Engineering adaptive communication protocols for upcoming WSN applications

为即将推出的 WSN 应用设计自适应通信协议

• 批准号: 436528049
• 负责人: Dr.-Ing. Philip Parsch
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Department of Computer Science
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Fellowships
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2018-12-31 至 2021-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/436528049?language=en
• 关键词: Engineering; adaptive; communication; protocols; upcoming

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), a growing number of devices start exchanging information. While this enables new interesting applications, it also places high demands on the underlying communications infrastructure, in particular, wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which facilitate interaction between IoT devices and the environment. These must enable reliable, energy-efficient and timely communication, which becomes increasingly complex as dynamics and heterogeneity of such networks increase. In this context, adaptive communication protocols seem to be an interesting solution, since these can automatically reconfigure themselves to meet specified performance goals under changing conditions. Unfortunately, existing solutions still have major drawbacks limiting their performance and applicability. For example, they only support single performance goals (e.g., reliability or energy, but not both) and do not account for heterogeneity among others. In this research work, to overcome this problem, a novel adaptive communication protocol is proposed. In contrast to existing solutions from the literature, the proposed approach is based on a specialized MAC (medium access control) protocol that intrinsically allows for adaptivity, which is extended by an ODA (observe, decide, act) loop for control and automation. In this context, different adaption techniques will be investigated such as control-theoretic approaches and machine learning (e.g., Q-Learning). The purpose is to assess their effectiveness as well as their impact on memory/computational performance of the embedded nodes. Effectiveness in this context is measured with respect to how good different adaption techniques are in finding a compromise between opposing performance goals. For example, reliability and energy consumption are two contradictory requirements, i.e., increasing one worsens the other. As a result, it is paramount to find suitable tradeoffs. In addition, considering that WSNs are distributed, embedded systems with heterogeneous (i.e., node-specific) limitations, this turns to be a very challenging task.Finally, the proposed adaptive communication protocol will be evaluated in simulation and on real hardware, e.g., on T-Mote Sky nodes. This provides valuable insights that help correct shortcomings by today's solutions and thus increase their applicability and performance – current adaptive protocols already achieve >80% higher performance than classic, non-adaptive ones, but this can be further increased. In summary, this research project thus contributes to the design and development of adaptive WSNs able to cope with the increasing complexity, dynamics and heterogeneity of modern and upcoming applications.

随着物联网(IoT)的到来，越来越多的设备开始交换信息。这在实现新的有趣应用的同时，也对底层通信基础设施提出了更高的要求，特别是促进物联网设备与环境之间交互的无线传感器网络(WSN)。这些必须实现可靠、节能和及时的通信，随着此类网络的动态化和异构性增加，通信变得越来越复杂。在这种情况下，自适应通信协议似乎是一个有趣的解决方案，因为这些协议可以自动重新配置自己，以在不断变化的条件下满足指定的性能目标。遗憾的是，现有的解决方案仍然存在严重缺陷，限制了它们的性能和适用性。例如，它们只支持单一的性能目标(例如，可靠性或能量，但不能同时支持这两个目标)，并且不考虑其他目标之间的异质性。本文针对这一问题，提出了一种新的自适应通信协议。与文献中现有的解决方案不同，所提出的方法基于专门的MAC(媒体访问控制)协议，该协议本质上允许自适应，该自适应通过用于控制和自动化的oda(观察、决定、动作)循环来扩展。在此背景下，将研究不同的适应技术，如控制论方法和机器学习(例如，Q-学习)。目的是评估它们的有效性以及它们对嵌入式节点的内存/计算性能的影响。在这种情况下的有效性是根据不同的适应技术在找到相反的绩效目标之间的折衷方面有多好来衡量的。例如，可靠性和能耗是两个矛盾的要求，即一个增加一个恶化另一个。因此，找到适当的权衡是至关重要的。此外，考虑到无线传感器网络是具有异构性(即节点特定)限制的分布式嵌入式系统，这是一项非常具有挑战性的任务。最后，将在仿真和真实硬件上(例如T-Mote Sky节点)对所提出的自适应通信协议进行评估。这提供了有价值的见解，有助于纠正当前解决方案的不足，从而提高它们的适用性和性能--当前的自适应协议的性能已经比经典的非自适应协议高80%，但还可以进一步提高。总之，本研究项目有助于设计和开发能够应对现代和即将到来的应用的日益复杂、动态和异构性的自适应无线传感器网络。