Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / This thesis studies the feasibility of developing a closed-loop shipboard sensor calibration system with two main objectives. The first objective was to reduce the number of personnel required to calibrate a shipboard sensor by 50%. The second was to reduce the time required to complete the calibration process by 60%. This was achieved by displaying the sensor data and the calibration standard data on a tablet PC. Wireless technology was used to transmit the data from the sensor and the calibration standard to the tablet PC. The data from the sensor is sent via IEEE 802.11b wireless LAN using DataSocket protocol and the calibration standard is sent via Bluetooth protocol. The technology can be installed and used on current ships in the United States Navy. Four software programs were developed to accomplish these goals. One program runs on the tablet PC and the other three run on the network capable application processor (NCAP). These four programs accomplish the goals stated. / Lieutenant, United States Navy

Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / Since its introduction in 1999, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) has become the de-facto standard for wireless networking, providing convenient and low cost connectivity. Increasingly, enterprises are extending their networks with 802.11-based WLANs to provide mobility and information-on-the-move for its employees. However, the introduction of WLANs into enterprise networks has raised major concerns about security. A poorly implemented WLAN introduces weaknesses in the enterprise network which can be exploited by attackers, resulting in severe consequences for the enterprise. This thesis was sponsored by the DoD to study the problem of designing a secure wireless architecture for an enterprise network. The specific requirements for the enterprise network were based extensively on DoD and the intelligence community's security guidelines and policies. This thesis provides an indepth analysis into the 802.11 standard and measures how far the standard goes in meeting the specific requirements of the enterprise network. This thesis presents a layered-defense architecture to provide a scalable design for secure wireless networks. A prototype system utilizing XML to control the flow of classified information in wireless networks is also presented. . / Civilian, Defense Science and Technology Agency, Singapore

Nowadays, Opportunistic Routing (OR) is widely considered to be the most important paradigm for Multi-hop wireless networks (MWNs). It exploits the broadcast nature of wireless medium to propagate information from one point to another within the network. In OR scheme, when a node has new information to share, it rst needs to set its forwarding list which include the IDs and/or any relevant information to its best suited neighboring nodes. This operation is supported by the use of appropriate metrics. Then, it executes a coordination algorithm allowing transmission reliability and high throughput among the next-hop forwarders. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive guide to understand the characteristics and challenges faced in the area of opportunistic routing protocols in MWNs. Moreover, since the planet we live on is largely covered by water, OR protocols have gained much attention during the last decade in real-time aquatic applications, such as oil/chemical spill monitoring, ocean resource management, anti-submarine missions and so on. One of the major problems in Underwater Wireless Sensor Network (UWSNs) is determining an e cient and reliable routing methodology between the source node and the destination node. Therefore, designing e cient and robust routing protocols for UWSNs became an attractive topic for researchers. This paper seeks to address in detail the key factors of underwater sensor network. Furthermore, it calls into question 5 state-of-the-art routing protocols proposed for UWSN: The Depth-Based Routing protocol (DBR), the Energy-E cient Depth-Based Routing protocol (EEDBR), the Hydraulic-pressure-based anycast routing protocol (Hydrocast), the Geographic and opportunistic routing protocol with Depth Adjustment for mobile underwater sensor networks (GEDAR), and the Void- Aware Pressure Routing for underwater sensor networks (VAPR). Finally, it covers the performance of those protocol through the use of the R programming language.

A tecnologia de comunicação em redes sem fio em malha, com base no padrão IEEE 802.11, tem sido uma solução tecnológica relevante no cenário atual das redes sem fio. Entretanto, com a eliminação dos cabos para comunicação de dados, as redes sem fio em malha dependem de fonte de energia para energizar os pontos de acesso da rede, que nem sempre está disponível na forma cabeada no local da instalação. Neste cenário, sendo o Brasil um país situado em uma zona tropical com alta incidência anual de radiação solar, a possibilidade da utilização da conversão da energia solar em elétrica é uma alternativa para eliminar a dependência de fonte de energia cabeada dos pontos de acesso da rede sem fio em malha. Este trabalho apresenta considerações sobre o desenvolvimento de sistemas autônomos de comunicação sem fio em malha, alimentados por energia solar fotovoltaica, compactos e de fácil instalação em área urbana e rural. Apresenta também, informações sobre o protótipo implementado denominado SAM Solar e respectiva avaliação quanto a autonomia, área de cobertura, número de usuários, altura mínima de instalação e taxa de transferência. / The wireless mesh network communication technology, based on the IEEE802.11 standard, has been a relevant technology solution for wireless networking in the recent years. However, even with the elimination of cables for data communication, the wireless mesh networks have to be connected to a voltage source using an electrical cable that may not be available at the local installation. In this scenario, being Brazil a country located in a tropical zone that receives large annual solar irradiation, the conversion of photons to electricity an be an alternative to eliminate the needs of wiring to the mesh access points. This work contributes to the development of autonomous wireless mesh communication systems powered by solar energy, with easy installation in urban or rural areas. This work also describes its evaluations in aspects such as autonomy, wireless coverage, number of users supported, installation height and throughput.

A tecnologia de comunicação em redes sem fio em malha, com base no padrão IEEE 802.11, tem sido uma solução tecnológica relevante no cenário atual das redes sem fio. Entretanto, com a eliminação dos cabos para comunicação de dados, as redes sem fio em malha dependem de fonte de energia para energizar os pontos de acesso da rede, que nem sempre está disponível na forma cabeada no local da instalação. Neste cenário, sendo o Brasil um país situado em uma zona tropical com alta incidência anual de radiação solar, a possibilidade da utilização da conversão da energia solar em elétrica é uma alternativa para eliminar a dependência de fonte de energia cabeada dos pontos de acesso da rede sem fio em malha. Este trabalho apresenta considerações sobre o desenvolvimento de sistemas autônomos de comunicação sem fio em malha, alimentados por energia solar fotovoltaica, compactos e de fácil instalação em área urbana e rural. Apresenta também, informações sobre o protótipo implementado denominado SAM Solar e respectiva avaliação quanto a autonomia, área de cobertura, número de usuários, altura mínima de instalação e taxa de transferência. / The wireless mesh network communication technology, based on the IEEE802.11 standard, has been a relevant technology solution for wireless networking in the recent years. However, even with the elimination of cables for data communication, the wireless mesh networks have to be connected to a voltage source using an electrical cable that may not be available at the local installation. In this scenario, being Brazil a country located in a tropical zone that receives large annual solar irradiation, the conversion of photons to electricity an be an alternative to eliminate the needs of wiring to the mesh access points. This work contributes to the development of autonomous wireless mesh communication systems powered by solar energy, with easy installation in urban or rural areas. This work also describes its evaluations in aspects such as autonomy, wireless coverage, number of users supported, installation height and throughput.

Sensor networks use a group of collaborating sensor nodes to collect information about real world phenomena. Sensor nodes use low-power short-range radio links to communicate with each other. Communication between sensor nodes shows significant variation over time and space. This can lead to unreliable and unpredictable network performance. These dynamic and lossy characteristics of wireless links pose major challenges for building reliable sensor networks and raise new issues that data delivery protocols must address. This thesis addresses the problems of designing protocols to overcome time-varying environmental conditions that lead to unpredictable network performance. The goal is to provide reliable data delivery in sensor networks and to minimise energy use. The major contributions of this thesis are: measuring the performance of wireless links in field trials on a time scale of weeks; systematic analysis of strengths and weaknesses of existing data delivery protocols; and the design, implementation and testing of a novel autonomic communication framework. We have measured link quality over time in experiments in unattended outdoor environments. Most previous work focused on spatial properties and experiments were not extensive, only lasting for a few hours. Besides common phenomena found in other work, such as the variation of network performance over time and the existence of asymmetric links, we find that links are independent over long time scales, and performance patterns of links are different. We also analyse the performance of data delivery protocols that use different techniques to improve reliability in sensor networks. Through systematic analysis of strengths and weaknesses of existing data delivery strategies, we find that networks using a single technique can only perform well for a limited range of link conditions. Different strategies are required in different operating conditions. Based on these experimental and theoretical studies, a novel autonomic communication framework (ACF) for wireless sensor networks is proposed. Nodes in this ACF are able to change their behaviour to adapt to time-varying environments so that optimal network performance can be achieved. Our framework provides a holistic solution for reliable data delivery to overcome time-varying wireless links. Our implementation and experimental evaluations demonstrate that this holistic framework is effective for reliable and energy-efficient data delivery in realistic sensor network settings.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Sensor networks have great potential to be employed in mission critical situations like battlefields but also in more everyday security and commercial applications such as building and traffic surveillance, habitat monitoring and smart homes etc. However, wireless sensor networks pose unique security challenges. While the deployment of sensor nodes in an unattended environment makes the networks vulnerable to a variety of potential attacks, the inherent power and memory limitations of sensor nodes makes conventional security solutions unfeasible. Though there has been some development in the field of sensor network security, the solutions presented thus far address only some of security problems faced. This research presents a security framework WSNSF (Wireless Sensor Networks Security Framework) to provide a comprehensive security solution against the known attacks in sensor networks. The proposed framework consists of four interacting components: a secure triple-key (STKS) scheme, secure routing algorithms (SRAs), a secure localization technique (SLT) and a malicious node detection mechanism. Singly, each of these components can achieve certain level of security. However, when deployed as a framework, a high degree of security is achievable. WSNSF takes into consideration the communication and computation limitations of sensor networks. While there is always a trade off between security and performance, experimental results prove that the proposed framework can achieve high degree of security with negligible overheads.

To provide mobile hosts with seamless and broadband wireless Internet access, two fundamental problems that need to be tackled in wireless networking are transparently supporting host mobility and effectively utilizing wireless bandwidth. The increasing heterogeneity of wireless networks and the proliferation of wireless devices, however, severely expose the limitations of the paradigms adopted by existing solutions. In this work, we explore new research directions for addressing network heterogeneity and bandwidth scarcity in future wireless data networks. In addressing network heterogeneity, we motivate a transport layer solution for transparent mobility support across heterogeneous wireless networks. We establish parallelism and transpositionality as two fundamental principles to be incorporated in designing such a transport layer solution. In addressing bandwidth scarcity, we motivate a cooperative wireless network model for scalable bandwidth utilization with wireless user population. We establish base station assistance and multi-homed peer relay as two fundamental principles to be incorporated in designing such a cooperative wireless network model. We present instantiations based on the established principles respectively, and demonstrate their performance and functionality gains through theoretic analysis, packet simulation, and testbed emulation.

Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs) are distributed systems of heterogeneous devices, referred to as sensors and actors, which sense, control, and interact with the physical environment. Sensors are low-cost, low-power, multi-functional devices that communicate untethered in short distances. Actors are resource-rich devices that collect and process sensor data and consequently perform actions on the environment. This thesis is concerned with coordination and communication problems in WSANs, in datacentric and multimedia application scenarios. First, communication and coordination problems are jointly addressed in a unifying framework for the case of static actors. A sensor-actor coordination model is proposed, based on an event-driven partitioning paradigm. Sensors are partitioned into different sets and each set is associated with a different actor. Data delivery trees are created to optimally react to the event and timely deliver event data with minimum energy expenditure. The optimal partitioning strategy is determined bymathematical programming, and a distributed solution is also proposed. Furthermore, the actor-actor coordination problem is formulated as an optimal task assignment problem, and a distributed solution of the problem based on an analogy with a one-shot auction is presented. Application scenarios for WSANs with mobile actors are then studied. A location management scheme is introduced to handle the mobility of actors with minimal energy consumption for resource-constrained sensors. The proposed scheme, which is the first localization scheme specifically designed for WSANs, is shown to consistently reduce the energy consumption with respect to existing localization services for ad hoc and sensor networks. An optimal energy-aware forwarding rule is then derived for sensor-actor communication in fast varying Rayleigh channels. The proposed scheme allows controlling the delay of the data-delivery process based on power control, and reacts to network congestion by diverting traffic from congested to lightly-loaded actors. The mobility of actors is coordinated to optimally accomplish application-specific tasks, based on a nonlinear optimization model that accounts for location and capabilities of heterogeneous actors. The research challenges for delivery of multimedia traffic in wireless sensor and actor networks are then outlined. Finally, a cross-layer communication architecture based on Ultra Wide Band communications is described, whose design objective is to reliably and flexibly deliver QoS to multimedia applications in WSANs, by carefully leveraging and controlling interactions among layers according to application requirements. Performance evaluation shows how the proposed solution achieves the performance objectives of wireless sensor and actor networks.

This dissertation presents system and circuit development of the low-power multi-gigabit CMOS demodulator using analog and mixed demodulation techniques. In addition, critical building blocks of the low-power analog quadrature front-ends are designed and implemented using 90 nm CMOS with a targeted compatibility to the traditional demodulator architecture. It exhibits an IF-to-baseband conversion gain of 25 dB with 1.8 GHz of baseband bandwidth and a dynamic range of 23 dB while consuming only 46 mW from a 1 V supply voltage. Several different demodulators using analog signal processor (ASP) are implemented: (1) an ultra-low power non-coherent ASK demodulator is measured to demodulate a maximum speed of 3 Gbps while consuming 32 mW from 1.8 V supply; (2) a mere addition of 7.5 mW to the aforementioned analog quadrature front-end enables a maximum speed of 2.5 Gbps non-coherent ASK demodulation with an improved minimum sensitivity of -38 dBm; (3) a robust coherent BPSK demodulator is shown to achieve a maximum speed of 3.5 Gbps based on the same analog quadrature front-end with only additional 7 mW. Furthermore, an innovative seamless handover mechanism between ASP and PLL is designed and implemented to improve the frequency acquisition time of the coherent BPSK demodulator. These demodulator designs have been proven to be feasible and are integrated in a 60 GHz wireless receiver. The system has been realized in a product prototype and used to stream HD video as well as transfer large multi-media files at multi-gigabit speed.