A WIoT is a wireless network of low-power sensing nodes placed on the human body. While operating, these networks routinely collect physiological signals to send to offsite medical professionals for review. In this manner, these networks support a concept known as pervasive healthcare in which patients can be continuously monitored and treated remotely. Given that these networks are used to guide medical treatment and depend on transmitting sensitive data, it is important to ensure that the communication channel remains secure. Symmetric pairwise cryptography is a traditional scheme that can be used to provide such security. The scheme functions by sharing a cryptographic key between a pair of sensors. Once shared, the key can then be used by both parties to encrypt and decrypt all future messages. To configure a WIoT to support the use of symmetric pairwise cryptography a key distribution protocol is required. Schemes for pre-deployment are often used to perform this distribution. These schemes usually require inserting key information into WIoT devices before they can be used in the network. Unfortunately, this need to manually configure WIoT devices can decrease their usability. In this thesis we propose and evaluate an alternative approach to key distribution that uses physiological signals derived from accelerometer and gyroscope sensors. The evaluation of our approach indicates that more study is required to determine techniques that will enable ballistocardiography-derived physiological signals to provide secure key distribution.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a foundational building block for the upcoming information revolution. Particularly, the IoT bridges the cyber domain to anything within our physical world which enables unprecedented monitoring, connectivity, and smart control. The utilization of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can offer an extra level of flexibility which results in more advanced and efficient connectivity and data aggregation. In the first part of the thesis, we focus on the optimal IoT devices placement and, the spectral and energy budgets management for accurate source estimation. Practical aspects such as measurement accuracy, communication quality, and energy harvesting are considered. The problem is formed such that a set of cheap and expensive sensors are placed to minimize the estimation error under limited system cost. The IoT revolution relies on aggregating big data from massive numbers of devices that are widely scattered in our environment. These devices are expected to be of low- complexity, low-cost, and limited power supply, which impose stringent constraints on the network operation. Aerial data transmission offers strong line-of-sight links and flexible/instant deployment. The UAV-enabled IoT networks can, for instance, offer solutions to avoid and manage natural disasters such as forest fire. We investigate in this thesis the aerial data aggregation for field estimation, wildfire detection, and connection coverage enhancement via UAVs. To accomplish the network task, the field of interest is divided into several subregions over which the UAVs hover to collect samples from the underlying nodes. To this end, we formulate and solve optimization problems to minimize total hovering and traveling times. This goal is fulfilled by optimizing the UAV hovering locations, the hovering time at each location, and the trajectory traversed between hovering locations. Finally, we propose the utilization of the tethered UAV (T-UAV) to assist the terrestrial network, where the tether provides power supply and connects the T-UAV to the core network through a high capacity link. The T-UAV however has limited mobility due to the limited tether length. A stochastic geometry-based analysis is provided for the optimal coverage probability of T-UAV-assisted cellular networks.

In the context of wireless communications, low latency autonomous systems continue to grow in importance. Some applications of autonomous systems where low latency communication is essential are (i) vehicular network's safety performance depends on how recently the vehicles are updated on their neighboring vehicle's locations, (ii) updates from IoT devices need to be aggregated appropriately at the monitoring station before the information gets stale to extract temporal and spatial information from it, and (iii) sensors and controllers in a smart grid need to track the most recent state of the system to tune system parameters dynamically, etc. Each of the above-mentioned applications differs based on the connectivity between the source and the destination. First, vehicular networks involve a broadcast network where each of the vehicles broadcasts its packets to all the other vehicles. Secondly, in the case of UAV-assisted IoT networks, packets generated at multiple IoT devices are transmitted to a final destination via relays. Finally for the smart grid and generally for distributed systems, each source can have varying and unique destinations. Therefore in terms of connectivity, they can be categorized into one-to-all, all-to-one, and variable relationship between the number of sources and destinations. Additionally, some of the other major differences between the applications are the impact of mobility, the importance of a reduced AoI, centralized vs distributed manner of measuring AoI, etc. Thus the wide variety of application requirements makes it challenging to develop scheduling schemes that universally address minimizing the AoI. All these applications involve generating time-stamped status updates at a source which are then transmitted to their destination over a wireless medium. The timely reception of these updates at the destination decides the operating state of the system. This is because the fresher the information at the destination, the better its awareness of the system state for making better control decisions. This freshness of information is not the same as maximizing the throughput or minimizing the delay. While ideally throughput can be maximized by sending data as fast as possible, this may saturate the receiver resulting in queuing, contention, and other delays. On the other hand, these delays can be minimized by sending updates slowly, but this may cause high inter-arrival times. Therefore, a new metric called the Age of Information (AoI) has been proposed to measure the freshness of information that can account for many facets that influence data availability. In simple terms, AoI is measured at the destination as the time elapsed since the generation time of the most recently received update. Therefore AoI is able to incorporate both the delay and the inter-packet arrival time. This makes it a much better metric to measure end-to-end latency, and hence characterize the performance of such time-sensitive systems. These basic characteristics of AoI are explained in detail in Chapter 1. Overall, the main contribution of this dissertation is developing scheduling and resource allocation schemes targeted at improving the AoI of various autonomous systems having different types of connectivity, namely vehicular networks, UAV-assisted IoT networks, and smart grids, and then characterizing and quantifying the benefits of a reduced AoI from the application perspective. In the first contribution, we look into minimizing AoI for the case of broadcast networks having one-to-all connectivity between the source and destination devices by considering the case of vehicular networks. While vehicular networks have been studied in terms of AoI minimization, the impact of mobility and the benefit of a reduced AoI from the application perspective has not been investigated. The mobility of the vehicles is realistically modeled using the Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) software to account for overtaking, lane changes, etc. We propose a safety metric that indicates the collision risk of a vehicle and do a simulation-based study on the ns3 simulator to study its relation to AoI. We see that the broadcast rate in a Dedicated Short Range Network (DSRC) that minimizes the system AoI also has the least collision risk, therefore signifying that reducing AoI improves the on-road safety of the vehicles. However, we also show that this relationship is not universally true and the mobility of the vehicles becomes a crucial aspect. Therefore, we propose a new metric called the Trackability-aware AoI (TAoI) which ensures that vehicles with unpredictable mobility broadcast at a faster rate while vehicles that are predicable are broadcasting at a reduced rate. The results obtained show that minimizing TAoI provides much better on-road safety as compared to plain AoI minimizing, which points to the importance of mobility in such applications. In the second contribution, we focus on networks with all-to-one connectivity where packets from multiple sources are transmitted to a single destination by taking an example of IoT networks. Here multiple IoT devices measure a physical phenomenon and transmit these measurements to a central base station (BS). However, under certain scenarios, the BS and IoT devices are unable to communicate directly and this necessitates the use of UAVs as relays. This creates a two-hop scenario that has not been studied for AoI minimization in UAV networks. In the first hop, the packets have to be sampled from the IoT devices to the UAV and then updated from the UAVs to the BS in the second hop. Such networks are called UAV-assisted IoT networks. We show that under ideal conditions with a generate-at-will traffic generation model and lossless wireless channels, the Maximal Age Difference (MAD) scheduler is the optimal AoI minimizing scheduler. When the ideal conditions are not applicable and more practical conditions are considered, a reinforcement learning (RL) based scheduler is desirable that can account for packet generation patterns and channel qualities. Therefore we propose to use a Deep-Q-Network (DQN)-based scheduler and it outperforms MAD and all other schedulers under general conditions. However, the DQN-based scheduler suffers from scalability issues in large networks. Therefore, another type of RL algorithm called Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is proposed to be used for larger networks. Additionally, the PPO-based scheduler can account for changes in the network conditions which the DQN-based scheduler was not able to do. This ensures the trained model can be deployed in environments that might be different than the trained environment. In the final contribution, AoI is studied in networks with varying connectivity between the source and destination devices. A typical example of such a distributed network is the smart grid where multiple devices exchange state information to ensure the grid operates in a stable state. To investigate AoI minimization and its impact on the smart grid, a co-simulation platform is designed where the 5G network is modeled in Python and the smart grid is modeled in PSCAD/MATLAB. In the first part of the study, the suitability of 5G in supporting smart grid operations is investigated. Based on the encouraging results that 5G can support a smart grid, we focus on the schedulers at the 5G RAN to minimize the AoI. It is seen that the AoI-based schedulers provide much better stability compared to traditional 5G schedulers like the proportional fairness and round-robin. However, the MAD scheduler which has been shown to be optimal for a variety of scenarios is no longer optimal as it cannot account for the connectivity among the devices. Additionally, distributed networks with heterogeneous sources will, in addition to the varying connectivity, have different sized packets requiring a different number of resource blocks (RB) to transmit, packet generation patterns, channel conditions, etc. This motivates an RL-based approach. Hence we propose a DQN-based scheduler that can take these factors into account and results show that the DQN-based scheduler outperforms all other schedulers in all considered conditions. / Doctor of Philosophy / Age of information (AoI) is an exciting new metric as it is able to characterize the freshness of information, where freshness means how representative the information is of the current system state. Therefore it is being actively investigated for a variety of autonomous systems that rely on having the most up-to-date information on the current state. Some examples are vehicular networks, UAV networks, and smart grids. Vehicular networks need the real-time location of their neighbor vehicles to make maneuver decisions, UAVs have to collect the most recent information from IoT devices for monitoring purposes, and devices in a smart grid need to ensure that they have the most recent information on the desired system state. From a communication point of view, each of these scenarios presents a different type of connectivity between the source and the destination. First, the vehicular network is a broadcast network where each vehicle broadcasts its packets to every other vehicle. Secondly, in the UAV network, multiple devices transmit their packets to a single destination via a relay. Finally, with the smart grid and the generally distributed networks, every source can have different and unique destinations. In these applications, AoI becomes a natural choice to measure the system performance as the fresher the information at the destination, the better its awareness of the system state which allows it to take better control decisions to reach the desired objective. Therefore in this dissertation, we use mathematical analysis and simulation-based approaches to investigate different scheduling and resource allocation policies to improve the AoI for the above-mentioned scenarios. We also show that the reduced AoI improves the system performance, i.e., better on-road safety for vehicular networks and better stability for smart grid applications. The results obtained in this dissertation show that when designing communication and networking protocols for time-sensitive applications requiring low latency, they have to be optimized to improve AoI. This is in contrast to most modern-day communication protocols that are targeted at improving the throughput or minimizing the delay.

[ES] La interoperabilidad entre los objetos comunicados es el objetivo principal del internet de las cosas (IoT). Algunos esfuerzos para lograrlo han generado diversas propuestas de arquitecturas, sin embargo, aún no se ha llegado a un conceso. Estas arquitecturas difieren en el tipo de estructura, grado de centralización, algoritmo de enrutamiento, métricas de enrutamiento, técnicas de descubrimiento, algoritmos de búsqueda, segmentación, calidad de servicio y seguridad, entre otros. Algunas son mejores que otras, dependiendo del entorno en el que se desempeñan y del tipo de parámetro que se use. Las más populares son las orientadas a eventos o acciones basadas en reglas, las cuales han permitido que IoT ingrese en el mercado y logre una rápida masificación. Sin embargo, su interoperabilidad se basa en alianzas entre fabricantes para lograr su compatibilidad. Esta solución se logra en la nube con una plataforma que unifica a las diferentes marcas aliadas. Esto permite la introducción de estas tecnologías a la vida común de los usuarios pero no resuelve problemas de autonomía ni de interoperabilidad. Además, no incluye a la nueva generación de redes inteligentes basadas en cosas inteligentes. La arquitectura propuesta en esta tesis toma los aspectos más relevantes de las cuatro arquitecturas IoT más aceptadas y las integra en una, separando la capa IoT (comúnmente presente en estas arquitecturas), en tres capas. Además, está pensada para abarcar redes de proximidad (integrando diferentes tecnologías de interconexión IoT) y basar su funcionamiento en inteligencia artificial (AI). Por lo tanto, esta propuesta aumenta la posibilidad de lograr la interoperabilidad esperada y aumenta la funcionalidad de cada objeto en la red enfocada en prestar un servicio al usuario. Aunque el sistema que se propone incluye el procesamiento de una inteligencia artificial, sigue los mismos aspectos técnicos que sus antecesoras, ya que su operación y comunicación continúan basándose en la capa de aplicación y trasporte de la pila de protocolo TCP/IP. Sin embargo, con el fin de aprovechar los protocolos IoT sin modificar su funcionamiento, se crea un protocolo adicional que se encapsula y adapta a su carga útil. Se trata de un protocolo que se encarga de descubrir las características de un objeto (DFSP) divididas en funciones, servicios, capacidades y recursos, y las extrae para centralizarla en el administrador de la red (IoT-Gateway). Con esta información el IoT-Gateway puede tomar decisiones como crear grupos de trabajo autónomos que presten un servicio al usuario y enrutar a los objetos de este grupo que prestan el servicio, además de medir la calidad de la experiencia (QoE) del servicio; también administra el acceso a internet e integra a otras redes IoT, utilizando inteligencia artificial en la nube. Al basarse esta propuesta en un nuevo sistema jerárquico para interconectar objetos de diferente tipo controlados por AI con una gestión centralizada, se reduce la tolerancia a fallos y seguridad, y se mejora el procesamiento de los datos. Los datos son preprocesados en tres niveles dependiendo del tipo de servicio y enviados a través de una interfaz. Sin embargo, si se trata de datos sobre sus características estos no requieren mucho procesamiento, por lo que cada objeto los preprocesa de forma independiente, los estructura y los envía a la administración central. La red IoT basada en esta arquitectura tiene la capacidad de clasificar un objeto nuevo que llegue a la red en un grupo de trabajo sin la intervención del usuario. Además de tener la capacidad de prestar un servicio que requiera un alto procesamiento (por ejemplo, multimedia), y un seguimiento del usuario en otras redes IoT a través de la nube. / [CA] La interoperabilitat entre els objectes comunicats és l'objectiu principal de la internet de les coses (IoT). Alguns esforços per aconseguir-ho han generat diverses propostes d'arquitectures, però, encara no s'arriba a un concens. Aquestes arquitectures difereixen en el tipus d'estructura, grau de centralització, algoritme d'encaminament, mètriques d'enrutament, tècniques de descobriment, algoritmes de cerca, segmentació, qualitat de servei i seguretat entre d'altres. Algunes són millors que altres depenent de l'entorn en què es desenvolupen i de el tipus de paràmetre que es faci servir. Les més populars són les orientades a esdeveniments o accions basades en regles. Les quals li han permès entrar al mercat i aconseguir una ràpida massificació. No obstant això, la seva interoperabilitat es basa en aliances entre fabricants per aconseguir la seva compatibilitat. Aquesta solució s'aconsegueix en el núvol amb una plataforma que unifica les diferents marques aliades. Això permet la introducció d'aquestes tecnologies a la vida comuna dels usuaris però no resol problemes d'autonomia ni d'interoperabilitat. A més, no inclou a la nova generació de xarxes intel·ligents basades en coses intel·ligents. L'arquitectura proposada en aquesta tesi, pren els aspectes més rellevants de les quatre arquitectures IoT mes acceptades i les integra en una, separant la capa IoT (comunament present en aquestes arquitectures), en tres capes. A més aquesta pensada en abastar xarxes de proximitat (integrant diferents tecnologies d'interconnexió IoT) i basar el seu funcionament en intel·ligència artificial. Per tant, aquesta proposta augmenta la possibilitat d'aconseguir la interoperabilitat esperada i augmenta la funcionalitat de cada objecte a la xarxa enfocada a prestar un servei a l'usuari. Tot i que el sistema que es proposa inclou el processament d'una intel·ligència artificial, segueix els mateixos aspectes tècnics que les seves antecessores, ja que, la seva operació i comunicació se segueix basant en la capa d'aplicació i transport de la pila de protocol TCP / IP. No obstant això, per tal d'aprofitar els protocols IoT sense modificar el seu funcionament es crea un protocol addicional que s'encapsula i s'adapta a la seva càrrega útil. Es tracta d'un protocol que s'encarrega de descobrir les característiques d'un objecte (DFSP) dividides en funcions, serveis, capacitats i recursos, i les extreu per centralitzar-la en l'administrador de la xarxa (IoT-Gateway). Amb aquesta informació l'IoT-Gateway pot prendre decisions com crear grups de treball autònoms que prestin un servei a l'usuari i encaminar als objectes d'aquest grup que presten el servei. A més de mesurar la qualitat de l'experiència (QoE) de el servei. També administra l'accés a internet i integra a altres xarxes Iot, utilitzant intel·ligència artificial en el núvol. A l'basar-se aquesta proposta en un nou sistema jeràrquic per interconnectar objectes de diferent tipus controlats per AI amb una gestió centralitzada, es redueix la tolerància a fallades i seguretat, i es millora el processament de les dades. Les dades són processats en tres nivells depenent de el tipus de servei i enviats a través d'una interfície. No obstant això, si es tracta de dades sobre les seves característiques aquests no requereixen molt processament, de manera que cada objecte els processa de forma independent, els estructura i els envia a l'administració central. La xarxa IoT basada en aquesta arquitectura té la capacitat de classificar un objecte nou que arribi a la xarxa en un grup de treball sense la intervenció de l'usuari. A més de tenir la capacitat de prestar un servei que requereixi un alt processament (per exemple multimèdia), i un seguiment de l'usuari en altres xarxes IoT a través del núvol. / [EN] Interoperability between communicating objects is the main goal of the Internet of Things (IoT). Efforts to achieve this have generated several architectures' proposals; however, no consensus has yet been reached. These architectures differ in structure, degree of centralisation, routing algorithm, routing metrics, discovery techniques, search algorithms, segmentation, quality of service, and security. Some are better than others depending on the environment in which they perform, and the type of parameter used. The most popular are those oriented to events or actions based on rules, which has allowed them to enter the market and achieve rapid massification. However, their interoperability is based on alliances between manufacturers to achieve compatibility. This solution is achieved in the cloud with a dashboard that unifies the different allied brands, allowing the introduction of these technologies into users' everyday lives but does not solve problems of autonomy or interoperability. Moreover, it does not include the new generation of smart grids based on smart things. The architecture proposed in this thesis takes the most relevant aspects of the four most accepted IoT-Architectures and integrates them into one, separating the IoT layer (commonly present in these architectures) into three layers. It is also intended to cover proximity networks (integrating different IoT interconnection technologies) and base its operation on artificial intelligence (AI). Therefore, this proposal increases the possibility of achieving the expected interoperability and increases the functionality of each object in the network focused on providing a service to the user. Although the proposed system includes artificial intelligence processing, it follows the same technical aspects as its predecessors since its operation and communication is still based on the application and transport layer of the TCP/IP protocol stack. However, in order to take advantage of IoT-Protocols without modifying their operation, an additional protocol is created that encapsulates and adapts to its payload. This protocol discovers the features of an object (DFSP) divided into functions, services, capabilities, and resources, and extracts them to be centralised in the network manager (IoT-Gateway). With this information, the IoT-Gateway can make decisions such as creating autonomous workgroups that provide a service to the user and routing the objects in this group that provide the service. It also measures the quality of experience (QoE) of the service. Moreover, manages internet access and integrates with other IoT-Networks, using artificial intelligence in the cloud. This proposal is based on a new hierarchical system for interconnecting objects of different types controlled by AI with centralised management, reducing the fault tolerance and security, and improving data processing. Data is preprocessed on three levels depending on the type of service and sent through an interface. However, if it is data about its features, it does not require much processing, so each object preprocesses it independently, structures it and sends it to the central administration. The IoT-Network based on this architecture can classify a new object arriving on the network in a workgroup without user intervention. It also can provide a service that requires high processing (e.g., multimedia), and user tracking in other IoT-Networks through the cloud. / González Ramírez, PL. (2022). Interconnection Architecture of Proximity Smart IoE-Networks with Centralised Management [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/181892 / TESIS