Coverage in a Wireless Sensor Network reflects how well a sensor network monitors an area. Many times it is impossible to provide full coverage. The key challenges are to prolong the lifetime and ensure connectivity to provide a stable network. In this thesis we first define p-percent coverage problem in which we require only p% of the whole area to be monitored. We propose two algorithms, Connected P-Percent Coverage Depth First Search (CpPCA-DFS) and Connected P-Percent Connected Dominating Set (CpPCA-CDS). Through simulations we then compare and analyze them for their efficiency and lifetime. Finally in conclusion we prove that CpPCA-CDS provides 5 to 20 percent better active node ratio at low density. At high node density it achieves better distribution of covered area however the lifetime is only 5 to10 percent shorter then CpPCA-DFS. Overall CpPCA-CDS provides up to 30 percent better distribution of covered area.

Wireless sensor network is an intelligent network system which has the self-monitoring functionality. It consists of many low-cost, low-power and small-sized sensor nodes that can communicate with each other to perform sensing and data processing. Acting as an important role in the system, network coverage usually has a huge effect on the system’s lifetime.In this thesis, particle swarm algorithm was used as a method to optimize the coverage in the coverage of wireless sensor network. A network coverage optimization strategy based on particle swarm optimization was proposed and MATLAB was used as a tool to apply the algorithm. The model used in this thesis is the probability sensing model and the coverage type is area coverage. Effectiveness of the algorithm is proved by simulation. The simulation of the algorithm suggests the optimal deployment can be determined if a certain parameter which in this thesis is the sensing range is given.

Shooter localization systems are used to detect and locate the origin of gunfire. A wireless sensor network is one possible implementation of such a system. A wireless sensor network is sensitive to synchronization errors. Localization techniques that rely on the timing will give less accurate or even useless results if the synchronization errors are too large. This thesis focuses on the influence of synchronization errors on the abilityto localize a shooter using a wireless sensor network. A localization algorithm is developed and implemented and the effect of synchronization errors is studied. The localization algorithm is evaluated using numerical experiments, simulations, and data from real gunshots collected at field trials. The results indicate that the developed localization algorithm is able to localizea shooter with quite good accuracy. However, the localization performance is to a high degree influenced by the geographical configuration of the network as well as the synchronization error. / Skottlokaliseringssystem används för att upptäcka och lokalisera ursprunget för avlossade skott. Ett trådlöst sensornätverk är ett sätt att utforma ett sådant system.Trådlösa sensornätverk är känsliga för synkroniseringsfel. Lokaliseringsmetoder som bygger på tidsobservationer kommer med för stora synkroniseringsfel ge dåliga eller helt felaktiga resultat. Detta examensarbete fokuserar på vilken inverkan synkroniseringsfel har på möjligheterna att lokalisera en skytt i ett trådlöst sensornätverk. En lokaliseringsalgoritm utvecklas och förmågan att korrekt lokalisera en skytt vid olika synkroniseringsfel undersöks. Lokaliseringsalgoritmen prövas med numeriska experiment, simuleringar och även för data från riktiga skottljud, insamlade vid fältförsök. Resultaten visar att lokaliseringsalgoritmen fungerar tillfredställande, men att lokaliseringsförmågan till stor del påverkas av synkroniseringsfel men även av sensornätverkets geografiska utseende.

In distributed systems, dependency among different computations of an application leads to a problem of deciding the locations of computations. Spatial requirements of a computation can be expressed in terms of spatial relationships with other computations. This research presents programming abstractions and language constructs which can be used for specifying spatial coordination requirements for distributed computations. A spatial coordination middleware has been implemented for satisfying spatial coordination requirements of systems implemented using the Actor model of concurrent computation. Our approach abstracts spatial requirements of concurrent computations and provides key programming primitives for specifying these requirements. We have also implemented a number of higher level spatial coordination primitives which can be translated into the basic primitives. Spatial requirements can be specified using these primitives and then the runtime system converts them into a constraint satisfaction problem and satisfies them. Our approach reduces the programming complexity and provides a middleware which separates spatial requirements from functional code and enables the application programmer to change spatial requirements at runtime without effecting application's functionality. We have identified some of the high level primitives and provided a mechanism to develop high level primitives on top of the basic primitives. This thesis presents the rationale, design, implementation, and evaluation of spatial coordination. By comparing programs written with and without our spatial coordination primitives, we show how spatial coordination enables a programmer to specify spatial requirements declaratively and simplify the programming task. Experimental results demonstrate the performance of the approach, as the number of constraints increases.

Advances in micro-sensor and wireless technology enable small but smart sensors to be developed for wide range environment-monitor applications. Since Sensor nodes only have limited power capacity and are difficult to recharge, how to prolong network lifetime is an important issue in wireless sensor networks design. Several topology control algorithms have been proposed to maintain the connectivity of wireless sensor network and reduce the energy consumption. Multi-hop Infrastructure Network Architecture (MINA) is a kind of Multi-layer Architecture for WSN topology, which utilizes hundred of sensors to transmit data to a sink. This architecture partitions sensor nodes into layers based on their distances (calculated by hop count) to BS. In this way, the node connected to more nodes will relay more data for other nodes. This make the node exhaust its battery power quickly and thus reduces the network lifetime. This study proposes an Efficient Energy Time-Slot Allocation (EETA) scheme which distributes time slots in accordance with the energy of neighbor nodes and the number of neighbor nodes. In addition, this work also devises an adaptive time slot size to reduce data packet drop in case when the node buffer is full. The simulation results show that the EETA performs better than the MINA in terms of network lifetime.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been widely used in many areas, such as early earthquake monitoring, building structure monitoring, and military surveillance. In this thesis, we focus on the wireless sensor network deployed in the battlefield, using random key predistribution scheme. Firstly we presented an analysis of the security impacts by node capture attack. Also, based on the node cloning attack, we proposed a new attack scheme, called compromised key redistribution attack, and discussed related attack scenarios. Besides, we have found out and conjectured that, when the overlapping factor of compromised key set is larger than 0.05, it is very possible (almost 90%) that the number of distinct compromised keys is 10.5% of the original key pool. This conjecture helps the adversary estimate the approximated size of original key pool by calculating the overlapping factor, thus calculate the probability that malicious nodes successfully establish connections with legitimate nodes.

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As integrated circuits become smaller in size, antenna design has become the size limiting factor for RF front ends. The size reduction of an antenna is limited due to tradeoffs between its size and its performance. Thus, combining antenna designs with other system components can reutilize parts of the system and significantly reduce its overall size. The biggest challenge is in minimizing the interference between the antenna and other components so that the radiation performance is not compromised. This is especially true for antenna arrays where the radiation pattern is important. Antenna size reduction is also desired for wireless sensors where the devices need to be unnoticeable to the subjects being monitored. In addition to reducing the interference between components, the environmental effect on the antenna needs to be considered based on sensors' deployment. This dissertation focuses on solving the two challenges: 1) designing compact multi-frequency arrays that maintain directive radiation across their operating bands and 2) developing integrated antennas for sensors that are protected against hazardous environmental conditions. The first part of the dissertation addresses various multi-frequency directive antennas arrays that can be used for base stations, aerospace/satellite applications. A cognitive radio base station antenna that maintains a consistent radiation pattern across the operating frequencies is introduced. This is followed by multi-frequency phased array designs that emphasize light-weight and compactness for aerospace applications. The size and weight of the antenna element is reduced by using paper-based electronics and internal cavity structures. The second part of the dissertation addresses antenna designs for sensor systems such as wireless sensor networks and RFID-based sensors. Solar cell integrated antennas for wireless sensor nodes are introduced to overcome the mechanical weakness posed by conventional monopole designs. This can significantly improve the sturdiness of the sensor from environmental hazards. The dissertation also introduces RFID-based strain sensors as a low-cost solution to massive sensor deployments. With an antenna acting as both the sensing device as well as the communication medium, the cost of an RFID sensor is dramatically reduced. Sensors' strain sensitivities are measured and theoretically derived. Their environmental sensitivities are also investigated to calibrate them for real world applications.

Surveillance systems are usually employed to monitor wide areas in which their usersaim to detect and/or observe events or phenomena of their interest. The use ofwireless sensor networks in such systems is of particular interest as these networks can provide a relative low cost and robust solution to cover large areas. Emerging applications in this context are proposing the use of wireless sensor networks composed of both static and mobile sensor nodes. Motivation for this trend is toreduce deployment and operating costs, besides providing enhanced functionalities.The usage of both static and mobile sensor nodes can reduce the overall systemcosts, by making low-cost simple static sensors cooperate with more expensive andpowerful mobile ones. Mobile wireless sensor networks are also desired in somespecific scenarios in which mobility of sensor nodes is required, or there is a specificrestriction to the usage of static sensors, such as secrecy. Despite the motivation,systems that use different combinations of static and mobile sensor nodes are appearing and with them, challenges in their interoperation. This is specially the case for surveillance systems.This work focuses on the proposal of solutions for wireless sensor networks including static and mobile sensor nodes specifically regarding cooperative andcontext aware mission setup and performance. Orthogonally to the setup and performance problems and related cooperative and context aware solutions, the goalof this work is to keep the communication costs as low as possible in the executionof the proposed solutions. This concern comes from the fact that communication increases energy consumption, which is a particular issue for energy constrained sensor nodes often used in wireless sensor networks, especially if battery supplied. Inthe case of the mobile nodes, this energy constraint may not be valid, since their motion might need much more energy. For this type of node the problem incommunicating is related to the links’ instabilities and short time windows availableto receive and transmit data. Therefore, it is better to communicate as little as possible. For the interaction among static and mobile sensor nodes, all thesecommunication constraints have to be considered.For the interaction among static sensor nodes, the problems of dissemination and allocation of sensing missions are studied and a solution that explores local information is proposed and evaluated. This solution uses mobile software agentsthat have capabilities to take autonomous decisions about the mission dissemination and allocation using local context information so that the mission’s requirementscan be fulfilled. For mobile wireless sensor networks, the problem studied is how to perform the handover of missions among the nodes according to their movements.This problem assumes that each mission has to be done in a given area of interest. In addition, the nodes are assumed to move according to different movement patterns,passing through these areas. It is also assumed that they have no commitment in staying or moving to a specific area due to the mission that they are carrying. To handle this problem, a mobile agent approach is proposed in which the agents implement the sensing missions’ migration from node to node using geographical context information to decide about their migrations. For the networks combining static and mobile sensor nodes, the cooperation among them is approached by abiologically-inspired mechanism to deliver data from the static to the mobile nodes.The mechanism explores an analogy based on the behaviour of ants building and following trails to provide data delivery, inspired by the ant colony algorithm. It is used to request the displacement of mobile sensors to a given location according tothe need of more sophisticated sensing equipment/devices that they can provide, so that a mission can be accomplished.The proposed solutions are flexible, being able to be applied to different application domains, and less complex than many existing approaches. The simplicity of the solutions neither demands great computational efforts nor large amounts of memory space for data storage. Obtained experimental results provide evidence of the scalability of these proposed solutions, for example by evaluatingtheir cost in terms of communication, among other metrics of interest for eachsolution. These results are compared to those achieved by reference solutions (optimum and flooding-based), providing indications of the proposed solutions’ efficiency. These results are considered close to the optimum one and significantly better than the ones achieved by flooding-based solutions.

In conjunction with the possibility of inexpensive wireless communication, many products of tomorrow are developed with the support for wireless communication. The technology enables the possibilty of wireless communication to small plattforms at a realistic price. The cheap connectivity allows for great creativity and gives the developers imagination a wide discretion in the development of new products. This thesis aims to evaluate how the serial communication protocol Modbus RTU - RS232, performs and behaves when transported through meshed networks (Atmel lightweight mesh will be used in this thesis). The work was commissioned by M2M Solutions in J¨onk¨oping. The report will answer the following questions1. How does Modbus RTU behaves when transported through a meshed network. 2. How does Modbus RTU preform when transported through Atmel Lightweight Mesh.The authors have chosen to conduct action research to answer established questions. A test system consisting of both hardware and software was designed and created. With this system, several different tests were conducted and the results were observed and subjected to reflection. The different tests varied the distance, the network’s composition and location of the network infrastructure. Through observation of the test system and evaluation of the recorded data conclusions concering Modbus RTU’s performance and behavior during transport in Atmel lightweigh mesh has been drawn. The test system has been designed with the help of clients and previously made research. Modbus behaves nominally during transportation through Atmel lightweight mesh. Before the network is fully established, an inability to transport data has beend observed. The performance is evaluated by the time it takes to send data, the time is greatly affected by the following factors; Network composition and changes in signal strength (that creates changes in transport routes). For each additional node that traffic is transported through an increase of 5-10ms in the responstime was noted. The network’s ability to change the transport route is also expected to increase performance. The wireless communication provides a longer range than during transportation by standard conventional cable.Considering the results, the authors believe that Modbus RTU has the potential for use in transportation through wireless, meshed networks. One possible scenario is when several Modbus RTU masters are beeing used and data needs to be transported over large distances.