DADC: A Novel Duty-cycling Scheme for IEEE 802.15.4 Cluster-tree-based IoT Applications

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is one of the widely adopted specifications for realizing different applications of the Internet of Things. It defines several physical layer options and Medium Access Control (MAC) sub-layer for devices with low-power operating at low data rates. As devices implementing this standard are primarily battery-powered, minimizing their power consumption is a significant concern. Duty-cycling is one such power conserving mechanism that allows a device to schedule its active and inactive radio periods effectively, thus preventing energy drain due to idle listening. The standard specifies two parameters, beacon order and superframe order, which define the active and inactive period of a device. However, it does not specify a duty-cycling scheme to adapt these parameters for varying network conditions. Existing works in this direction are either based on superframe occupation ratio or buffer/queue length of devices. In this article, the particular limitations of both the approaches mentioned above are presented. Later, a novel duty-cycling mechanism based on MAC parameters is proposed. Also, we analyze the role of synchronization schemes in achieving efficient duty-cycles in synchronized cluster-tree network topologies. A Markov model has also been developed for the MAC protocol to estimate the delay and energy consumption during frame transmission.

Measuring and Assessing Performance of Mobile Broadband Networks and Future 5G Trends

Mobile broadband (MBB) is one of the critical goals in fifth-generation (5G) networks due to rising data demand. MBB provides very high-speed internet access with seamless connections. Existing MBB, including third-generation (3G) and fourth-generation (4G) networks, also requires monitoring to ensure good network performance. Thus, performing analysis of existing MBB assists mobile network operators (MNOs) in further improving their MBB networks’ capabilities to meet user satisfaction. In this paper, we analyzed and evaluated the multidimensional performance of existing MBB in Oman. Drive test measurements were carried out in four urban and suburban cities: Muscat, Ibra, Sur and Bahla. This study aimed to analyze and understand the MBB performance, but it did not benchmark the performance of MNOs. The data measurements were collected through drive tests from two MNOs supporting 3G and 4G technologies: Omantel and Ooredoo. Several performance metrics were measured during the drive tests, such as signal quality, throughput (downlink and unlink), ping and handover. The measurement results demonstrate that 4G technologies were the dominant networks in most of the tested cities during the drive test. The average downlink and uplink data rates were 18 Mbps and 13 Mbps, respectively, whereas the average ping and pong loss were 53 ms and 0.9, respectively, for all MNOs.

Environmental and Safety Impacts of Vehicle-to-Everything Enabled Applications: A Review of State-of-the-Art Studies

With the rapid development of communication technology, connected vehicles (CV) have the potential, through the sharing of data, to enhance vehicle safety and reduce vehicle energy consumption and emissions. Numerous research efforts have been conducted to quantify the impacts of CV applications, assuming instant and accurate communication among vehicles, devices, pedestrians, infrastructure, the network, the cloud, and the grid, collectively known as V2X (vehicle-to-everything). The use of cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X), to share data is emerging as an efficient means to achieve this objective. C-V2X releases 14 and 15 utilize the 4G LTE technology and release 16 utilizes the new 5G new radio (NR) technology. C-V2X can function without network infrastructure coverage and has a better communication range, improved latency, and greater data rates compared to older technologies. Such highly efficient interchange of information among all participating parts in a CV environment will not only provide timely data to enhance the capacity of the transportation system but can also be used to develop applications that enhance vehicle safety and minimize negative environmental impacts. However, before the full benefits of CV can be achieved, there is a need to thoroughly investigate the effectiveness, strengths, and weaknesses of different CV applications, the communication protocols, the varied results with different CV market penetration rates (MPRs), the interaction of CVs and human driven vehicles, the integration of multiple applications, and the errors and latencies associated with data communication. This paper reviews existing literature on the environmental, mobility and safety impacts of CV applications, identifies the gaps in our current research of CVs and recommends future research directions. The results of this paper will help shape the future research direction for CV applications to realize their full potential benefits.

An Efficient Pareto Optimal Resource Allocation Scheme in Cognitive Radio-Based Internet of Things Networks

The high data rates detail that internet-connected devices have been increasing exponentially. Cognitive radio (CR) is an auspicious technology used to address the resource shortage issue in wireless IoT networks. Resource optimization is considered a non-convex and nondeterministic polynomial (NP) complete problem within CR-based Internet of Things (IoT) networks (CR-IoT). Moreover, the combined optimization of conflicting objectives is a challenging issue in CR-IoT networks. In this paper, energy efficiency (EE) and spectral efficiency (SE) are considered as conflicting optimization objectives. This research work proposed a hybrid tabu search-based stimulated algorithm (HTSA) in order to achieve Pareto optimality between EE and SE. In addition, the fuzzy-based decision is employed to achieve better Pareto optimality. The performance of the proposed HTSA approach is analyzed using different resource allocation parameters and validated through simulation results.

Weigh-in-Motion: Lightweight Real-Time Identification of Gbps Wireless Traffic

Distinguishing between wireless and wired traffic in a network middlebox is an essential ingredient for numerous applications including security monitoring and quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning. The majority of existing approaches have exploited the greater delay statistics, such as round-trip-time and inter-packet arrival time, observed in wireless traffic to infer whether the traffic is originated from Ethernet (i.e., wired) or Wi-Fi (i.e., wireless) based on the assumption that the capacity of the wireless link is much slower than that of the wired link. However, this underlying assumption is no longer valid due to increases in wireless data rates over Gbps enabled by recent Wi-Fi technologies such as 802.11ac/ax. In this paper, we revisit the problem of identifying Wi-Fi traffic in network middleboxes as the wireless link capacity approaches the capacity of the wired. We present Weigh-in-Motion, a lightweight online detection scheme, that analyzes the traffic patterns observed at the middleboxes and infers whether the traffic is originated from high-speed Wi-Fi devices. To this end, we introduce the concept of ACKBunch that captures the unique characteristics of high-speed Wi-Fi, which is further utilized to distinguish whether the observed traffic is originated from a wired or wireless device. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is evaluated via extensive real experiments, demonstrating its capability of accurately identifying wireless traffic from/to Gigabit 802.11 devices.

A Road towards 6G Communication—A Review of 5G Antennas, Arrays, and Wearable Devices

Next-generation communication systems and wearable technologies aim to achieve high data rates, low energy consumption, and massive connections because of the extensive increase in the number of Internet-of-Things (IoT) and wearable devices. These devices will be employed for many services such as cellular, environment monitoring, telemedicine, biomedical, and smart traffic, etc. Therefore, it is challenging for the current communication devices to accommodate such a high number of services. This article summarizes the motivation and potential of the 6G communication system and discusses its key features. Afterward, the current state-of-the-art of 5G antenna technology, which includes existing 5G antennas and arrays and 5G wearable antennas, are summarized. The article also described the useful methods and techniques of exiting antenna design works that could mitigate the challenges and concerns of the emerging 5G and 6G applications. The key features and requirements of the wearable antennas for next-generation technology are also presented at the end of the paper.

Performance Analysis of Iteratively Decoded Convergent Source Mapping with Sphere Packing-Assisted Differential Space-Time Spreading Technique for Efficient Video Transmission

With the substantial growth in number of wireless devices, future communication demands overarching research to design high-throughput and efficient systems. We propose an intelligent Convergent Source Mapping (CSM) approach incorporating Differential Space-Time Spreading (DSTS) technique with Sphere Packing (SP) modulation. The crux of CSM process is assured convergence by attaining an infinitesimal Bit-Error Rate (BER). Data Partitioning (DP) H.264 video codec is deployed to gauge the performance of our intelligent and efficient system. For the purpose of efficient and higher data rates, we have incorporated compression efficient source encoding along with error resiliency and transmission robustness features. The proposed system follows the concept of iterations between the Soft-Bit Source-Decoder (SBSD) and Recursive Systematic Convolutional (RSC) decoder. Simulations of the DSTS-SP-assisted CSM system are presented for the correlated narrowband Rayleigh channel, using different CSM rates but constant overall bit-rate budget. The SP-assisted DSTS systems are mainly useful in decoding algorithms that operate without requiring Channel State Information (CSI). The effects of incorporating redundancy via different CSM schemes on the attainable performance and convergence of the proposed system are investigated using EXtrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) charts. The effectiveness of the proposed system is demonstrated through IT++ based proof-of-concept simulations. The Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) analysis shows that using Rate-2/6 CSM with minimum Hamming distance ( d H , min ) of 4 offers about 5 dB gain, compared to an identical overall system code rate but with Rate-2/3 CSM and d H , min of 2. Furthermore, for a consistent value of d H , min and overall rate, the Rate-2/3 CSM scheme beats the Rate-5/6 CSM by about 2 dB at the PSNR degradation point of 2 dB. Moreover, the proposed system with Rate-2/3 CSM scheme furnishes an E b / N 0 gain of 20 dB when compared with the uniform-rate benchmarker. Clearly, we can say that higher d H , min and lower CSM values are favourable for our proposed setup.

Fundamentals of Internet of Things (IoT): Applications, Challenges, Future Trends

One of the jargons in Information Technology is the Internet of Things (IoT). The future is the Internet of Things, which will transform real-world objects into intelligent objects. IoT aims to introduce plug-and-play technology providing the ultimate user, ease of operation, remote access control, and configurable. This paper presents IoT technology from a bird’s eye view covering its applications in all fields, various challenges faced, and future prospects/trends. IoT applications require higher data rates, large bandwidth, increased capacity, low latency, and high throughput..

Multicast Through Device to Device Communication Using Enhanced Diffie–Hellman Algorithm

The mobile device demand has been increased and it is estimated that in upcoming 10 years, the wireless cellular demand will increase up to 500 times. And it is not possible only with the cellular networks to satisfy this huge demand. To meet the huge requirement from the mobile end user, 5G networks enabled device to device communication can be applied. Device to Device (D2D) connection is the direct link among the two devices without the intervention of main station. Thus, D2D reduces the latency. And 5G are supported for the high data rates. Furthermore, for efficient transmission, multicast device to device communication is used. Multicast distrubutes the messages to multiple users of the restricted geographical area. Trustworthy communication is necessary for multicast D2D communication. Enhanced Diffie–Hellman algorithm is used for the trustworthiness.

A Low-Power Squaring Circuit with Regulated Output and Improved Settling Time in 180 nm CMOS for 3–5 GHz IR-UWB Applications

This paper demonstrates a low-power squaring circuit for 3–5 GHz non-coherent Impulse-Radio Ultra-Wideband (IR-UWB) receivers for Pulse Position Modulation (PPM) in a low-cost 180 nm CMOS technology. The squaring, which is the key element in typical IR-UWB receivers, is performed exploiting the non-linear transfer function of a MOS transistor. For a high gain at low power consumption the transistor is biased in the moderate inversion region, where the second-order derivative of the transconductance gm and, as a result, the quadratic term in the transfer function reaches a maximum. A control loop was implemented to set the dc output voltage to a defined value and thus to allow a comparison of the squarer output signal with a defined threshold voltage, which can easily be set and adjusted (e.g. by a DAC). To speed up the settling time of the output and hence to reach higher data rates, a novel slew-rate booster is implemented at the output. Thereby, the squarer is capable of data rates of up to 15.6 Mbit s−1, which is more than two times higher compared to the circuit without the slew-rate booster, while only consuming 72.4 µW in addition. In the extracted post-layout simulations the whole circuitry consumes 724 µA at a 1.8 V power supply, resulting in a power consumption of 1.3 mW.