This study presents a novel methodology for structural health monitoring (SHM), using a self-powered sensing concept, within the context of machine learning (ML) and pattern recognition (PR). The proposed method is based on the interpretation of data provided by a self-powered discrete analog wireless sensor used to measure the structural response along with an energy-efficient pulse switching technology employed for data communication. A system using such an energy-aware sensing technology demands dealing with power budgets for sensing and communication of binary data, resulting in missing and incomplete data received at the SHM processor. Numerical studies were conducted on an aircraft wing stabilizer subjected to dynamic loading to evaluate and verify the performance of the proposed methodology. Damage was simulated on a finite element model by decreasing stiffness in a region of the stabilizer’s skin. Several features, i.e., patterns or images, were extracted from the strain response of the stabilizer. The obtained features were fed into a ML methodology incorporating low-rank matrix decomposition and PR for damage diagnosis of the wing. Different ML algorithms, including support vector machine, k-nearest neighbor, and artificial neural networks, were integrated within the learning methodology to assess the performance of the damage detection approach. Different levels of harvested energy were also considered to evaluate the robustness of the damage detection method with respect to such variations. Further, reliability of the proposed methodology was evaluated through an uncertainty analysis. Results demonstrate that the developed SHM methodology employing ML is efficient in detecting damage from a novel self-powered sensor network, even with noisy and incomplete binary data.
This study proposes a novel strategy for damage identification in aircraft structures. The strategy was evaluated based on the simulation of the binary data generated from self-powered wireless sensors employing a pulse switching architecture. The energy-aware pulse switching communication protocol uses single pulses instead of multi-bit packets for information delivery resulting in discrete binary data. A system employing this energy-efficient technology requires dealing with time-delayed binary data due to the management of power budgets for sensing and communication. This paper presents an intelligent machine-learning framework based on combination of the low-rank matrix decomposition and pattern recognition (PR) methods. Further, data fusion is employed as part of the machine-learning framework to take into account the effect of data time delay on its interpretation. Simulated time-delayed binary data from self-powered sensors was used to determine damage indicator variables. Performance and accuracy of the damage detection strategy was examined and tested for the case of an aircraft horizontal stabilizer. Damage states were simulated on a finite element model by reducing stiffness in a region of the stabilizer’s skin. The proposed strategy shows satisfactory performance to identify the presence and location of the damage, even with noisy and incomplete data. It is concluded that PR is a promising machine-learning algorithm for damage detection for time-delayed binary data from novel self-powered wireless sensors.
This paper develops an energy-aware ultrasonic sensor network architecture using a Pulse Switching approach for lightweight,
through-substrate operation in Structural Health Monitoring applications. Pulse Switching protocols employ
single pulses instead of multi-bit packets for information delivery with maximal lightness in event monitoring with
binary sensing requirements i.e. where event information transmitted is only a single bit (YES / NO) based on evaluation
of structural characteristics. The paper presents a simulation study of the Energy-Aware Through-Substrate Pulse
Switching protocol performance for structural monitoring when operated using energy harvested from intermittent
vibrations in the structure itself. The paper incorporates an energy harvesting model for simulating memory-less
vibration patterns using exponentially distributed random processes at different networked nodes. These nodes are
placed inside a rectangular plate structure and the corresponding harvested energy profiles are simulated. The vibration
profiles are a function of the position of the node on the plate as well as time. Such spatio-temporal variation leads to
interesting dynamics in the energy-aware protocol operation which have been explored in the current paper setting.
Through the simulations, it is shown that the proposed Energy-Aware Pulse Switching protocol mechanisms can offer a
robust through-substrate network that can be reliably used for Structural Health Monitoring using vibration-harvested
energy.
With an increasing demand for spectrum, dynamic spectrum access (DSA) has been proposed as viable means for providing the flexibility and greater access to spectrum necessary to meet this demand. Within the DSA concept, unlicensed secondary users temporarily "borrow" or access licensed spectrum, while respecting the licensed primary user's rights to that spectrum. As key enablers for DSA, cognitive radios (CRs) are based on software-defined radios which allow them to sense, learn, and adapt to the spectrum environment. These radios can operate independently and rapidly switch channels. Thus, the initial setup and maintenance of cognitive radio networks are dependent upon the ability of CR nodes to find each other, in a process known as rendezvous, and create a link on a common channel for the exchange of data and control information. In this paper, we propose a novel rendezvous protocol, known as QLP, which is based on Q-learning and the p-persistent CSMA protocol. With the QLP protocol, CR nodes learn which channels are best for rendezvous and thus adapt their behavior to visit those channels more frequently. We demonstrate through simulation that the QLP protocol provides a rendevous capability for DSA environments with different dynamics of PU activity, while attempting to achieve the following performance goals: (1) minimize the average time-to-rendezvous, (2) maximize system throughput, (3) minimize primary user interference, and (4) minimize collisions among CR nodes.
This paper proposes a novel signal analysis based node localization strategy for sensor networks used in structural health
monitoring (SHM) applications. The key idea is to analyze location-dependent multipath signal patterns in inter-node
ultrasonic signals, and use machine-learning mechanisms to detect such patterns for accurate node localization on metal
substrates on target structures. Majority of the traditional mechanisms rely on radio based Time Delay of Arrival
(TDOA), coupled with multilateration, and multiple reference nodes. The proposed mechanism attempts to solve the
localization problem in an ultrasonic sensor network (USN), avoiding the use of multiple reference beacon nodes.
Instead, it relies on signal analysis and multipath signature classification from a single reference node that periodically
transmits ultrasonic localization beacons. The approach relies on a key observation that the ultrasonic signal received at
any point on the structure from the reference node, is a superposition of the signals received on the direct path and
through all possible multi-paths. It is hypothesized that if the location of the reference node and the substrate properties
are known a-priori, it should be possible to train a receiver (source node), to identify its own location by observing the
exact signature of the received signal. To validate this hypothesis, steps were taken to develop a TI MSP-430 based
module for implementing a run-time system from a proposed architecture. Through extensive experimentation within an
USN on the 2024 Aluminum substrate, it was demonstrated that localization accuracies up to 92% were achieved in the
presence of varying spatial resolutions.
This paper presents implementation details, system characterization, and the performance of a wearable sensor network that was designed for human activity analysis. Specific machine learning mechanisms are implemented for recognizing a target set of activities with both out-of-body and on-body processing arrangements. Impacts of energy consumption by the on-body sensors are analyzed in terms of activity detection accuracy for out-of-body processing. Impacts of limited processing abilities for the on-body scenario are also characterized in terms of detection accuracy, by varying the background processing load in the sensor units. Impacts of varying number of sensors in terms of activity classification accuracy are also evaluated. Through a rigorous systems study, it is shown that an efficient human activity analytics system can be designed and operated even under energy and processing constraints of tiny on-body wearable sensors.
This paper presents the design, system structure and performance for a wireless and wearable diet monitoring system. Food and drink intake can be detected by the way of detecting a person’s swallow events. The system works based on the key observation that a person’s otherwise continuous breathing process is interrupted by a short apnea when she or he swallows as a part of solid or liquid intake process. We detect the swallows through the difference between normal breathing cycle and breathing cycle with swallows using a wearable chest-belt. Three popular machine learning algorithms have been applied on both time and frequency domain features. Discrimination power of features is then analyzed for applications where only small number of features is allowed. It is shown that high detection performance can be achieved with only few features.
This paper presents a novel wireless sensor networking technique using ultrasonic signal as the carrier wave for binary
data exchange. Using the properties of lamb wave propagation through metal substrates, the proposed network structure
can be used for runtime transport of structural fault information to ultrasound access points. Primary applications of the
proposed sensor networking technique will include conveying fault information on an aircraft wing or on a bridge to an
ultrasonic access point using ultrasonic wave through the structure itself (i.e. wing or bridge). Once a fault event has
been detected, a mechanical pulse is forwarded to the access node using shortest path multi-hop ultrasonic pulse routing.
The advantages of mechanical waves over traditional radio transmission using pulses are the following: First, unlike
radio frequency, surface acoustic waves are not detectable outside the medium, which increases the inherent security for
sensitive environments in respect to tapping. Second, event detection can be represented by the injection of a single
mechanical pulse at a specific temporal position, whereas radio messages usually take several bits. The contributions of
this paper are: 1) Development of a transceiver for transmitting/receiving ultrasound pulses with a pulse loss rate below
2·10-5 and false positive rate with an upper bound of 2·10-4. 2) A novel one-hop distance estimation based on the properties of lamb wave propagation with an accuracy of above 80%. 3) Implementation of a wireless sensor network
using mechanical wave propagation for event detection on a 2024 aluminum alloy commonly used for aircraft skin
construction.
KEYWORDS: Logic, Algorithm development, Chromium, Performance modeling, Computer engineering, Composites, Mobile devices, Control systems, Current controlled current source
Majority of the existing Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) routing protocols, attempt to minimize one of the popular DTN
routing indices, i.e. message delay, forwarding count and storage. However, for many DTN applications such as
distributing commercial content, targeting the best performance for one index and compromising the others is
insufficient. A more practical solution would be to strike a balance between multiple of these indices. Gain
Dissemination Protocol (GDP) is one of the protocols which targets this aim by introducing a gain concept which tries
reach a maximum gain of delivery by keeping the balance between the value achieved via delivering the packet to the
destination and the forwarding cost involved with that. In this paper, we focus on characterizing the GDP protocol in the
scope of mobility. We also propose an upper bound for gain in multicast routing problem, i.e. the Union of Unicast
Benchmark (UUB) and compare the performance of a few DTN routing protocols with the former. This eventually
reveals the performance scope of a potential gain-aware DTN dissemination protocol.
Wireless sensor network used in military applications may be deployed in hostile environments, where privacy and security is
of primary concern. This can lead to the formation of a trust-based sub-network among mutually-trusting nodes. However,
designing a TDMA MAC protocol is very challenging in situations where such multiple sub-networks coexist, since TDMA
protocols require node identity information for slot assignments. This paper introduces a novel distributed TDMA MAC
protocol, ZEA-TDMA (Zero Exposure Anonymous TDMA), for anonymous wireless networks. ZEA-TDMA achieves slot
allocation with strict anonymity constraints, i.e. without nodes having to exchange any identity revealing information. By using
just the relative time of arrival of packets and a novel technique of wireless collision-detection and resolution for fixed packetsizes,
ZEA-TDMA is able to achieve MAC slot-allocation which is described as follows. Initially, a newly joined node listens to
its one-hop neighborhood channel usage and creates a slot allocation table based on its own relative time, and finally, selects a
slot that is collision free within its one-hop neighborhood. The selected slot can however cause hidden collisions with a two-hop
neighbor of the node. These collisions are resolved by a common neighbor of the colliding nodes, which first detects the
collision, and then resolve them using an interrupt packet. ZEA-TDMA provides the following features: a) it is a TDMA
protocol ideally suited for highly secure or strictly anonymous environments b) it can be used in heterogeneous environments
where devices use different packet structures c) it does not require network time-synchronization, and d) it is insensitive to
channel errors. We have implemented ZEA-TDMA on the MICA2 hardware platform running TinyOS and evaluated the
protocol functionality and performance on a MICA2 test-bed.
This paper presents a novel energy-efficient distributed self-organized pulse switching architecture with a cell based
event localization for wireless sensor and actuator network applications. The key idea of this pulse switching architecture
is to abstract a single pulse, as opposed to multi-bit packets, as the information exchange mechanism. Unlike multi-bit
packet communication, the proposed pulse switching architecture is based on pulse communications where a node either
transmits a pulse or keeps silent at every time unit. Specifically, an event can be coded as a single pulse in a specific time
unit with respect to the global clock. Then the pulse is transported multi-hop while preserving the event’s localization
information in the form of temporal pulse position representing its originating cell, destination cell and next-hop cell.
The proposed distributed pulse switching is shown to be energy-efficient compared to traditional packet switching
especially for binary event sensing and actuation applications. Binary event sensing and actuation with conventional
packet transport can be prohibitively energy-inefficient due to the communication, processing, and buffering overheads
of the large number of bits within a packet’s data, header, and preambles. This paper presents a joint MAC and Routing
architecture for self-organized distributed pulse switching. Through simulation experiments, it is shown that pulse
switching can be an effective distributed means for event based networking in wireless sensor and actuator networks,
which can potentially replace the packet transport when the information to be transported is binary in nature.
The physical safety and well being of the soldiers in a battlefield is the highest priority of Incident Commanders.
Currently, the ability to track and monitor soldiers rely on visual and verbal communication which can be somewhat
limited in scenarios where the soldiers are deployed inside buildings and enclosed areas that are out of visual range of
the commanders. Also, the need for being stealth can often prevent a battling soldier to send verbal clues to a
commander about his or her physical well being. Sensor technologies can remotely provide various data about the
soldiers including physiological monitoring and personal alert safety system functionality.
This paper presents a networked sensing solution in which a body area wireless network of multi-modal sensors can
monitor the body movement and other physiological parameters for statistical identification of a soldier's body posture,
which can then be indicative of the physical conditions and safety alerts of the soldier in question. The specific concept
is to leverage on-body proximity sensing and a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based mechanism that can be applied for
stochastic identification of human body postures using a wearable sensor network.
The key idea is to collect relative proximity information between wireless sensors that are strategically placed over a
subject's body to monitor the relative movements of the body segments, and then to process that using HMM in order to
identify the subject's body postures. The key novelty of this approach is a departure from the traditional accelerometry
based approaches in which the individual body segment movements, rather than their relative proximity, is used for
activity monitoring and posture detection. Through experiments with body mounted sensors we demonstrate that while
the accelerometry based approaches can be used for differentiating activity intensive postures such as walking and
running, they are not very effective for identification and differentiation between low activity postures such as sitting
and standing. We develop a wearable sensor network that monitors relative proximity using Radio Signal Strength
indication (RSSI), and then construct a HMM system for posture identification in the presence of sensing errors.
Controlled experiments using human subjects were carried out for evaluating the accuracy of the HMM identified
postures compared to a naïve threshold based mechanism, and its variations over different human subjects. A large
spectrum of target human postures, including lie down, sit (straight and reclined), stand, walk, run, sprint and stair
climbing, are used for validating the proposed system.
This paper presents a collaborative target tracking framework, in which distributed mechanisms are developed for
tracking multiple mobile targets using a team of networked micro robotic vehicles. Applications of such a framework
would include detection of multi-agent intrusion, network-assisted attack localization, and other collaborative search
scenarios. The key idea of the developed framework is to design distributed algorithms that can be executed by tracking
entities using a mobile ad hoc network. The paper comprises the following components. First, the software and
hardware architectural detail of a
Swarm Capable Autonomous Vehicle (SCAV) system that is used as the mobile
platform in our target tracking application is presented. Second, the details of an indoor self-localization and Kalman
filter based navigation system for the SCAV are presented. Third, a formal definition of the collaborative multi-target
tracking problem and a heuristic based networked solution are developed. Finally, the performance of the proposed
tracking framework is evaluated on a laboratory test-bed of a fleet of SCAV vehicles. A detailed system characterization
in terms localization, navigation, and collaborative tracking performance is performed on the SCAV test-bed. In addition
to valuable implementation insights about the localization, navigation, filtering, and ad hoc networking processes, a
number of interesting conclusions about the overall tracking system are presented.
KEYWORDS: Raster graphics, Sensors, Sensor networks, Data modeling, Performance modeling, Energy efficiency, Computer simulations, Receivers, Data transmission, Data communications
This paper presents a self-organizing MAC protocol framework for distributed sensor networks with arbitrary mesh
topologies. The novelty of the proposed ISOMAC (In-band Self-Organized MAC) protocol lies in its in-band control
mechanism for exchanging TDMA slot information while distributed MAC scheduling. A fixed length bitmap vector is
used in each packet header for exchanging relative slot timing information across immediate and up to 2-hop neighbors.
It is shown that by avoiding explicit timing information exchange, ISOMAC can work without network-wide time
synchronization which can be prohibitive for severely cost-constrained sensor nodes in very large networks. A slotclustering
effect, caused by in-band bitmap constraints, causes ISOMAC to offer better spatial channel reuse compared
to traditional distributed TDMA protocols. ISOMAC employs a partial node wake-up and header-only transmission
strategy to adjust energy expenditure based on the instantaneous nodal data rate. Both analytical and simulation models
have been developed for characterizing the proposed protocol. Results demonstrate that with in-band bitmap vectors of
moderate length, ISOMAC converges reasonably quickly - approximately within 4 to 8 TDMA frame duration. Also, if
the bitmap header duration is restricted within 10% of packet duration, the energy penalty of the in-band information is
quite negligible. It is also shown that ISOMAC can be implemented in the presence of network time synchronization,
although its performance without synchronization is just marginally worse than that with synchronization.
This paper presents an integrated sensor network and distributed event processing architecture for managed in-building traffic evacuation during natural and human-caused disasters, including earthquakes, fire and biological/chemical terrorist attacks. The proposed wireless sensor network protocols and distributed event processing mechanisms offer a new distributed paradigm for improving reliability in building evacuation and disaster management. The networking component of the system is constructed using distributed wireless sensors for measuring environmental parameters such as temperature, humidity, and detecting unusual events such as smoke, structural failures, vibration, biological/chemical or nuclear agents. Distributed event processing algorithms will be executed by these sensor nodes to detect the propagation pattern of the disaster and to measure the concentration and activity of human traffic in different parts of the building. Based on this information, dynamic evacuation decisions are taken for maximizing the evacuation speed and minimizing unwanted incidents such as human exposure to harmful agents and stampedes near exits. A set of audio-visual indicators and actuators are used for aiding the automated evacuation process. In this paper we develop integrated protocols, algorithms and their simulation models for the proposed sensor networking and the distributed event processing framework. Also, efficient harnessing of the individually low, but collectively massive, processing abilities of the sensor nodes is a powerful concept behind our proposed distributed event processing algorithms. Results obtained through simulation in this paper are used for a detailed characterization of the proposed evacuation management system and its associated algorithmic components.
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