Design of a WSN Platform for Long-Term Environmental Monitoring for IoT Applications

The Internet of Things (IoT) provides a virtual view, via the Internet Protocol, to a huge variety of real life objects, ranging from a car, to a teacup, to a building, to trees in a forest. Its appeal is the ubiquitous generalized access to the status and location of any thing we may be interested in. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are well suited for long-term environmental data acquisition for IoT representation. This paper presents the functional design and implementation of a complete WSN platform that can be used for a range of long-term environmental monitoring IoT applications. The application requirements for low cost, high number of sensors, fast deployment, long lifetime, low maintenance, and high quality of service are considered in the specification and design of the platform and of all its components. Low-effort platform reuse is also considered starting from the specifications and at all design levels for a wide array of related monitoring applications.

(Un)Suitability of Anonymous Communication Systems to WSN

Anonymous communication systems have been extensively studied by the research community to prevent the disclosure of sensitive information from the analysis of individuals' traffic patterns. Many remarkable solutions have been developed in this area, most of which have proven to be effective in the protection of user privacy against different types of attacks. Recently, the privacy preservation problem has also been considered in the realm of wireless sensor networks due to their imminent adoption in real-world scenarios. A special challenge that arises from the analysis of the flow of sensor nodes' communications is the location privacy problem. In this paper, we concentrate on analyzing the suitability of traditional anonymous communication systems originally designed for the Internet to the original scenario of sensor networks. The results show that, in most cases, traditional solutions do not provide the adequate protection means for the particular problem of location privacy, while other solutions are very much resource consuming for the restricted capabilities of sensor nodes.

Dynamically Reconfigurable Hardware With a Novel Scheduling Strategy in EnergyHarvesting Sensor Networks
Renewable energy, such as solar radiation, can be used to extend the lifetime of a wireless sensor network (WSN) node. Such systems fundamentally change the problem of power scheduling. Instead of maximizing system lifetime with a fixed amount of energy as in battery-powered systems, the purpose of scheduling becomes the prevention of energy depletion at any given time. On the other hand, partial dynamic reconfiguration is

demonstrated as an efficient technique for intensive applications, such as video and encryption processing. Unlike software (SW)-based implementation, reconfigurable hardware (HW) requires time and energy for reconfiguration before enabling the application, which causes a trade-off between the SW and the reconfigurable HW. Therefore, when reconfigurable HW is applied in an energy-harvesting system, the problem lies in the manner by which to schedule the dynamic reconfiguration, such that the dynamically harvested energy is efficiently used. In this paper, a novel methodology is presented for the scheduling of the dynamic reconfiguration for a WSN node under energy-harvesting conditions based on statistical information on tasks and available energy. To evaluate our method, an HW-reconfigurable WSN node is prototyped, and related experimental data are collected. Our experiments demonstrate that by implementing our method, more than 50% of the energy costs can be saved with a 50% performance improvement.

On Energy Efficiency in Collaborative Target Tracking in Wireless Sensor Network: A Review

Energy-efficiency in target tracking applications has been extensively studied in the literature of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). However, there is little work which has been done to survey and summarize this effort. In this paper, we address the lack of these studies by giving an up-to-date State-of-the-Art of the most important energy-efficient target tracking schemes. We propose a novel classification of schemes that are based on the interaction between the communication subsystem and the sensing subsystem on a single sensor node. We are interested in collaborative target tracking instead of single-node tracking. In fact, WSNs are often of a dense nature, and redundant data that can be received from multiple sensors help at improving tracking accuracy and reducing energy consumption by using limited sensing and communication ranges. We show that energyefficiency in a collaborative WSN-based target tracking scheme can be achieved via two classes of methods: sensing-related methods and communication-related methods. We illustrate both of them with several examples. We show also that these two classes can be related to each other via a prediction algorithm to optimize communication and sensing operations. By self-organizing the WSN in trees and/or clusters, and selecting for activation the most appropriate nodes that handle the tracking task, the tracking algorithm can reduce the energy consumption at the communication and the sensing layers. Thereby, network parameters (sampling rate, wakeup period, cluster size, tree depth, etc.) are adapted to the dynamic of the target (position, velocity, direction, etc.). In addition to this general classification, we discuss also a special classification of some protocols that put specific assumptions on the target nature and/or use a "non-standard" hardware to do sensing. At the end, we conduct a theoretic comparison between all these schemes in terms of objectives and mechanisms. Finally, we give some recommendations tha- help at designing a WSN-based energy efficient target tracking scheme.

Providing Source Location Privacy in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of numerous small nodes that can sense, collect, and disseminate information for many different types of applications. One of these applications is subject tracking and monitoring, in which the monitored subjects often need protection. For instance, a WSNcan be deployed to monitor the movement of a panda in a national park. The panda needs protection from different adversaries, such as hunters and poachers. An adversary might trace the messages in the WSN to find the source node that sensed the panda, with the final aim of killing the panda. Hence the question is: how do we hide the location of the source node from the adversary? This question is relevant in several of the scenarios related to this application, such as patient monitoring and battlefield surveillance. In other words, the problem is to provide privacy to the source node: source location privacy. In this paper, we provide a survey of the state of the art in source location privacy. We first discuss the key concepts in source location privacy, such as anonymity, unobservability, safety period, and capture likelihood. Then, we present an overview of the solutions that provide source location privacy within a WSN, in relation to the assumptions about the adversary's capabilities. In particular, we summarize the concepts and solutions, which are categorized based on the core techniques used to provide source location privacy. We mention the limitations of the algorithms as found in the literature, classify the solutions based on their approach, and provide an overview of the assumptions on the adversarial capabilities related to each solution.

Secure and robust clustering for quantized target tracking in wireless sensor networks
We consider the problem of secure and robust clustering for quantized target tracking in wireless sensor networks (WSN) where the observed system is assumed to evolve according to a probabilistic state space model. We propose a new method for jointly activating the best group of candidate sensors that participate in data aggregation, detecting the malicious sensors and estimating the target position. Firstly, we select the appropriate group in order to balance the energy dissipation and to provide the required data of the target in the WSN. This selection is also based on the transmission power between a sensor node and a cluster head. Secondly, we detect the malicious sensor nodes based on the information relevance of their measurements. Then, we estimate the target position using quantized variational filtering (QVF) algorithm. The selection of the candidate sensors group is based on multi-criteria function, which is computed by using the predicted target position provided by the QVF algorithm, while the malicious sensor nodes detection is based on Kullback-Leibler distance between the current target position distribution and the predicted sensor observation. The performance of the proposed method is validated by simulation results in target tracking for WSN.

Energy-Aware Sensor Node Design With Its Application in Wireless Sensor Networks
Energy consumption remains as a major obstacle for full deployment and exploitation of wireless sensor network (WSN) technology nowadays. This paper presents the design and implementation of an energy-aware sensor node, which can help in constructing energyefficient WSNs. An energy-efficient strategy, which aims at minimizing energy consumption from both the sensor node level and the network level in a WSN, is proposed. To minimize the communication energy consumption of the sensor node, the distance between the transmitter and the receiver is estimated before available transmission, and then, the lowest transmission power needed to transmit the measurement data is calculated and determined. The sensor nodes are also set to sleep mode between two consecutive measurements for energy saving in normal operating conditions. Furthermore, energy saving can be achieved by estimating the energy consumption within the whole network under different network configurations and then by choosing the most energy-efficient one.

Energy-Aware Measurement Scheduling in WSNs Used in AAL Applications

In wireless sensor networks developed for ambient assisted living applications, the supply of the required power is one of the most challenging problems. Batteries have remarkable drawbacks, and in some cases, the change of batteries is impossible (space, infected area, etc.). We approached the problem from two directions: 1) The energy for the sensor node's operation should be harvested from the environment, and 2) the nodes should work as efficiently as possible. A new method is presented, which optimizes the whole network energy demand while maintaining the performance of the system, with the scheduling of the measurements and sensors. It is taken into account that both the measurement of a physical variable and the transmission of a message have different costs. Selection of sensors and measurement intervals in the system is based on a cost assigned to each sensor, which considers 1) the estimated state of the observed variable based on the past measurements and a model, 2) the actual energy state of the sensor, and 3) the possible future events that will affect the energy levels and/or the observed variable. A hidden Markov model is used to assign probabilities to the states of the unknown variables, which are to be observed. The probabilities of the state transitions are specified by a learning process. Then, a defined cost function is applied to calculate the cost of each sensor, the sensors with the minimal cost will be configured for more frequent measurements ensuring precision, and the others will be configured to less frequent measurements to save energy.

Toward a Statistical Framework for Source Anonymity in Sensor Networks

In certain applications, the locations of events reported by a sensor network need to remain anonymous. That is, unauthorized observers must be unable to detect the origin of such events by analyzing the network traffic. Known as the source anonymity problem, this

problem has emerged as an important topic in the security of wireless sensor networks, with variety of techniques based on different adversarial assumptions being proposed. In this work, we present a new framework for modeling, analyzing, and evaluating anonymity in sensor networks. The novelty of the proposed framework is twofold: first, it introduces the notion of "interval indistinguishability and provides a quantitative measure to model anonymity in wireless sensor networks; second, it maps source anonymity to the statistical problem of binary hypothesis testing with nuisance parameters. We then analyze existing solutions for designing anonymous sensor networks using the proposed model. We show how mapping source anonymity to binary hypothesis testing with nuisance parameters leads to converting the problem of exposing private source information into searching for an appropriate data transformation that removes or minimize the effect of the nuisance information. By doing so, we transform the problem from analyzing real-valued sample points to binary codes, which opens the door for coding theory to be incorporated into the study of anonymous sensor networks. Finally, we discuss how existing solutions can be modified to improve their anonymity.

Optimality Analysis of Sensor-Source Geometries in Heterogeneous Sensor Networks

Source localization is an important application of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Many types of sensors can be used for source localization, e.g., range sensors, bearing sensors and time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) based sensors, etc. It is well known that relative sensor-source geometry can significantly affect the performance of any particular localization algorithm. Existing works in the literature mainly deal with geometry analysis for homogeneous sensors. However, in real applications, different types of sensors may be utilized for source localization. Hence, in this paper, we consider the optimal sensor placement problem in heterogeneous sensor networks (HSNs), where two types of sensors are deployed for source localization. Relative optimal sensor-source configurations with the minimum number of sensors for source localization are identified under the Doptimality criterion with potential extensions to the general case. Explicit characterizations of optimal sensor-source geometries are given for hybrid range and bearing sensors, hybrid bearing and TDOA based sensors as well as co-located hybrid range and bearing sensors, respectively. The results of this work can be applied to the sensor path planning problem for optimal source localization.