This paper addresses an application of the potential game theory to a power-aware mobile sensor coverage problem where each sensor tries to maximize a probability of target detection in a convex mission space. The probability of target detection depends on a sensing voltage of each mobile sensor as well as its current position. While a higher sensing voltage improves the target detection probability, this requires more power consumption. In this paper, we assume that mobile sensors have different sensing capabilities of detecting a target and they can adaptively change sensing areas by adjusting their sensing voltages. We consider an objective function to evaluate a trade-off between improving the target detection probability and reducing total power consumption of all sensors. We represent a sensing voltage and a position of each mobile sensor using a barycentric coordinate over an extended strategy space. Then, the sensor coverage problem can be formulated as a potential game where the power-aware objective function and the barycentric coordinates correspond to a potential function and players' mixed strategies, respectively. It is known that all local maximizers of a potential function in a potential game are equilibria of replicator dynamics. Based on this property of potential games, we propose decentralized control for the power-aware sensor coverage problem such that each mobile sensor finds a locally optimal position and sensing voltage by updating its barycentric coordinate using replicator dynamics.

In this work, an ultra-wideband impulse radio (UWB-IR) transceiver with accurate time-of-arrival (TOA) estimation for a ranging/positioning system was developed for wireless sensor network applications. The system uses an impulse radio characterized by a low duty cycle and direct-sequence spreading, which enable very precise ranging and good receiver sensitivity. An algorithm enabling the TOA of the first-path signal to be measured accurately in a multi-path environment with simple, low-power and low cost implementations was proposed. UWB chips with CMOS 0.18-µm technology and UWB transceiver modules performed that the accuracy of the proposed ranging system is 18.5 cm in a closed space.

A new state estimation algorithm is presented for a class of LTI systems that have an input disturbance in polynomial form and a sinusoidal sensor disturbance in the measurement output. Adaptation rules are developed for identifying the unknown magnitude, phase and frequency of the sensor disturbance from the system output measurement. For the application of the identification result to the state estimation problem, the sinusoidal signal with arbitrary initial phase has been considered in this paper. In order to test the performance of the proposed algorithm, comparative computer simulations have been carried out with a robust state observer. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

We propose a geographic forwarding protocol for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Our proposed protocol, named Landmark-based Location-Aware Routing (LLAR), intelligently combines greedy forwarding and a hole detouring technique utilizing landmark information. Compared to existing approaches, our proposal utilizes the feedback message from the sink node for discovery of the optimal path. Simulations show that our proposed scheme can eliminate a significant number of overhead messages compared to its counterparts, thereby further achieving higher energy efficiency.

It is theoretically impossible to restore the original fingerprint image from a sequence of line images captured by a line sensor. However, in this paper we propose a unique fingerprint-image-generation algorithm, which derives fingerprint images from sequences of line images captured at different swipe speeds by the line sensor. A continuous image representation, called trajectory, is used in modeling distortion of raw fingerprint images. Sequences of line images captured from the same finger are considered as sequences of points, which are sampled on the same trajectory in N-dimensional vector space. The key point here is not to reconstruct the original image, but to generate identical images from the trajectory, which are independent of the swipe speed of the finger. The method for applying the algorithm in a practical application is also presented. Experimental results on a raw fingerprint image database from a line sensor show that the generated fingerprint images are independent of swipe speed, and can achieve remarkable matching performance with a conventional minutiae matcher.

A path diversity is an effective technique to get highly reliable communications in the sensor network. In this paper, the path diversity is examined for a tree network composed of binary symmetric channels (BSC) from the view point of bit error probability (BEP). End-nodes of the network are connected to a fusion center, which sums up the received data. The probability density function (pdf) of decision variable conditioned on a source node data is derived by an iterative algorithm to obtain BEP. Numerical results show that in the case of a majority decision, BEP at the fusion center is almost the same as the BSC crossover probability due to the path diversity effects, even if the number of relay links increases.

The wireless robotic sensor network (WRSN) is a combination of a mobile robot and wireless sensor networks. In WRSN, robots perform high-level missions such as human rescue, exploration in dangerous areas, and maintenance and repair of unmanned networks in cooperation with surrounding sensor nodes. In such a network, robots should move to the accident site as soon as possible. This paper proposes a distance-aware robot routing (DAR) algorithm, which focuses on how to pick the shortest path for the mobile robot by considering characteristics different from packet routing. Simulations are performed to demonstrate the benefits of using the proposed algorithm.

This paper proposes a lightweight, fast and efficient method for the detection of jamming attacks, interference, and other anomalies in electronic shelf label (ESL) systems and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with periodic data transmission. The proposed method is based on the thresholding technique, which is applied to selected parameters of traffic and allows discrimination of random failures from anomalies and intrusions. It does not require the installation of additional hardware and does not create extra communication costs; its computational requirements are negligible, since it is based on statistical methods. Herein recommendations are provided for choosing a thresholds type. Extensive simulations, made by Castalia simulator for WSNs, show that the proposed method has superior accuracy compared to existing algorithms.

Quantity-based event reliability protocols have been proposed for reliable event detection in wireless sensor networks. They support the event reliability by achieving the desired number of data packets successfully transmitted from sensor nodes sensing an event to a sink by controlling the transport process. However, since many data collisions and buffer overflows frequently happen due to data congestions on limited data delivery paths from an event to a sink, the quantity-based event reliability protocols are hard to achieve the desired number due to lost data packets. Thus, this letter proposes a Quality-based Event Reliability Protocol (QERP) utilizing a property that the data packets from sensor nodes have different Contribution Degree (CD) values for event detection according to their environmental conditions. QERP selects sensor nodes to forward their data packets according to CD, and differentially transports the data packets by CD-based buffer management and load balancing.

For wireless sensor networks in which resources are limited and network topology dynamically changes, we propose the one-hop neighbor based broadcast scheduling (ONBS) algorithm to provide reliable delivery service of broadcast packets. The proposed algorithm reduces the scheduling overhead by allowing each joining node to decide its broadcast schedule based on only its one-hop neighbor information in an on-line and distributed manner. Also, once the broadcast schedule is decided, it is not changed to accommodate a newly joining node in order to prevent the consecutive changes of existing schedules. The network simulation results show that the proposed algorithm provides low latency and high reachability despite low overhead and on-line algorithm design.

This paper presents an architecture and a circuit design of readout address compression for a high-speed 3-D range-finding image sensor using the light-section method. We utilize a kind of variable-length code which is modified to suit the 3-D range-finder. The best compression rate by the proposed compression technique is 33.3%. The worst compression and the average compression rate is 56.4% and 42.4%, respectively, when we simulated the effectivity by using the example of measured sheet scans. We also show the measurement result of the fabricated image sensor with the address compression.

In this paper, we study the decentralized coverage control problem for an environment using a group of autonomous mobile robots with nonholonomic kinematic and dynamic constraints. In comparison with standard coverage control procedures, we develop a combined controller for Voronoi-based coverage approach in which kinematic and dynamic constraints of the actual mobile sensing robots are incorporated into the controller design. Furthermore, a collision avoidance component is added in the kinematic controller in order to guarantee a collision free coverage of the area. The convergence of the network to the optimal sensing configuration is proven with a Lyapunov-type analysis. Numerical simulations are provided approving the effectiveness of the proposed method through several experimental scenarios.

Wireless sensor networks represent a new data collection paradigm in which expandability plays an important role. In a practical monitoring environment, for example, food factory monitoring system, sensor relocations and reorganizations are necessary with reorganization of production lines and starting of new production lines. These relocations sometime make congestion in some area of the network. In this dynamic changing environment online expansion is a challenging problem for resource constraint network. This paper proposes a two-tier autonomous decentralized community architecture for wireless sensor network to solve the problem. The first layer consists of sensors and second layer consists of routers. In the architecture routers make community (a group of nodes mutually cooperate for a common goal is a community). The goal of this paper is to introduce the concept of sharing information among routers of the community to decrease sensor connection time for the network especially for the dynamic changing environment. Results show that our proposed technologies can reduce sensor connection time to achieve online expansion.

Wireless Sensor Network(WSN) is widely used in Emergency Management System(EMS) to assure high safety. Real-timely transmitting emergency information in dynamically changing environment should be assured in mission critical district. Conventional methods based on static situations and centralized approaches can not satisfy this requirement. In this paper, to assure real-time property, autonomous community construction technology is proposed to set special area called community which includes a special passage composed of several routers for emergency information's transmission and routers around this passage in one hop range. Emergency information's transmission is protected by routers around this passage from interference of other sensing information's transmission in and outside community. Moreover, autonomous community reconstruction technology is proposed to guarantee real-time property at failure conditions. In this technology, community members autonomously cooperate and coordinate with each other to setup a bypass in community for transmitting emergency information if fault happens. Evaluation results indicate effectiveness of proposed technology.

A Wireless Sensor Network has sensor nodes which have limited computational power and memory size. Due to the nature of the network, the data is vulnerable to attacks. Thus, maintaining confidentiality is an important issue. To compensate for this problem, there are many countermeasures which utilize common or public key cryptosystems that have been proposed. However, these methods have problems with establishing keys between the source and the destination nodes. When these two nodes try to establish new keys, they must exchange information several times. Also, the routes of the Wireless Sensor Networks can change frequently due to an unstable wireless connection and batteries running out on sensor nodes. These problems of security and failure become more serious as the number of nodes in the network increases. In this paper, we propose a new data distribution method to compensate for vulnerability and failure based on the Secret Sharing Scheme. In addition, we will confirm the effect of our method through experiments. Concerning security, we compare our method with the existing TinySec, which is the major security architecture of Wireless Sensor Networks.

The AODV routing protocol, which is simple and efficient, is often used in wireless sensor networks to transmit data. The AODV routing protocol constructs a path from the source node, which detects the target, to the sink node. Whenever the target moves, the path will be reconstructed and the RREQ packet will be broadcasted to flood the wireless sensor network. The localization repair routing protocol sets up a reconstruction area and restricts the broadcast of the RREQ packet to that area to avoid broadcast storm. However, this method cannot reconstruct the path once the target moves out of the reconstruction area. In this paper, we propose a lightweight routing protocol for mobile target detection. When the path breaks because of the movement of the target, the nodes can repair the path effectively using the presented routing information to achieve the lightweight effect.

Currently, there are various routing methods that consider the energy in a wireless sensor environment. The algorithm we consider is a low-rate wireless personal area network, viz., 802.15.4, and ZigBee routing network. Considering, the overall organization of the network energy efficiency, we suggest a logical position exchange (LPE) algorithm between specified nodes. Logical positioning means connecting high sub-networks and low sub-networks based on the neighbor nodes information of the address ID, and depth in the ZigBee tree topology network. When one of the nodes of the tree topology network, which is responsible for connecting multiple low sub-networks and high sub-networks, has difficulty performing its important roles in the network, because of energy exhaustion, it exchanges essential information and entrusts logical positioning to another node that is capable of it. A partial change in the logical topology enhances the energy efficiency in the network.

In the contention access period (CAP) of IEEE 802.15.4 beacon-enabled mode, collision probability increases, and network performance decreases as the number of contending devices increases. In this paper, we propose an enhanced contention access mechanism (ECAM) to reduce the collision probability in low rate -- wireless personal area networks (LR-WPANs). In ECAM, since the duration of each CAP is divided into multiple sub-CAPs, the number of devices contending for frame transmissions in each sub-CAP can be reduced by approximately one over the number of sub-CAPs. Further, this lowers the probability of collision due to two or more simultaneous frame transmissions. In addition, since ECAM shortens the channel access duration of devices, devices with ECAM have lower power consumption. To compare the performance of ECAM with that of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, we carry out extensive simulations. The results show that ECAM yields better performance than the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, especially for dense networks with a heavy traffic load.

This paper proposes two algorithms to balance energy consumption among sensor nodes by distributing the workload of image compression tasks within a cluster on wireless sensor networks. The main point of the proposed algorithms is to adopt the energy threshold, which is used when we implement the exchange and/or assignment of tasks among sensor nodes. The threshold is well adaptive to the residual energy of sensor nodes, input image, compressed output, and network parameters. We apply the lapped transform technique, an extended version of the discrete cosine transform, and run length encoding before Lempel-Ziv-Welch coding to the proposed algorithms to improve both quality and compression rate in image compression scheme. We extensively conduct computational experiments to verify the our methods and find that the proposed algorithms achieve not only balancing the total energy consumption among sensor nodes and, thus, increasing the overall network lifetime, but also reducing block noise in image compression.

Reliable data transmission is desirable in wireless sensor networks due to the high packet loss rate during multi-hop transmissions. To reliably transmit data for event-driven applications, packet loss recovery mechanism is needed. For loss recovery, sensor nodes need to keep packets in their buffers until transmissions successfully complete. However, since sensor nodes have limited memory, packets cannot be buffered for a long period of time. This letter proposes an efficient buffer management technique that caches data packets for appropriate amount of time to minimize the resource requirements and at the same time provide reliable data transmission among sensor nodes.