A decade ago, wireless technology was unimaginable in its application in industrial automation as wireless had poor reliability and security in the form of time delays and frame losses. Also, lack of interoperability and standards has been a barrier for wireless applications in control system. But with recent advancements in wireless technology, and with the underlying advantages of wireless like low infrastructural costs, scalability, mobility, and ability to operate in extreme and remote environments, many are seriously considering wireless for industrial automation solutions. For wireless implementation in industries, it is important to understand its characteristics - security, update rates, data types, protocols, and latency time. Protocol being an important characteristic of any communication, is to be chosen intelligently for maximum efficiency. Because of the complexity of creating a communication protocol, existing information technology (IT) protocols such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and ZigBee were used in industries. But as applications widened, and interoperability became an important factor to be considered, it was required to standardize the protocols used. ISA SP100 and WirelessHART are results of this standardizing process. For the last few years, there has been a huge discussion on which of these protocols are robust and work better, and none has emerged as clear winners. The aim of this thesis is to explore the capabilities and limitations of each of these protocols for various industrial applications. This thesis considers all these protocols and helps choose the best fit for industrial applications and includes study of security, reliability, and efficiency of these protocols. / text

The present development of the demography of elderly people in the western world will generate a shortage of caregiver’s for elderly people in the near future. There are major risk that the lack of qualified caregivers will result in deterioration in the quality of elderly care. One possible solution is the use of modern information and communication technology (ICT) to enable staff to work more efficiently. However, if ICT system is introduced into the elderly care it must done in a way which is acceptable from a humane perspective while at the same time increasing the efficiency of the personal that working in elderly care centers. This thesis investigates the technical feasibility of using a wireless mesh network for a social alarm system, in the elderly care. The System as such is not intended to replace the staff at an elderly care center but instead is intended to reduce staff workloads while providing more time for elderly care.

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Cooperative communication allows for single users in multi user wireless network to share their antennas and achieve virtual antenna transmitters, which leads to transmit diversity. Coded Cooperation introduced channel coding into cooperative diversity over traditional pioneer cooperative diversity methods which were based on a user repeating its partner's transmitted signals in a multi-path fading channel environment in order to improve Bit Error Rate (BER) performance.. In this dissertation the Coded Cooperation is simulated and the analytical bounds are evaluated in order to understand basic cooperation principles. This is done using Rate Compatible Punctured Convolutional Codes (RCPC). Based on the understanding of these principles a new protocol called Cross Layer Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) 2 Cooperative Diversity is developed to allow for improvements in BER and throughput. In Cross Layer Hybrid ARQ 2 Cooperation, Hybrid ARQ 2 (at the data-link layer) is combined with cooperative diversity (at the physical layer), in a cross layer design manner, to improve the BER and throughput based on feedback from the base station on the user's initial transmissions. This is done using RCPC codes which partitions a full rate code into sub code words that are transmitted as incremental packets in an effort to only transmit as much parity as is required by the base station for correct decoding of a user's information bits. This allows for cooperation to occur only when it is necessary unlike with the conventional Coded Cooperation, where bandwidth is wasted cooperating when the base station has already decoded a user's information bits. The performance of Cross Layer Hybrid ARQ 2 Cooperation is quantised by BER and throughput. BER bounds of Cross Layer Hybrid ARQ 2 Cooperation are derived based on the Pairwise Error Probability (PEP) of the uplink channels as well as the different inter-user and base station Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) states. The BER is also simulated and confirmed using the derived bound. The throughput of this new scheme is also simulated and confirmed via analytical throughput bounds. This scheme maintains BER and throughput gains over the conventional Coded Cooperation even under the worst inter-user channel conditions. / Thesis (M.Sc.Eng.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2008.

Low-power wireless technology enables numerous applications in areas from environmental monitoring and smart cities, to healthcare and recycling. But resource-constraints and the distributed nature of applications make low-power wireless networks difficult to develop and understand, resulting in increased development time, poor performance, software bugs, or even network failures. Network simulators offer full non-intrusive visibility and control, and are indispensible tools during development. But simulators do not always adequately represent the real world, limiting their applicability. In this thesis I argue that high simulation timing accuracy is important when developing high-performance low-power wireless protocols. Unlike in generic wireless network simulation, timing becomes important since low-power wireless networks use extremely timing-sensitive software techniques such as radio duty-cycling. I develop the simulation environment Cooja that can simulate low-power wireless networks with high timing accuracy. Using timing-accurate simulation, I design and develop a set of new low-power wireless protocols that improve on throughput, latency, and energy-efficiency. The problems that motivate these protocols were revealed by timing-accurate simulation. Timing-accurate software execution exposed performance bottlenecks that I address with a new communication primitive called Conditional Immediate Transmission (CIT). I show that CIT can improve on throughput in bulk transfer scenarios, and lower latency in many-to-one convergecast networks. Timing-accurate communication exposed that the hidden terminal problem is aggravated in duty-cycled networks that experience traffic bursts. I propose the Strawman mechanism that makes a radio duty-cycled network robust against traffic bursts by efficiently coping with hidden terminals. The Cooja simulation environment is available for use by others and is the default simulator in the Contiki operating system since 2006.

Localization and coverage are two important and closely related problems in wireless ad hoc networks. Localization aims to determine the physical locations of devices in a network, while coverage determines if a region of interest is sufficiently monitored by devices. Localization systems require a high degree of coverage for correct functioning, while coverage schemes typically require accurate location information. This thesis investigates the relationship between localization and coverage such that new schemes can be devised which integrate approaches found in each of these well studied problems. This work begins with a thorough review of the current literature on the subjects of localization and coverage. The localization scheduling problem is then introduced with the goal to allow as many devices as possible to enter deep sleep states to conserve energy and reduce message overhead, while maintaining sufficient network coverage for high localization accuracy. Initially this sufficient coverage level for localization is simply a minimum connectivity condition. An analytical method is then proposed to estimate the amount of localization error within a certain probability based on the theoretical lower bounds of location estimation. Error estimates can then be integrated into location dependent schemes to improve on their robustness to localization error. Location error estimation is then used by an improved scheduling scheme to determine the minimum number of reference devices required for accurate localization. Finally, an optimal coverage preserving sleep scheduling scheme is proposed which is robust to localization error, a condition which is ignored by most existing solutions. Simulation results show that with localization scheduling network lifetimes can be increased by several times and message overhead is reduced while maintaining negligible differences in localization error. Furthermore, results show that the proposed coverage preserving sleep scheduling scheme results in fewer active devices and coverage holes under the presence of localization error.

In Wireless Sensor and Robot Networks (WSRNs), static sensors report event information to one of the robots. In the k nearest neighbour query processing problem in WSRNs, the robot receives event report needs to find exact k nearest robots (KNN) to react to the event, among those connected to it. We are interested in localized solutions, which avoid message flooding to the whole network. Several existing methods restrict the search within a predetermined boundary. Some network density-based estimation algorithms were proposed but they either result in large message transmission or require the density information of the whole network in advance which is complex to implement and lacks robustness. Algorithms with tree structures lead to the excessive energy consumption and large latency caused by structural construction. Itinerary based approaches generate large latency or unsatisfactory accuracy. In this thesis, we propose a new method to estimate a search boundary, which is a circle centred at the query point. Two algorithms are presented to disseminate the message to robots of interest and aggregate their data (e.g. the distance to query point). Multiple Auction Aggregation (MAA) is an algorithm based on auction protocol, with multiple copies of query message being disseminated into the network to get the best bidding from each robot. Partial Depth First Search (PDFS) attempts to traverse all the robots of interest with a query message to gather the data by depth first search. This thesis also optimizes a traditional itinerary-based KNN query processing method called IKNN and compares this algorithm with our proposed MAA and PDFS algorithms. The experimental results followed indicate that the overall performance of MAA and PDFS outweighs IKNN in WSRNs.

WiFi is becoming common in households and digital devices needs to support it. At the same time the devices are getting smaller and the Ethernet port may seem superfluous. When testing these devices the test environment needs to be able to provide WiFi connectivity. The tests may be focused on testing WiFi but it could also be the only network connectivity and thus needs to be very reliable. With a large number of devices in a small physical area a normal WiFi setup would have a density of devices that is too high for today’s1 WiFi standards. A combination of wired physical medium and physical isolation was considered.

The mobility of wireless users has created a number of technological challenges, especially when a Mobile Node (MN) changes the point of attachment to the network. In recent years, a great deal of research effort has been spent on the issue of mobility, and resulted in development of general frameworks as well as specific protocols supporting mobility. These frameworks and protocols are intended to solve the problem of IP routing (i.e. finding an IP path) to the MN. Typically, the access network may also establish and keep service state information (service context) necessary to process and forward packets in a way that suits specific service requirements. Context Transfer has been suggested as an alternative way of restoring the service context at the new access network. / Thesis (PhDTelecommunications)--University of South Australia, 2005.

Thesis (M.S.)--George Mason University, 2008. / Vita: p. 55. Thesis director: Bijan Jabbari. Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Electrical Engineering. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Mar. 17, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 53-54). Also issued in print.