Wireless LANs

This work presents the implementation of the the IEEE 1609.2 WAVE Security
Services Standard. This implementation provides the ability to generate a message
signature, along with the capability to verify that signature for wave short messages
transmitted over an unsecured medium. Only the original sender of the message can sign
it, allowing for the authentication of a message to be checked. As hashing is used during
the generation and verification of signatures, message integrity can be verified because a
failed signature verification is a result of a compromised message. Also provided is the
ability to encrypt and decrypt messages using AES-CCM to ensure that sensitive
information remains safe and secure from unwanted recipients. Additionally this
implementation provides a way for the 1609.2 specific data types to be encoded and
decoded for ease of message transmittance. This implementation was built to support the
Smart Drive initiative’s VANET testbed, supported by the National Science Foundation
and is intended to run on the Vehicular Multi-technology Communication Device
(VMCD) that is being developed. The VMCD runs on the embedded Linux operating
system and this implementation will reside inside of the Linux kernel.

Nowadays the widespread availability of wireless networks has created an interest
in using them for other purposes, such as localization of mobile devices in indoor
environments because of the lack of GPS signal reception indoors. Indoor localization
has received great interest recently for the many context-aware applications it could make possible. We designed and implemented an indoor localization platform for Wi-Fi nodes (such as smartphones and laptops) that identifies the building name, floor number, and room number where the user is located based on a Wi-Fi access point signal fingerprint pattern matching. We designed and evaluated a new machine learning algorithm, KRedpin, and developed a new web-services architecture for indoor localization based on J2EE technology with the Apache Tomcat web server for managing Wi-Fi signal data from the FAU WLAN. The prototype localization client application runs on Android cellphones and operates in the East Engineering building at FAU. More sophisticated classifiers have also been used to improve the localization accuracy using the Weka data mining tool.

In recent years, advances in wireless technologies have enabled novel applications for wireless devices. Sensor network is one such application that consists of large number of battery-operated nodes. To simulate such networks with large number of nodes, a wireless sensor network simulator that is highly scalable is vital. JiST/SWANS is one such simulator that is highly scalable. However, the JiST/SWANS MAC layer implementation of 802.11b is not suitable for sensor networks, which are energy-constrained. Hence, our main focus is to implement the S-MAC protocol in JiST/SWANS. The S-MAC protocol allows the nodes to go to sleep and thereby it helps conserve energy. This subsequently helps the nodes to extend their effective lifetime. We validate our S-MAC protocol implementation in the JiST/SWANS through simulations.

We consider a heterogeneous wireless sensor network, which has several supernodes for data relay and a large number of energy-constrained sensor nodes that are deployed randomly to cover certain targets. Since targets are covered by many sensors, we create several cover sets that are active successively to save power. We introduce the Heterogeneous Connected Set Covers (HCSC) which aims to find at least one cover set that covers all the targets and is connected to a data-relaying supernode. A sensor node can participate in different set covers but the sum of energy spent in all sets is constrained by the initial energy resources of that sensor node. This is the first solution proposed for the target coverage in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. We show that the HCSC is an NP-Complete problem and propose three distributed algorithms for it and showing simulation results to verify the proposed approaches.

Wireless sensor networks are one of the first real world examples of pervasive computing, the notion that small, smart, and cheap sensing and computing devices will eventually permeate the environment. Sensor networks consist of very large number of energy constrained nodes and to properly evaluate these networks a scalable ad-hoc wireless network simulator with an energy model is needed. Since most of the existing simulators have been designed for ad-hoc network with low scalability they can not be used to accurately simulate sensor networks. The JiST/SWANS simulator is one of the newer simulators that has been developed by Cornell University for simulating ad-hoc networks and is highly scalable which makes it appropriate for use in evaluating sensor networks. Since this simulator lack energy model our objective is to design and implement an energy model for JiST/SWANS so that it can adequately and accurately calculate the amount of energy consumption in the simulation of sensor networks.

In a beacon-enabled network, nodes send beacons when they are ready to transmit or receive messages from the other sensors in their communication range. If the beacons are not synchronized in time, a sensor might receive more than one beacon and hence will not be able to demodulate the beacon, thereby, being isolated from the network. As a result coverage nulls are introduced in the system. To address the above mentioned issues, Motorola Labs have proposed an algorithm for synchronizing the beacons in a wireless personal area network. In this thesis, extensive study of the proposed beacon time synchronization algorithm is done using OPNET as a simulation tool. Simulation is carried out by designing a detailed model of the algorithm using IEEE 802.15.4 as a reference. In depth analysis of the simulation results has been carried out. The results obtained are compared with those of existing time synchronization methods.

The broadcast operation has a most fundamental role in mobile ad hoc networks because of the broadcasting nature of radio transmission, i.e., when a sender transmits a packet, all nodes within the sender's transmission range will be affected by this transmission. The benefit of this property is that one packet can be received by all neighbors while the negative effect is that it interferes with other transmissions. Flooding ensures that the entire network receives the packet but generates many redundant transmissions which may trigger a serious broadcast storm problem that may collapse the entire network. The broadcast storm problem can be avoided by providing efficient broadcast algorithms that aim to reduce the number of nodes that retransmit the broadcast packet while still guaranteeing that all nodes receive the packet. This dissertation focuses on providing several efficient localized broadcast algorithms to reduce the broadcast redundancy in mobile ad hoc networks. In my dissertation, the efficiency of a broadcast algorithm is measured by the number of forward nodes for relaying a broadcast packet. A classification of broadcast algorithms for mobile ad hoc networks has been provided at the beginning. Two neighbor-designating broadcast algorithms, called total dominant pruning and partial dominant pruning, have been proposed to reduce the number of the forward nodes. Several extensions based on the neighbor-designating approach have also been investigated. The cluster-based broadcast algorithm shows good performance in dense networks, and it also provides a constant upper bound approximation ratio to the optimum solution for the number of forward nodes in the worst case. A generic broadcast framework with K hop neighbor information has a trade-off between the number of the forward nodes and the size of the K-hop zone. A reliable broadcast algorithm, called double-covered broadcast, is proposed to improve the delivery ratio of a broadcast package when the transmission error rate of the network is high. The effectiveness of all these algorithms has been confirmed by simulations.

In last few years there has been significant growth in the area of wireless communication. Quality of Service (QoS) has become an important consideration for supporting variety of applications that utilize the network resources. These applications include voice over IP, multimedia services, like, video streaming, video conferencing etc. IEEE 802.16/WiMAX is a new network which is designed with quality of service in mind. This thesis focuses on analysis of quality of service as implemented by the WiMAX networks. First, it presents the details of the quality of service architecture in WiMAX network. In the analysis, a WiMAX module developed based on popular network simulator ns-2, is used. Various real life scenarios like voice call, video streaming are setup in the simulation environment. Parameters that indicate quality of service, such as, throughput, packet loss, average jitter and average delay, are analyzed for different types of service flows as defined in WiMAX. Results indicate that better quality of service is achieved by using service flows designed for specific applications.

The ZigBee standard is a wireless networking standard created and maintained by the ZigBee Alliance. The standard aims to provide an inexpensive, reliable, and efficient solution for wirelessly networked sensing and control products. The ZigBee Alliance is composed of over 300 member companies making use of the standard in different ways, ranging from energy management and efficiency, to RF remote controls, to health care products. Home automation is one market that greatly benefits from the use of ZigBee. With a focus on conserving home electricity use, a sample design is created to test a home automation network using Freescale's ZigBee platform. Multiple electrical designs are tested utilizing sensors ranging from proximity sensors to current sense transformers. Software is fashioned as well, creating a PC application that interacts with two ZigBee transceiver boards performing different home automation functions such as air conditioner and automatic lighting control.