to collectively perform monitoring of a neighbourhood of interest by issuing continuous aggregate queries on the streams observed in its vicinity. This class of algorithms is fully decentralized and diffusive in nature: collecting all the data at a few central nodes of the network is unfeasible in networks of low capability devices or in the presence of massive data sets. Two main problems arise in this scenario: (i) the intrinsic complexity of maintaining statistics over a data stream whose size greatly exceeds the capabilities of the device that performs the computation; (ii) composing the partial outcomes computed at different points of observation into an accurate, global statistic over a neighbourhood of interest, which entails coping with several problems, last but not least the receipt of duplicate information along multiple paths of diffusion. Streaming techniques have emerged as powerful tools to achieve the general goals described above, in the first place because they assume a computational model in which computational and storage resources are assumed to be far exceeded by the amount of data on which computation occurs. In this contribution, we review the main streaming techniques and provide a classification of the computational problems and the applications they effectively address, with an emphasis on decentralized scenarios, which are of particular interest in pervasive networks.

The Coverage Problem in Video-Based Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks typically consist of a great number of tiny low-cost electronic devices with limited sensing and computing capabilities which cooperatively communicate to collect some kind of information from an area of interest. When wireless nodes of such networks are equipped with a low-power camera, visual data can be retrieved, facilitating a new set of novel applications. The nature of video-based wireless sensor networks demands new algorithms and solutions, since traditional wireless sensor networks approaches are not feasible or even efficient for that specialized communication scenario. The coverage problem is a crucial issue of wireless sensor networks, requiring specific solutions when video-based sensors are employed. In this paper, it is surveyed the state of the art of this particular issue, regarding strategies, algorithms and general computational solutions. Open research areas are also discussed, envisaging promising investigation considering coverage in video-based wireless sensor networks.