Recent Advances of ICT Convergence on WSN Applications

We have witnessed fast development of various information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the first decade of the 21st century. At the same time, there has been a tremendous amount of efforts to provide unprecedented services to the end users in industrial sectors such as manufacture, transportation, healthcare, military, and other ICT convergence applications and services, all under the name of ICT convergence. WSN (wireless sensor network) is a key component which enables such ICT convergence to be realized. This special issue provides recent advances of ICT convergence on WSN applications focusing on various industrial sectors.

M. R. Bosunia et al. in their work entitled “A New Routing Protocol with High Energy Efficiency and Reliability for Data Delivery in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks” proposed a new routing protocol that constructs a stable, reliable, and shortest route having nodes with the minimum level of remaining energy to increase the operational lifetime of MANET. It also introduces a recovery scheme that reduces the network control overhead significantly to increase the reliability of the network. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol outperforms the state-of-the-art protocols.

The paper entitled “Wireless Energy Harvesting for Cognitive Multihop Wireless Sensor Networks” analyzed the performance of cognitive multihop transmissions with wireless energy harvesting in a wireless sensor network. The authors derived an exact closed-form expression to determine throughput and outage probability of the cognitive multihop transmission as a function of an energy harvesting overhead and the interference power constraint at the primary receiver.

In “Energy-Efficient Coverage Guarantee Scheduling and Routing Strategy for Wireless Sensor Networks,” Nam Tuan Le and Yeong Min Jang proposed an energy model for wireless sensor networks that is based on the sensing coverage. The scheme attempts to achieve optimal coverage of the sensing area and energy-balanced scheduling for all sensors. The energy efficiency of the proposed scheme is shown by intelligent decisions. The proposed scheme can reduce redundancy of working sensor nodes by defining minimal number of active nodes in a sensing area.

In the paper entitled “Reliable Multicasting Service for Densely Deployed Military Sensor Networks,” W. Na et al. proposed an efficient reliable multicast scheme using pre-ACK frames to provide fully reliable multicasting and decrease unnecessary data forwarding in the military sensor networks. The proposed scheme is analyzed with a discrete Markov chain model. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme provides full reliability and outperforms the existing schemes in terms of aggregate throughput and energy consumption.

The paper entitled “ESSE: Efficient Secure Session Establishment for Internet-Integrated Wireless Sensor Networks” examined the problems that can happen when applying the DTLS protocol to the IoT, which comprises constrained devices and constrained networks. To solve the problems at hand, the DTLS protocol is separated into establishment phase and transmission phase. The proposed approach enhances the performance of both device and network by using a way to delegate the DTLS handshake phase. The proposed scheme supports secure end-to-end communication despite using delegation.

Dinh-Sy Do and Younghan Kim in their work entitled “Lightweight Reprogramming and Energy Balancing in Wireless Sensor Networks” considered the problem of lightweight code distribution and energy balancing in wireless sensor networks by utilizing shared requests to reduce redundant control messages. It introduced various solutions, such as multisegment advertisement strategy and edge-oriented strategy. Through analysis and evaluations, it is confirmed that the proposed solutions not only help to reduce update completion time by 1/3 compared with the Deluge protocol, but also decrease significantly the redundant control messages and balance energy consumption among nodes in the updating process.

In the paper entitled “Secure Bootstrapping and Rebootstrapping for Resource-Constrained Thing in Internet of Things,” Seung Wook Jung and Souhwan Jung presented user-friendly bootstrapping and rebootstrapping schemes in the context of Internet of things using the human memorable password. The proposed schemes do not require a special hardware module on the thing or special equipment for bootstrapping and rebootstrapping. All these properties make the proposed scheme cost-effective and easy to use.

Thu L. N. Nguyen and Yoan Shin in their work entitled “Multiple Target Localization in WSNs Based on Compressive Sensing Using Deterministic Sensing Matrices” formulated multiple target locations as a sparse matrix in the discrete time domain. It exploits received signal strength information to recover noisy measurements, while utilizing deterministic sensing matrices and greedy algorithm to locate each target. The proposed approach reduces the number of measurements in localization process, is of low cost, and maintains the accuracy as compared to the conventional approach.

The paper entitled “Enhancement of the IEEE 802.11 Power Saving Mode by Prioritized Reservations” proposed a prioritized reservation scheme to enhance the IEEE 802.11 PSM. The concept of PSCW (PSM Communication Window) is suggested, during which PSM sensor nodes can retrieve the buffered frames using the reserved SPs (service periods), where the priorities of the PSM nodes are considered in scheduling the SPs. Through analytic models and discrete simulations, it is shown that the proposed mechanism outperforms the existing PSM schemes in terms of energy efficiency and prioritized services.

In the paper entitled “A Gene Regulatory Network-Inspired Self-Organizing Control for Wireless Sensor Networks,” Heejung Byun and Jaesung Park employed Gene Regulatory Networks (GRNs) principles and proposed a new GRN model for self-organizing control of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with dual aims of energy saving and delay guarantee. Through this scheme, each sensor node schedules its state autonomously according to the controlled gene expression and protein concentration of the proposed GRN model. Simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme achieves good performance in meeting delay requirements and conserving energy in WSN systems.

Yong-Hoon Choi et al. in their work entitled “Energy Efficient Operation of Cellular Network Using On/Off Base Stations” proposed an adaptive cell zooming method to reduce energy consumption of base stations. It formulates cell zooming mechanism as an optimization problem considering varying traffic patterns, interference, and the service availability of the whole area. Simulations are conducted to verify the performance of the proposed cell zooming method.

In “Comparison of SUN and Wi-Fi P2P WSN in M2M Environments,” Eui-Suk Oh et al. considered IEEE 802.15.4g and IEEE 802.11 in machine-to-machine environments. The performances of the physical modes of the IEEE 802.15.4g and the IEEE 802.11 standards were presented and compared in terms of the bit error rate and throughput when additive white Gaussian noise, shadowing, and multipath fading channels were assumed. The numerical results showed that IEEE 802.11 is more vulnerable than IEEE 802.15.4g in the shadowing channels when compared to the AWGN channel. For the multipath fading channel, IEEE 802.11 performs better than IEEE 802.15.4g.

In the paper entitled “Distributed Downlink Power Control by Message-Passing for Very Large-Scale Networks,” a completely new approach to distributed downlink power control was proposed using a belief-propagation (BP) framework. The proposed BP approach includes two tasks. First, the sum rate maximizing power control problem is modeled as a factor graph representation. Second, a message-passing algorithm is constructed on the basis of the factor graph, which efficiently computes a near-optimal solution in a distributed manner. The practical issues for implementing the proposed BP approach are extensively discussed in terms of the computational complexity, signaling overhead, convergence, and latency.

In the paper entitled “Data Tracking and Effect of Frequency Offset to Simultaneous Collecting Method for Wireless Sensor Networks,” the data tracking method was used as the data decomposition in wireless communication for simultaneous multidata collection (WC-SDC). It clarified the accuracy of data decomposition and the impact from the frequency offset. The countermeasure to the frequency offset and the error tracking was proposed. From the numerical results, the proposed countermeasure achieves the accurate data decomposition even under the 7% frequency offset normalized by the minimum frequency resolution.

Reducing unnecessary and redundant handshake frame is considered as a promising way to reduce the end-to-end delay and energy consumption. Zhe-tao Li et al. in their work entitled “A Low Latency, Energy Efficient MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks” presented a protocol named compressed handshake media access control (CH-MAC). CH-MAC introduces a new handshake mechanism with implicit RTS to achieve the object of low delivery latency and an initiative sleeping mechanism to settle the hidden terminal problem. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol outperforms SMAC protocol in both energy consumption and packet latency.

In the paper entitled “Packet Loss Compensation for Control Systems over Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks,” a predictive compensator, a modified linear quadratic regulator (LQR) compensator, and a combination of both compensators were proposed to mitigate the effects of unpredictable packet loss in an IWSN. The control system that applied the three proposed compensators was simulated under various conditions of packet loss using MATLAB/Simulink and TrueTime. Simulation results showed that, among the three compensators, the combined compensator works best in compensating for the packet loss in both forward and backward channels of the control system.

E. A. Oliveira et al. in their work entitled “Device Nimbus: An Intelligent Middleware for Smarter Services for Health and Fitness” introduced an intelligent middleware, Device Nimbus. The middleware supports the integration of distributed and heterogeneous mobile sensor data, enabling both context and predictive analyses. It describes a minimum viable product of Device Nimbus and reports the results of preliminary tests spanning multiple data sources focused on fitness apps, illustrating the efficacy of the middleware.

The paper entitled “Efficient Channel Management Mechanism to Enhance Channel Utilization for Sensing Data Delivery in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks” proposed multischedule-based channel switching mechanism to improve channel utilization and uniformly distribute channel load. In the proposed mechanism, four schedules were defined to switch between the control channel and service channels. The simulation results showed that utilization of the service channel was increased and contention on the control channel was reduced compared with the legacy standard, especially in slow motion and high-density VANETs.