Abstract

Wireless vehicular ad-hoc networks comprised solely of city taxis are investigated for their ability to deliver data across an urban environment. Openly available taxi trace datasets for Rome (Italy) and San Francisco (USA) are combined with respective building footprint and road network topology data from OpenStreetMap, to generate a realistic systems level model of a taxi V2V network. Analysis of LOS and NOLOS constraints on wireless transmission range suggests a minimum threshold of 50m is applicable to ensure LOS in over 90% of cases. Variations in taxi location sampling frequency and filtering techniques for the taxi trace datasets are also investigated. Overall vehicular network performance is computed for an all-to-one transmission scenario for both cities with varying taxi fleet size. Results suggest a non-linear relationship between increases in taxi fleet sizes and the reduction of end-to-end delay; doubling taxi fleet size (using a randomised data folding technique) reduces end-to-end delay by a factor of 0.6–0.7. However, doubling the fleet does not increase the fraction of delivered source messages, which saturates at 0.67–0.71 in most simulations. Finally it appears that taxi networks for delivering messages across urban environments are limited more by their routing than by the number of possible V2V exchanges. In a simulated one-to-all continuous V2V broadcast scenario, over 90% of the taxis within the fleet receive the source message within one hour of the original taxi passing the source node.

Abstract

We present how NFC transponders can be used for energy efficient programming of closed-loop sensor networks, to update or augment the existing functionality. Use cases include road tunnel inspection, water pipeline monitoring and maintaining safety information on behalf of mine workers. We utilize opportunistic movement of the human operator, the flow of fluid in a pipeline or material in mines, to move the NFC transponder in the system effortlessly and without external network connectivity. Transponders contain mobile agents in their memory, which are injected into the system when transponder comes to the proximity of a node with NFC reader component. Then mobile agents autonomously operate their tasks, i.e. collect and process sensor data in the devices, detect events from data, control physical components and report their results. Mobile agents can adapt to the operational conditions of the system and physical environment, e.g. to save energy or operate in isolated network segments in fault situations. Real-world evaluation shows that this method is energy efficient in comparison with communications atop similar wireless sensor network.

Abstract

TNO has formulated the ambition of founding a basis for the development of flexible multi-data source and multi-application (ad hoc) sensor networks. These networks are envisioned on a scale that is beyond networks for specific and separate sensor networks. These separate networks need in the future to be combined intelligently in order to assist users with real-time assessment during operations in challenging environments. For this, enabling technologies such as network architectures and model-based data-interpretation are being developed. In this context TNO has developed wireless sensor networks that consist of very small and cheap nodes. Each node can be the size of a golf ball and can run for a long time on an A4 battery. They are designed to be deployed on a massive scale (100-10k or larger). In the tactical environment they are typically lying on the ground. Because it is very difficult to test the performance of such deployments under realistic and controllable conditions, simulation is the only way to get insight in this. This paper focuses on how to study the performance of massive deployments of these sensor networks through simulation. It describes the modeling, validation and simulation of such networks. Features such as antenna patterns, radio propagation/path loss, terrain, medium access and transport protocols, routing, and simulation parallelization are discussed. Model validation experiments for the antenna pattern, the path loss propagation and communication performance for nodes lying on the ground will be discussed. It further describes the implementation of a promising energy aware MAC and transport protocol that are proposed in the literature and are suitable for congestion mitigation and cross-layer optimization. Results on timeliness of messages, bandwidth and power consumption are discussed. ©2008 IEEE.