Architectures and Protocols for Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks

A special issue of Journal of Sensor and Actuator Networks (ISSN 2224-2708). This special issue belongs to the section "Wireless Control Networks".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2020) | Viewed by 26105

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Department of Information Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics, University of L'Aquila, Via Vetoio, 67100 Teramo, Italy
Interests: Internet of Things; wireless communications; cross-layer protocol design

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Guest Editor
Director of Networked Systems Lab, Department of Information Communications Engineering, Chungnam National University, Daejeon 34003, Republic of Korea
Interests: networked control systems; Industry 4.0; machine learning

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Wireless technologies enable seamless integration of communication, control, and computation. Data transmission, sensing, control, and actuation applications are converging to the Internet of Things (IoT), with billions of wireless devices deployed to intelligently interconnect people, objects, and machines. New applications such as tactile Internet, remote surgery, augmented or virtual reality (AR/VR), and autonomous driving, where the mission criticality is a common characteristic, are posing more stringent requirements on reliability, delay, and resilience.

Standards organizations, such as the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), are extensively working on wireless protocol enhancements to support these demands. Accurate and computationally affordable techniques for protocol modeling and optimization are then fundamental to guarantee the integration of large-scale networks with a variety of potentially competing service requirements over the same physical medium. Energy-efficient operations, adaptability to heterogeneous and strict requirements, and interoperability represent challenging aspects that need to be addressed. In this context, stochastic network optimization and machine learning techniques are powerful tools that can be used in combination with currently used analytical approaches.

This Special Issue targets scientific contributions on wireless sensor/actuator networks and systems (WSANs) addressing heterogeneous and strict communication requirements (hopefully in combination), such as reliability and robustness, timeliness and real-time, scalability, mobility, security and privacy, and energy efficiency and sustainability. We are interested in papers dealing with innovative solutions that have been sufficiently evaluated through analytical, simulation or experimental models (hopefully in combination). Extensions to previously published works are accepted, but it needs to be clearly stated in the submission, and the new contribution needs to be clear.

Topics of interest are:

  • Communication standards and technologies for wireless sensor and actuator networks, e.g. IEEE 802.11, WiFi, IEEE 802.15.4, ZigBee, Bluetooth Low Energy, NB-IoT, RFID, and their integration/interoperability;
  • System architectures and communication infrastructures to fulfill strict performance requirements; scalability;
  • Cross-layer protocol design: MAC and PHY interactions, wireless network integration, and interoperability with wired systems;
  • Reliability and robustness: improving communication error detection/correction, hardware robustness, systems reliability in general;
  • Timeliness and real-time operations: improving the timing behavior and reducing end-to-end communication delays;
  • Security and privacy: new mechanisms to grant adequate levels of security/privacy without jeopardizing energy and time;
  • Mobility: mechanisms to support mobile devices in a seamless and transparent way, i.e., still respecting the overall performance requirements;
  • Energy efficiency and harvesting: improving lifetime, e.g., through optimized communications scheduling or duty-cycling and trade-offs between energy and performance;
  • Real-case applications, such as in building and industrial automation, vehicular networks or security/surveillance.

Dr. Piergiuseppe Di Marco
Dr. Pangun Park
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Journal of Sensor and Actuator Networks is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • wireless sensor networks
  • heterogeneous requirements
  • energy-efficient operation

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Published Papers (6 papers)

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Editorial

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4 pages, 154 KiB  
Editorial
Architectures and Protocols for Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks
by Piergiuseppe Di Marco and Pangun Park
J. Sens. Actuator Netw. 2021, 10(3), 52; https://doi.org/10.3390/jsan10030052 - 30 Jul 2021
Viewed by 2714
Abstract
Recent advances in wireless networking, sensing, computing, and control are revolutionizing how physical systems interact with information and physical processes such as Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Internet of Things (IoT), and Tactile Internet [...] Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Architectures and Protocols for Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks)

Research

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10 pages, 271 KiB  
Article
An Extended Reselling Protocol for Existing Anti-Counterfeiting Schemes
by Ghaith Khalil, Robin Doss and Morshed Chowdhury
J. Sens. Actuator Netw. 2021, 10(1), 12; https://doi.org/10.3390/jsan10010012 - 1 Feb 2021
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 2452
Abstract
Product counterfeiting is a continuous problem in industry. Recently, an anti-counterfeiting protocol to address this issue via radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology was proposed by researchers. Yet, the use case of reselling the same product has not been fully addressed which might cause serious [...] Read more.
Product counterfeiting is a continuous problem in industry. Recently, an anti-counterfeiting protocol to address this issue via radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology was proposed by researchers. Yet, the use case of reselling the same product has not been fully addressed which might cause serious problems for the exciting and proposed schemes and transactions. This paper proposes an extended RFID-based anti-counterfeiting protocol to address the use case of the original buyer reselling the same item to a second buyer. We will follow the proposed extended scheme with a formal security analysis to prove that the proposed protocol is secure and immune against most known security attacks. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Architectures and Protocols for Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks)
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15 pages, 693 KiB  
Article
A Bluetooth-Based Architecture for Contact Tracing in Healthcare Facilities
by Piergiuseppe Di Marco, Pangun Park, Marco Pratesi and Fortunato Santucci
J. Sens. Actuator Netw. 2021, 10(1), 2; https://doi.org/10.3390/jsan10010002 - 31 Dec 2020
Cited by 17 | Viewed by 4570
Abstract
With the latest standard releases, Bluetooth technology is becoming more and more relevant for building and industrial automation. At the same time, Bluetooth is now becoming fundamental for contact tracing applications, to support monitoring and containment of the COVID-19 pandemic. Critical facilities such [...] Read more.
With the latest standard releases, Bluetooth technology is becoming more and more relevant for building and industrial automation. At the same time, Bluetooth is now becoming fundamental for contact tracing applications, to support monitoring and containment of the COVID-19 pandemic. Critical facilities such as nursing homes and hospitals have been severely exposed to the pandemic, but the currently available short-range wireless technology still faces the fundamental limits of proximity accuracy, battery lifetime, and privacy in those complex indoor environments. The aim of this paper is to investigate effective ways of building an architecture with heterogeneous devices to support contact tracing in critical scenarios such as healthcare facilities, while meeting the required level of accuracy and privacy. A framework based on standard Bluetooth mesh networking technology is proposed, and the research challenges are discussed. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Architectures and Protocols for Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks)
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31 pages, 633 KiB  
Article
Where Freshness Matters in the Control Loop: Mixed Age-of-Information and Event-Based Co-Design for Multi-Loop Networked Control Systems
by Mohammad H. Mamduhi, Jaya Prakash Champati, James Gross and Karl H. Johansson
J. Sens. Actuator Netw. 2020, 9(3), 43; https://doi.org/10.3390/jsan9030043 - 21 Sep 2020
Cited by 14 | Viewed by 3097
Abstract
In the design of multi-loop Networked Control Systems (NCSs), wherein each control system is characterized by heterogeneous dynamics and associated with a certain set of timing specifications, appropriate metrics need to be employed for the synthesis of control and networking policies to efficiently [...] Read more.
In the design of multi-loop Networked Control Systems (NCSs), wherein each control system is characterized by heterogeneous dynamics and associated with a certain set of timing specifications, appropriate metrics need to be employed for the synthesis of control and networking policies to efficiently respond to the requirements of each control loop. The majority of the design approaches for sampling, scheduling, and control policies include either time-based or event-based metrics to perform pertinent actions in response to the changes of the parameters of interest. We specifically focus in this article on Age-of-Information (AoI) as a recently-developed time-based metric and threshold-based triggering function as a generic Event-Triggered (ET) metric. We consider multiple heterogeneous stochastic linear control systems that close their feedback loops over a shared communication network. We investigate the co-design across the NCS and discuss the pros and cons with the AoI and ET approaches in terms of asymptotic control performance measured by Linear-Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) cost functions. In particular, sampling and scheduling policies combining AoI and stochastic ET metrics are proposed. It is argued that pure AoI functions that generate decision variables solely upon minimizing the average age irrespective of control systems dynamics may not be able to improve the overall NCS performance even compared with purely randomized policies. Our theoretical analysis is validated through several simulation scenarios. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Architectures and Protocols for Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks)
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21 pages, 1616 KiB  
Article
Performance Enhancement of IEEE 802.15.6 Using Collision Avoidance Technique
by Muhammad Adnan, Farag Sallabi, Khaled Shuaib and Mohammed Abdul-Hafez
J. Sens. Actuator Netw. 2020, 9(3), 33; https://doi.org/10.3390/jsan9030033 - 17 Jul 2020
Cited by 11 | Viewed by 4218
Abstract
Research related to Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) has recently gained more attention due to its application in enabling smart healthcare systems. A WBAN consists of several sensing nodes and a dedicated coordinator. The distributed nodes communicate with the coordinator by accessing the [...] Read more.
Research related to Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) has recently gained more attention due to its application in enabling smart healthcare systems. A WBAN consists of several sensing nodes and a dedicated coordinator. The distributed nodes communicate with the coordinator by accessing the physical communication channel in a randomly distributed fashion. Random channel access may cause frame re-transmission of corrupted frames due to frame collisions. As a result of that, there will be degradation in the WBAN throughput, an increase in delay, and a waste of node energy. Nodes within a WBAN can be classified using specific user priorities allowing for prioritized communication to reduce possible frame collisions. To improve the performance and energy efficiency, this work aims to reduce collisions among nodes that belong to the same users’ priority (homogeneous collisions) and collisions among nodes of different users’ priorities (heterogeneous collisions). Homogeneous collisions can be reduced by scaling the minimum Contention Window (CW) among nodes within the same user priority, whereas heterogeneous collisions can be reduced by allowing higher user priority nodes to transmit while lower user priority nodes enter into a backoff state. This paper presents an analytical model and extensive simulations to show the enhanced performance of the proposed collision avoidance mechanism. The results show that the throughput and node energy efficiency is improved by a factor of three and two times, respectively. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Architectures and Protocols for Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks)
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Review

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31 pages, 1810 KiB  
Review
Advancement of Routing Protocols and Applications of Underwater Wireless Sensor Network (UWSN)—A Survey
by Khandaker Foysal Haque, K. Habibul Kabir and Ahmed Abdelgawad
J. Sens. Actuator Netw. 2020, 9(2), 19; https://doi.org/10.3390/jsan9020019 - 5 Apr 2020
Cited by 77 | Viewed by 7870
Abstract
Water covers a greater part of the Earth’s surface. However, little knowledge has been achieved regarding the underwater world as most parts of it remain unexplored. Oceans, including other water bodies, hold substantial natural resources and also the aquatic lives. These are mostly [...] Read more.
Water covers a greater part of the Earth’s surface. However, little knowledge has been achieved regarding the underwater world as most parts of it remain unexplored. Oceans, including other water bodies, hold substantial natural resources and also the aquatic lives. These are mostly undiscovered and unknown due to the unsuited and hazardous underwater environments for the human. This inspires the unmanned exploration of these dicey environments. Neither unmanned exploration nor the distant real-time monitoring is possible without deploying Underwater Wireless Sensor Network (UWSN). Consequently, UWSN has drawn the interests of the researchers recently. This vast underwater world is possible to be monitored remotely from a distant location with much ease and less risk. The UWSN is required to be deployed over the volume of the water body to monitor and surveil. For vast water bodies like oceans, rivers and large lakes, data is collected from the different heights/depths of the water level which is then delivered to the surface sinks. Unlike terrestrial communication and radio waves, conventional mediums do not serve the purpose of underwater communication due to their high attenuation and low underwater-transmission range. Instead, an acoustic medium is able to transmit data in underwater more efficiently and reliably in comparison to other mediums. To transmit and relay the data reliably from the bottom of the sea to the sinks at the surface, multi-hop communication is utilized with different schemes. For seabed to surface sink communication, leading researchers proposed different routing protocols. The goal of these routing protocols is to make underwater communications more reliable, energy-efficient and delay efficient. This paper surveys the advancement of some of the routing protocols which eventually helps in finding the most efficient routing protocol and some recent applications for the UWSN. This work also summarizes the remaining challenging issues and the future trends of those considered routing protocols. This survey encourages further research efforts to improve the routing protocols of UWSN for enhanced underwater monitoring and exploration. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Architectures and Protocols for Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks)
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