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It is of significant importance to provide network-wide Quality of Service (QoS) for a wide range of event detection applications in wireless sensor networks. This paper investigates the important problem of QoS provision to abnormal event detection. For event detection applications, there are two key performance metrics, i.e., detection probability and detection latency. This paper considers both metrics, aiming to provide statistical QoS for abnormal event detection. It is, however, a challenging issue because of stringent resource constraints of sensor nodes and unpredictable randomness of physical events. We propose a probabilistic approach to statistical QoS provision for event detection in sensor networks. We propose a distributed algorithm that iteratively determines the active probability of each sensor node. The probability is kept small for energy efficiency but sufficiently large to provide the required detection QoS. Our approach is flexible and can detection QoS customized by applications. Comprehensive simulation experiments have been conducted, which demonstrate that our approach is able to provide the required detection QoS for event detection and achieves considerably longer the system lifetime compared with other competing schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Duty cycling is a fundamental approach to conserving energy in sensor networks; however, it brings challenges to event detection in the sense that an event may be undetected or undergo a certain delay before it is detected, in particular when sensors are low duty-cycled. We investigate the fundamental relationship between event detection and energy efficiency. We quantify event detection performance by deriving the closed forms of detection delay and detectability with a relatively simple model. We also characterize the intrinsic tradeoff that exists between detection performance and system lifetime, which helps flexible design decisions for sensor networks. In addition, we propose a fully localized algorithm called CAS to cooperatively determine sensor wakeups. Without relying on location information, the distributed algorithm is easy to implement and scalable to network density and scale. Theoretical bounds of event detection are also studied to facilitate comparative study. Comprehensive experiments are conducted and results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly improves event detection performance in terms of detection latency and detection probability. It reduces as high as 31% of detection delay and increases as much as 25% of detectability compared with the random independent scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally unique ID allocation is usually not applicable in a sensor network due to the massive production of cheap sensor nodes, the limited bandwidth, and the size of the payload. However, locally unique IDs are still necessary for nodes to implement unicast communications to save power consumption. Several solutions have been proposed for locally unique ID assignment in sensor networks. However, they bring much communication overhead, which is not desirable due to the limited power supply in a sensor node. Combined with a directed diffusion communication paradigm, a reactive ID assignment scheme with security mechanisms is proposed in this paper. It defers ID conflict resolution until data communications are initiated and thus saves communication overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most existing connectivity-based localization algorithms require high node density which is unavailable in many large-scale sparse mobile networks. By analyzing large datasets of real user traces from Dartmouth and MIT, we observe that user mobility exhibits high spatiotemporal regularity and, more importantly, that user mobility is strongly correlated with the user' s social encounters (including so called Familiar Strangers). Motivated by these important observations, we propose a distributed localization scheme called SOMA that is particularly suitable for sparse mobile networks. To exploit the correlation between mobility and social encounters, we formulate the localization process as an optimization problem with the objective of maximizing the probability of visiting a sequence of locations when the user witnesses the given set of social encounters at different time. Employing the Hidden Markov Model, we design an efficient algorithm based on dynamic programming for solving the optimization problem. SOMA is fully distributed, in which each user only makes use of the connectivity information with other users. Since different users may have varying levels of mobility regularity, one critical challenge with SOMA is that a user with weak mobility regularity may result in poor localization accuracy. We introduce the concept of mobility irregularity to distinguish users. Then, one optimization is made to SOMA that allows a user with weak mobility regularity to leverage the locations from the users encounters. Experimental results based on large-scale real traces demonstrate that SOMA achieves much smaller localization error than many state-of-the-art localization schemes, but requires it minimal running time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spectrum sensing is essential for the success of the cognitive radio networks. In traditional spectrum sensing schemes, secondary users (SUs) are responsible for the spectrum sensing which could be very time and resource consuming. It leads to a great deal of inefficiency in spectrum usage and introduces many practical challenges. To tackle these challenges and leverage the spectrum opportunity more efficiently, we propose a new system that provides a spectrum sensing service for SUs using dedicated wireless spectrum sensor networks (WSSNs). In this paper we focus on the sensing channel assignment problem in WSSNs and formulate the problem as a sensing effectiveness maximization problem (SEMP). We prove that SEMP is NP-complete under the ideal case, and show that more challenges arise in real environments. To address the issue, we systematically study the design tradeoff and critical factors when maximizing the sensing effectiveness. Based on these study results we propose a sensing channel assignment algorithm (SCAS). We conduct test-bed empirical investigations as well as comprehensive simulations. Performance evaluation results show that for both the scenarios of given deployments and manual deployments, SCAS is able to sense more channels to improve the sensing effectiveness. The improvement is up to 300 % and the average improvement is 150 % compared with other simple alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by K. Oikonomou and I. Stavrakakis on the problem with medium access control (MAC) and another by O. Simeone and U. Spagnolini on an entirely novel time synchronization approach based on pulse-coupled oscillators.