News
Newsletter issue #9
Newsletter issue no. 9 has been published. It contains a guest column of Prof. Panos Chrysanthis, the member profile of UCY and two articles about the projects SPITFIRE and InteliSense.
Newsletter issue #8
The eighth issue of our newsletter can be downloaded. It contains two guest columns, the member profile of UDE and a report of the CONET 2010 workshop.
COST2100/CONET/NEWCOM++ Training School and Workshop
on "Cooperating Objects and Wireless Sensor Networks" will take place on May 10-13, 2010 in Bologona.
Resource Management and Adaptation
Partners involved
The RMA cluster involves 6 members (1 associated): TUB (cluster leader), UCL, ISEP-IPP, NUIG, SICS, UzL (associated member)
Problem and Objectives
The interaction of mobile cooperating systems is often subject to quality requirements regarding the timeliness and reliability of communication. The mobility of these systems, however, provides a significant challenge to these requirements since the RF interference situation can change constantly. Interference can originate from other mobile objects or by fixed networks using the same radio resources.
The key objective of the cluster is the development of mechanisms for reliable assessment of the current RF interference situation as a basis for dynamic resource adaptation that will provide better end-to-end system performance and quality of service. The adaptation process requires a cross-layer coordination of several protocol components like medium access control (MAC), packet scheduling, and others while satisfying external constraints like technology, fairness, transmission quality and legal constraints.
The following graph exemplifies the dynamics of RF interference over time in a realistic urban environment (a shopping street). The graphs show packet loss measurements in a body area network (BAN) measured outdoors over 30 minutes in the 2.4 GHz band using three distinct transmission power levels (click to enlarge).
Research Topics
The research items addressed in this cluster are both of fundamental and of practical nature. Fundamentally, an understanding of resource usage and its optimization is obtained, on the practical side adaptation algorithms and adaptive software architectures are developed. Consequently, this cluster provides also useful inputs to other CONET clusters. Some representative research items addressed in the RMA cluster include:
- an analysis of the robustness of existing sensornet MAC protocols against RF interference, and investigation of protocol parameters that have significant effect with regard to interference,
- development of a novel tool for generation of realistic and controllable interference,
- development of a novel interference mitigation scheme that can, under certain conditions, recover frames that were corrupted by RF interference.
Details are provided in the corresponding publications (next section).
Impact
The cluster has produced a number of scientific papers and prototype implementations. The complete list of research contributions can be found on the CONET publication page. Some examples, referring to some of the research activities exemplified above, are:
- Carlo Alberto Boano, Thiemo Voigt, Nicolas Tsiftes, Luca Mottola, Kay Roemer, and Marco Zuniga, ``Making Sensornet MAC Protocols Robust Against Interference,'' In Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks (EWSN). Coimbra, Portugal, February 2010.
- Jan-Hinrich Hauer, Andreas Willig, and Adam Wolisz, ``Mitigating the Effects of RF Interference through RSSI-Based Error Recovery,'' In Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks (EWSN). Coimbra, Portugal, February 2010.
- Carlo Alberto Boano, Kay Roemer, Zhitao He, Thiemo Voigt, Marco Zuniga, and Andreas Willig, ``Generation of Controllable Radio Interference for Protocol Testing in Wireless Sensor Networks,'' In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), demo session. Berkeley, California, USA. November 2009.
- Niclas Finne, Joakim Eriksson, Nicolas Tsiftes, Adam Dunkels, and Thiemo Voigt ``Improving Sensornet Performance by Separating System Configuration from System Logic,'' In Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks (EWSN). Coimbra, Portugal, February 2010.
- Carlo Alberto Boano, James Brown, Zhitao He, Utz Roedig, and Thiemo Voigt, ``Low-Power Radio Communication in Industrial Outdoor Deployments: The Impact of Weather Conditions and ATEX-compliance,'' In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Sensor Networks Applications, Experimentation and Logistics (Sensappeal). Athens, Greece. September 2009.
- Carlo Alberto Boano, Zhitao He, Yafei Li, Thiemo Voigt, Marco Zuniga, and Andreas Willig, ``Controllable Radio Interference for Experimental and Testing Purposes in Wireless Sensor Networks,'' In Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Practical Issues in Building Sensor Network Applications. Zurich, Switzerland. October 2009.
- Carlo Alberto Boano, Marco Zuniga, Thiemo Voigt, Andreas Willig, and Kay Roemer, ``The Triangle Metric: Fast Link Quality Estimation for Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks,'' In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), Zurich, Switzerland, August 2010. (invited paper)