Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become an important component in the Internet of things (IoT) field. In WSNs, multi-channel protocols have been developed to overcome some limitations related to the throughput and delivery rate which have become necessary for many IoT applications that require sufficient bandwidth to transmit a large amount of data. However, the requirement of frequent negotiation for channel assignment in distributed multi-channel protocols incurs an extra-large communication overhead which results in a reduction of the network lifetime. To deal with this requirement in an energy-efficient way is a challenging task. Hence, the Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach for channel assignment is used to overcome this problem. Nevertheless, the use of the RL approach requires a number of iterations to obtain the best solution which in turn creates a communication overhead and time-wasting. In this paper, a Self-schedule based Cooperative multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Channel Assignment (SCRL CA) approach is proposed to improve the network lifetime and performance. The proposal addresses both regular traffic scheduling and assignment of the available orthogonal channels in an energy-efficient way. We solve the cooperation between the RL agents problem by using the self-schedule method to accelerate the RL iterations, reduce the communication overhead and balance the energy consumption in the route selection process. Therefore, two algorithms are proposed, the first one is for the Static channel assignment (SSCRL CA) while the second one is for the Dynamic channel assignment (DSCRL CA). The results of extensive simulation experiments show the effectiveness of our approach in improving the network lifetime and performance through the two algorithms.

With the evolution of the internet of things (IoT), and due to its significant need in the industry, Industrial IoT (IIoT) becomes the suitable naming for this accompaniment. IIoT changed the view of the industry intelligently and over the internet. This overlapping of IoT and industry requires special treatment when systems deal with heterogeneous devices in a distributed environment and complex tasks. In this paper, we propose a middleware solution based on multi-agents system (MAS) to handle the distributed control of complex systems autonomously in an industrial environment. The proposed middleware enables machine-to-machine (M2M) communications among the system’s components. In this work, we also addressed the distributed diagnostic for real industrial system using MAS with a new suitable communication strategy to support the heterogeneity and interoperability issued in IIoT and assure real-time monitoring and control. Finally, we present a qualitative evaluation of our solution on real case study (cement factory).

Recently and due to the impressive growth in the amounts of transmitted data over the heterogeneous sensor networks and the emerged related technologies especially the Internet of Things in which the number of the connected devices and the data consumption are remarkably growing, big data has emerged as a widely recognized trend and is increasingly being talked about. The term big data is not only about the volume of data, but also refers to the high speed of transmission and the wide variety of information that is difficult to collect, store and process using the available classical technologies. Although the generated data by the individual sensors may not appear to be significant, all the data generated through the many sensors in the connected sensor networks are able to produce large volumes of data. Big data management imposes additional constraints on the wireless sensor networks and especially on the data aggregation process, which represents one of the essential paradigms in wireless sensor networks. Data aggregation process can represent a solution to the problem of big data by allowing data from different sources to be combined to eliminate the redundant ones and consequently reduce the amounts of data and the consumption of the available resources in the network. The main objective of this work is to propose a new approach for supporting big data in the data aggregation process in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. The proposed approach aims to reduce the data aggregation cost in terms of energy consumption by balancing the data loads on the heterogeneous nodes. The proposal is improved by integrating the feedback control closed loop to reinforce the balance of the data aggregation load on the nodes, maintaining therefore an optimal delay and aggregation time.

Today’s, and near future, communication networks rely heavily on capacity expansion to keep pace with the massive number of mobile devices and ever-increasing mobile traffic. This expansion can be achieved through three major ingredients, namely, adding more wireless-spectrum, efficient usage of this spectrum, and adequate networks’ architectures. In this paper, a proposition for integrating these three ingredients in a cognitive-radio-inspired framework is presented. The focus is on the integration of the idle spectrum resources of different wireless networks into a single mobile heterogeneous wireless network. This framework is based on a conceptual network-architecture articulated with a generic and cooperative spectrum-harvesting scheme. The former brings the necessary agility for such heterogeneous environments, the latter keeps the network supplied with the vital spectrum resources. In our proposal, we make use of cross-correlated sequences (CCSs) for context-aware events’ signaling purposes. This choice is motivated by the particularly interesting characteristics of CCSs, namely, duration shortness, robustness to bad radio conditions, detection rather than decoding, and low probability of collision. As an illustration, we propose a reporting and detection scheme, in the context of OFDMA systems, and provide performance results from simulations to validate our proposal.

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), multi-channel communication represents an attractive field due to its advantage in improving throughput and delivery rate. However, the major challenge that faces WSNs is the energy constraint. To overcome the channel assignment problem in an energy-efficient way, reinforcement learning (RL) approach is used. Though, RL requires several iterations to obtain the best solution, creating a communication overhead and time-wasting. In this paper, a heuristically accelerated reinforcement learning approach for channel assignment (HARL CA) in WSNs is proposed to reduce the learning iterations. The proposal considers the selected channel by the neighboring sender nodes as external information, used to accelerate the learning process and to avoid collisions, while the bandwidth of the used channel is regarded as an important factor in the scheduling process to increase the delivery rate. The results of extensive simulation experiments show the effectiveness of our approach in improving the network lifetime and performance.

With the evolution of the internet of things (IoT), and due to its significant need in the industry, Industrial IoT (IIoT) becomes the suitable naming for this accompaniment. IIoT changed the view of the industry intelligently and over the internet. This overlapping of IoT and industry requires special treatment when systems deal with heterogeneous devices in a distributed environment and complex tasks. In this paper, we propose a middleware solution based on multi-agents system (MAS) to handle the distributed control of complex systems autonomously in an industrial environment. The proposed middleware enables machine-to-machine (M2M) communications among the system's components. In this work, we also addressed the distributed diagnostic for real industrial system using MAS with a new suitable communication strategy to support the heterogeneity and interoperability issued in IIoT and assure real-time monitoring and control. Finally, we present a qualitative evaluation of our solution on real case study (cement factory).

Securing the network communication represents one of the most important challenges in wireless sensor networks. The key distribution problem has been widely discussed in classical wireless sensor networks contrarily to heterogeneous ones. HWSNs (Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks) have optimized the network capability and opened new security opportunities by introducing high resource capacity sensor nodes in the network. In this paper, an efficient dynamic authentication and key Management scheme is proposed for heterogeneous WSN. The main idea is to provide a single lightweight protocol for both authentication and key establishment while optimizing the security level. The key distribution algorithm is based on preexisting information to generate dynamic keys and does not require any secure channel and sharing phase which improves the security, energy efficiency and reduces the memory consumption. Experimental results have confirmed the performances of our mechanism compared to some of the existing security protocols.

Today’s, and near future, communication networks rely heavily on capacity expansion to keep pace with the massive number of mobile devices and ever-increasing mobile traffic. This expansion can be achieved through three major ingredients, namely, adding more wireless-spectrum, efficient usage of this spectrum, and adequate networks’ architectures. In this paper, a proposition for integrating these three ingredients in a cognitive-radio-inspired framework is presented. The focus is on the integration of the idle spectrum resources of different wireless networks into a single mobile heterogeneous wireless network. This framework is based on a conceptual network-architecture articulated with a generic and cooperative spectrum-harvesting scheme. The former brings the necessary agility for such heterogeneous environments, the latter keeps the network supplied with the vital spectrum resources. In our proposal, we make use of cross-correlated sequences (CCSs) for context-aware events’ signaling purposes. This choice is motivated by the particularly interesting characteristics of CCSs, namely, duration shortness, robustness to bad radio conditions, detection rather than decoding, and low probability of collision. As an illustration, we propose a reporting and detection scheme, in the context of OFDMA systems, and provide performance results from simulations to validate our proposal.

Actually, wireless sensor networks represent a substantial part in IoT. However, their limitation requires a special consideration in IoT applications. For their integration with the internet, it is necessary to adapt such networks using different middleware, with taking into account various challenges such as heterogeneity and interoperability. Previously Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) was the suitable design, but with a better practice, a new design called microservice becomes the leader due to its high performance and its suitability for IoT applications. In this paper, we first survey the most important middleware that have been proposed to handle WSN through IoT. Also, we discuss the most crucial microservices that handle different integration factors by making them supported by the proposed middleware. Our proposal is inspired from artificial neural network architecture to allow dynamic service interaction; it supports unlimited services with a regard to various device capabilities separately of the cloud technologies. Moreover, the evaluation of our design clearly shows that our middleware allows a lightweight WSN integration with IoT regarding to their limitations and requirements.

Reliable data transport is an essential requirement for many multimedia applications in wireless sensor networks. Actually, an efficient transport protocol for these applications must take into account not only reliability and energy consumption factors but also memory occupancy and data delivery delay. Recently, many research works have been conducted in this area, however the proposed protocols treat some of these aspects and neglect others. Contrarily, in this paper we present a novel transport solution designed to provide 100% reliability without making light of other factors. Through different mechanisms, we attempt to reach this objective with congestion avoidance and good performances in terms of energy consumption, delivery delay, and memory storage. The proposed protocol, called congestion avoidance with reliable transmission and energy efficiency (CARTEE), attains these goals through several mechanisms, namely: fixed sliding window transmission, alternative implicit/explicit acknowledgement, a new congestion detection technique, and distributed transmission rate adjustment. To evaluate the proposed protocol, we have conducted simulations using ns-3. The obtained results confirm the efficiency and scalability of CARTEE and demonstrate that it outperforms the recent proposed transport protocols in terms of reliability, congestion avoidance, data cache occupancy, and latency.

This article describes how fault tolerance is an essential issue for many WSN (Wireless Sensor Network) applications such as wildlife monitoring, battlefield surveillance and health monitoring. It represents a great challenge for researchers regarding to the characteristics of sensor nodes which are prone to failures due essentially to their limited resources. Faults may occur, not only when sensor nodes exhaust their energy, but also when the congestion phenomenon emerges, because of a high traffic in the network and limited storage capacity of the sensor nodes. In order to support fault tolerance in WSNs, the authors propose a new scheme which incorporates a link quality estimation algorithm and a congestion detection mechanism to enable nodes that present high quality links to be chosen for routing in a non-congested area in case of faults. Evaluations through simulations under NS2 show that our proposed protocol tolerates faults with a minimum cost relatively to HEEP protocol and improves network’s performances comparatively to other fault tolerant protocols such as EF-LEACH.

Security is one of the major challenges in the design and implementation of protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). In such systems, the cooperation between nodes is one of the important principles being followed in the current research works to formulate various security protocols. Many existing works assume that mobile nodes will follow prescribed protocols without deviation. However, this is not always the case, because these networks are subjected to a variety of malicious attacks. Since there are various models of attack, trust routing scheme can guarantee security and trust of the network. The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel trusted routing model for mitigating attacks in MANETs.

Diabetic patients are prone to daily and severe health-related risks, namely hyper and hypoglycaemia. Hypoglycaemia phenomenon happens when the glucose level in patient’s blood is lower than a well-determined sill. It may induce serious impacts, such as functional brain failure or even the death. Hypoglycaemia is especially dangerous when it occurs during the night while the patient is asleep because it becomes difficult to be detected by the patient itself or other persons around him. While all existing sensor-based solutions are detection-only driven, the proposed solution goes beyond and attempts to treat autonomously, and at low cost, the nocturnal hypoglycaemia. The presented system detects the nocturnal hypoglycaemia phenomenon based on accelerated heart-rate symptom and a progressive detection algorithm. The system treats then the detected nocturnal hypoglycaemia throughout safe and automatic injection of glucagon.