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.

Teleoperation of hydraulic manipulators is of potential when the presence of the operator, in a remote location, is inconvenient or dangerous. Augmenting such teleoperated systems using haptic sensation will further enhance performance, safety, and convenience. The advantage of using haptic force becomes more evident when it is employed to compensate for undesirable phenomena such as existence of a delayed and lossy communication channel or excitation of the manipulator base. The focus of this thesis is on haptic-enabled control of base-excited hydraulic manipulators that are controlled through a wireless communication channel. The targeted application is live transmission line maintenance. Both unilateral and bilateral controls of teleoperated hydraulic manipulators are studied. On the unilateral front, position error is shown to be an important issue, especially when the position accuracy of the slave manipulator is violated due to fast motion of the operator’s hand at the master site, lack of responsiveness in actuation system, or poor quality of communication channel. With respect to bilateral control, three main challenges are identified, and solutions to these challenges are investigated: (i) accurate control of the slave manipulator when the communication channel is delayed and/or lossy, (ii) control of the teleoperated system when the slave manipulator is mounted atop a moving platform, and (iii) transparent force feedback to improve the position tracking of the system. First, effects of network quality and slave manipulator base excitation are examined on performance of the teleoperated system. The position error between the haptic device implement and the hydraulic manipulator end-effector is shown to increase when the network is delayed and lossy. Next, excitation of the slave manipulator base deviates the end-effector from its reference trajectory, and the position error therefore becomes larger. To alleviate the position inaccuracy, a position referenced force feedback scheme is proposed. The scheme makes the input dynamics a better match with the slave dynamics. Combined with the virtual fixture force, the virtual fixture is shown to aid the operator in following a predefined virtual fixture trajectory. Due to complexity of dynamics, performance evaluations are mostly conducted using experimental validations on actual system in a laboratory setting.

Smart grid aims at improving the efficiency, reliability, security, and quality of service (QoS) of the current electricity grid by exploiting the advances in communication and information technology. In parallel to size of the electricity grid, smart grid communication infrastructure should cover a very large geographical area that may extend from remote generation sites to densely populated residential regions and inside buildings, homes, and electricity-power-system environments. In such an extensive communication network, different communication technologies operating on different communication medium are likely to coexist. Among the communication technologies available, wireless and power line communication (PLC) based solutions are comparatively attractive especially considering cost of the initial investment required for the realization of a communication network with such an immense size. In this dissertation, a detailed investigation of wireless and PLC channel characteristics of the smart grid networks is presented. Among the topics discussed are the time variation characteristics of wireless channels, root-mean-squared (RMS) delay spread and path amplitude statistics of PLC channels, and the impact of impulsive noise on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems.

Dans cette thèse nous nous sommes principalement concentrés sur les transmissions impulsion radio Ultra Large Bande (UWB-IR) qui a plusieurs avantages grâce à la nature de sa bande très large (entre 3.1GHZ et 10.6GHz) qui permet un débit élevé et une très bonne résolution temporelle. Ainsi, la très courte durée des impulsions émises assure une transmission robuste dans un canal multi-trajets dense. Enfin la faible densité spectrale de puissance du signal permet au système UWB de coexister avec les applications existantes. En raison de toutes ces caractéristiques, la technologie UWB a été considérée comme une technologie prometteuse pour les applications WSN. Cependant, il existe plusieurs défis technologiques pour l'implémentation des systèmes UWB. A savoir, une distorsion différente de la forme d'onde du signal reçu pour chaque trajet, la conception d'antennes très larges bandes de petites dimensions et non coûteuses, la synchronisation d'un signal impulsionnel, l'utilisation de modulation d'onde d'ordre élevé pour améliorer le débit etc. Dans ce travail, Nous allons nous intéresser à l'étude et l'amélioration de la synchronisation temporelle dans les systèmes ULB. / The basic concept of Impulse-Radio UWB (IR-UWB) technology is to transmit and receive baseband impulse waveform streams of very low power density and ultra-short duration pulses (typically at nanosecond scale). These properties of UWB give rise to fine time-domain resolution, rich multipath diversity, low power and low cost on-chip implementation facility, high secure and safety, enhanced penetration capability, high user capacity, and potential spectrum compatibility with existing narrowband systems. Due to all these features, UWB technology has been considered as a feasible technology for WSN applications. While UWB has many reasons to make it a useful and exciting technology for wireless sensor networks and many other applications, it also has some challenges which must be overcome for it to become a popular approach, such as interference from other UWB users, accurate modelling of the UWB channel in various environments, wideband RF component (antennas, low noise amplifiers) designs, accurate synchronization, high sampling rate for digital implementations, and so on. In this thesis, we will focus only on one of the most critical issues in ultra wideband systems: Timing Synchronization.