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This study explores a method of detecting smoke plumes effectively as the early sign of a forest fire. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely used for forest fire detection; however, they have not been customized or optimized for smoke characteristics. This paper proposes a CNN-based forest smoke detection model featuring novel backbone architecture that can increase detection accuracy and reduce computational load. Since the proposed backbone detects the plume of smoke through different views using kernels of varying sizes, it can better detect smoke plumes of different sizes. By decomposing the traditional square kernel convolution into a depth-wise convolution of the coordinate kernel, it can not only better extract the features of the smoke plume spreading along the vertical dimension but also reduce the computational load. An attention mechanism was applied to allow the model to focus on important information while suppressing less relevant information. The experimental results show that our model outperforms other popular ones by achieving detection accuracy of up to 52.9 average precision (AP) and significantly reduces the number of parameters and giga floating-point operations (GFLOPs) compared to the popular models.

The proposed protocol features reliable and fast image transmission while periodically transmitting scalar data without interruption by allowing two networks, a LoRa network and a wireless sensor network, with different transmission characteristics to cooperate. It adopts the RT-LoRa protocol for periodic scalar data transmission and uses a WSN-based pipelined transmission method that leverages single-hop message transmission of a LoRa network for image transmission. Thus, it can not only eliminate the control message overhead for time synchronization, slot scheduling, and path establishment for pipelined image transmission in WSNs but also eliminate interferences within WSNs, such as data collisions and data and message collisions, during pipelined image transmission, thereby enabling high reliability and fast transmission. According to experimental results obtained inside a university building, the proposed protocol achieved an image transfer rate of approximately 96% without packet loss, transmitted one 24 KB image in approximately 0.3 s, and achieved an image transfer rate of 100% under the tolerance of one image packet loss. These results indicate a speedup of about 25% compared to a recent pipelined protocol while ensuring near-perfect image transmission quality.

The paper exploits overt information of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems for camouflage to hide covert information. The optimum strategy of hiding information at the transmitter, accounting for the probability of the warden’s detection error and the resulting spectral efficiency of the covert information under the covertness requirement, is determined. The results show that the optimum strategy of hiding the covert information is to superimpose it onto the overt NOMA information which is hardest-decoded, increasing to 1 the probability of detection error at the warden when the number of NOMA users accretes. This indicates that the multiplicity of NOMA users can be leveraged to hide the covert information in NOMA systems. In addition, various results prove the increase in the covert spectral efficiency with increasing the number of NOMA users while guaranteeing the probability of the warden’s detection error close to 1.

The paper proposes a novel artificial noise (AN) injection strategy in multiple-input single-output multiple-antenna-eavesdropper (MISOME) systems under imperfect channel estimation at the legitimate channel to achieve zero secrecy outage probability under any circumstance. The zero secrecy outage is proved to always be achievable regardless of the eavesdropper’s number of antennas or location when the pair secrecy and codeword rates are chosen properly. The results show that when there is perfect channel state information, the zero-outage secrecy throughput increases with the transmit power, which is important for secrecy design. Additionally, an analysis of the secrecy throughput and secrecy energy efficiency gives further insight into the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

LoRa technology draws attention for its use in industrial monitoring and control systems in which each end device or task is required to send data periodically to a (cloud) server. Despite its provision of a stable link, it suffers from data loss by signal suppression and interference. A real-time LoRa protocol is proposed that uses a slot scheduling to remove collision and device or node grouping based on signal attenuation to deal with signal suppression. Based on the definition of a frame-slot structure, a logical slot indexing algorithm is devised to tag a logical index to each slot. The logical indices enable the easy allocation of slots to nodes such that if each node sends data in the allocated slots, it can satisfy time constraint. To handle external interference caused by other networks, the protocol uses a multiple listen-before-talk (mLBT) mechanism that allows channel detection multiple times within one slot. Our protocol is compared analytically and experimentally with other ones to show its superior throughput and reliability against signal suppression and interference.

Multimedia applications using wireless sensor networks often require bounds for end-to-end delay and packet loss rate in addition to energy efficiency in delivering a series of packets sliced from an image. This paper proposes a pipelined cooperative transmission (PCT) protocol for fast and reliable image delivery based on a tree topology originating from a sink, and allocation of a distinct time slot to each tree level. In this approach, if a sink needs an image from a specific multimedia node, it establishes a cooperative path such that a path node, a node on the tree path from the multimedia node to the sink, selects a cooperating node from its neighboring nodes at the same tree level. Then, the cooperating node assists its counterpart using the information obtained by means of overhearing message or data in order to forward a packet reliably to the nodes one level lower. This transmission mechanism improves the reliability of hop-by-hop transmission greatly without relying on retransmissions while making the packet move fast. Packets are transmitted in a pipelined manner using two channels such that different nodes at every other level send packets simultaneously. The proposed protocol is verified by analysis, simulation, and experiment, showing that it far outperforms the recent best approach in terms of end-to-end delay and energy consumption while achieving a high packet delivery rate.

A single-hop LoRa (Long Range) network suffers from a limitation in coverage caused by high signal attenuation when deployed in industrial areas, which often include wireless unfriendly zones (WUZs). Thus, some end nodes in WUZs may fail to transmit data to the gateway (GW). This paper proposes a reliable two-hop real-time LoRa protocol in which the nodes in WUZs transmit data to another node that relays the received data to the gateway for reliable transmission. The proposed protocol allocates transmission slots to nodes with different data transmission periods, so the nodes not only achieve high reliability but also meet time constraints or periods for delivering data to a gateway. In this case, 1-hop nodes (one hop away from GW) may consume more energy than 2-hop nodes (two hops away from GW). For energy balancing, the protocol uses a data aggregation approach to minimize the number of transmissions. We show by analysis that the proposed protocol can support up to 200 nodes using a single-channel GW when every node sends one packet with a payload of 30 bytes within 17 seconds, and 30% of the nodes are 2-hop nodes. In addition, we show by experiment that the proposed protocol can achieve high reliability in data transmission.

In designing a real-time MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks, it is desirable to shorten the data acquisition cycle time to satisfy more applications with a tighter time constraint in data collection. To achieve this, one often tries to improve throughput by employing a slot reuse technique. Meanwhile, the slotted sense multiple access protocol that uses a sharable slot was proven to be advantageous for timely and reliable data delivery. However, since the nodes at lower tree levels process more packets or bigger packets with data aggregation, they need a bigger sharable slot. Thus, it is not easy to employ a slot reuse technique due to the size variation of sharable slots. To tackle this problem, we try to reduce the size of an aggregated packet by limiting the number of packets for aggregation using two channels. If every node is allowed to send a single packet during data acquisition cycle time, an equal-sized sharable slot can be allocated to every tree level. It is shown that the proposed approach can reduce data acquisition cycle time significantly while maintaining good reliability in data transmission compared with slotted sense multiple access and also reduce energy consumption greatly compared with another multi-channel MAC protocol.

Recently, LoRa (Long Range) technology has been drawing attention in various applications due to its long communication range and high link reliability. However, in industrial environments, these advantages are often compromised by factors such as node mobility, signal attenuation due to various obstacles, and link instability due to external signal interference. In this paper, we propose a new multi-hop LoRa protocol that can provide high reliability for data transmission by overcoming those factors in dynamic LoRa networks. This study extends the previously proposed two-hop real-time LoRa (Two-Hop RT-LoRa) protocol to address technical aspects of dynamic multi-hop networks, such as automatic configuration of multi-hop LoRa networks, dynamic topology management, and updating of real-time slot schedules. It is shown by simulation that the proposed protocol achieves high reliability of over 97% for mobile nodes and generates low control overhead in topology management and schedule updates. The protocol was also evaluated in various campus deployment scenarios. According to experiments, it could achieve high packet delivery rates of over 97% and 95%, respectively, for 1-hop nodes and 2-hop nodes against node mobility.

In this paper, we study mobile element (ME)-based data-gathering schemes in wireless sensor networks. Due to the physical speed limits of mobile elements, the existing data-gathering schemes that usemobile elements can suffer from high data-gathering latency. In order to address this problem, this paper proposes a new hierarchical and cooperative data-gathering (HiCoDG) scheme that enables multiple mobile elements to cooperate with each other to collect and relay data. In HiCoDG, two types of mobile elements are used: the mobile collector (MC) and the mobile relay (MR). MCs collect data from sensors and forward them to the MR, which will deliver them to the sink. In this work, we also formulated an integer linear programming (ILP) optimization problem to find the optimal trajectories for MCs and the MR, such that the traveling distance of MEs is minimized. Two variants of HiCoDG, intermediate station (IS)-based and cooperative movement scheduling (CMS)-based, are proposed to facilitate cooperative data forwarding from MCs to theMR. An analytical model for estimating the average data-gathering latency in HiCoDG was also designed. Simulations were performed to compare the performance of the IS and CMS variants, as well as a multiple traveling salesman problem (mTSP)-based approach. The simulation results show that HiCoDG outperformsmTSP in terms of latency. The results also show that CMS can achieve the lowest latency with low energy consumption.

This paper proposes and implements a new TDMA-based MAC protocol for providing timely and reliable delivery of data and command for monitoring and control networks. In this kind of network, sensor nodes are required to sense data from the monitoring environment periodically and then send the data to a sink. The sink determines whether the environment is safe or not by analyzing the acquired data. Sometimes, a command or control message is sent from the sink to a particular node or a group of nodes to execute the services or request further interested data. The proposed MAC protocol enables bidirectional communication, controls active and sleep modes of a sensor node to conserve energy, and addresses the problem of load unbalancing between the nodes near a sink and the other nodes. It can improve reliability of communication significantly while extending network lifetime. These claims are supported by the experimental results.

In a practical deployment, mobile sensor network (MSN) suffers from a low performance due to high node mobility, time-varying wireless channel properties, and obstacles between communicating nodes. In order to tackle the problem of low network performance and provide a desired end-to-end data transfer quality, in this paper we propose a novel ad hoc routing and relaying architecture, namely RoCoMAR (Robots’ Controllable Mobility Aided Routing) that uses robotic nodes’ controllable mobility. RoCoMAR repeatedly performs link reinforcement process with the objective of maximizing the network throughput, in which the link with the lowest quality on the path is identified and replaced with high quality links by placing a robotic node as a relay at an optimal position. The robotic node resigns as a relay if the objective is achieved or no more gain can be obtained with a new relay. Once placed as a relay, the robotic node performs adaptive link maintenance by adjusting its position according to the movements of regular nodes. The simulation results show that RoCoMAR outperforms existing ad hoc routing protocols for MSN in terms of network throughput and end-to-end delay.

In wireless sensor networks for monitoring and control applications, a sink node needs to disseminate messages to all nodes to acquire monitoring data or to control the operation of sensor nodes. The basic flooding protocol suffers from low transmission reliability in broadcasting messages due to the hidden terminal problem. Besides, it can cause the broadcast storm problem by having many nodes rebroadcast the received message simultaneously. In order to resolve these problems while minimizing energy consumption in delivery of broadcast messages, we propose a reliable slotted broadcast protocol (RSBP) that allocates broadcast time slots to nodes based on their slot demands and then allows every node to transmit its broadcast message within the allocated slots. Then, every node can broadcast messages safely in a contention-free manner. Moreover, RSBP can be deployed easily since it does not have any specific requirements such as GPS, multi-channels and directional antennas that may not be always available in real scenarios. We show by experimental study that RSBP significantly outperforms other broadcast protocols in terms of safety-critical packet delivery and energy consumption.

Deploying a multi-hop underwater acoustic sensor network (UASN) in a large area brings about new challenges in reliable data transmissions and survivability of network due to the limited underwater communication range/bandwidth and the limited energy of underwater sensor nodes. In order to address those challenges and achieve the objectives of maximization of data delivery ratio and minimization of energy consumption of underwater sensor nodes, this paper proposes a new underwater routing scheme, namely AURP (AUV-aided underwater routing protocol), which uses not only heterogeneous acoustic communication channels but also controlled mobility of multiple autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). In AURP, the total data transmissions are minimized by using AUVs as relay nodes, which collect sensed data from gateway nodes and then forward to the sink. Moreover, controlled mobility of AUVs makes it possible to apply a short-range high data rate underwater channel for transmissions of a large amount of data. To the best to our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to employ multiple AUVs as relay nodes in a multi-hop UASN to improve the network performance in terms of data delivery ratio and energy consumption. Simulations, which are incorporated with a realistic underwater acoustic communication channel model, are carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, and the results indicate that a high delivery ratio and low energy consumption can be achieved.

In industrial monitoring and control applications, a server often has to send a command to a node or group of nodes in wireless sensor networks. Flooding achieves high reliability of message delivery by allowing nodes to take the redundancy of receiving the identical message multiple times. However, nodes consume much energy due to this redundancy and the long duty cycle. A reliable slotted broadcast protocol (RSBP) tackles this problem by allocating a distinct broadcast slot (BS) to every node using a tree topology. Not only does it remove collision, but it also minimizes energy consumption such that every node remains active only during its parent’s broadcast slot and its own broadcast slot to receive and rebroadcast a message, respectively. However, it suffers from low reliability in harsh environments due to the compete removal of redundancy and low responsiveness to the changes in network topology due to the global scheduling of slots. Our approach allocates one distinct broadcast sharable slot (BSS) to each tree level, thus making a BSS schedule topology-independent. Then, nodes at the same level compete to rebroadcast a message to nodes at one level higher within the BSS, thus allowing the redundancy. In addition, it uses a slot-scheduled transmission within BSS that can further improve reliability by reducing message collisions and also enables the precise management of energy. According to simulations and experiments, the proposed approach can achieve high reliability comparable to flooding and low-energy consumption comparable to RSBP.

In real-time multimedia application that is used to monitor the safety of workers and working environment in industrial fields, a burst of multimedia data, such as still images and audio or video streams, generated by multimedia nodes equipped with cameras or microphones on demand, is required to be collected at a server within a specified time bound in a reliable manner. However, due to the limited resources in sensor devices, such as process capability, bandwidth, and energy, it is challengeable to satisfy the time constraints of various real-time multimedia applications. Therefore, we introduce an optimized approach in order to shorten the acquisition period of bursty traffic so that it can satisfy more applications with tighter time constraints. For this purpose, we devise a path reservation scheme for an energy-efficient and time-constrained data transmission and a frame-slot scheduling scheme using two channels that enables the concurrent data transmission. Simulation results show that our proposed approach reduces the bursty data acquisition time and enhances network throughput significantly compared to other ones.

The demand for event-driven real-time applications for timely and reliable data acquisition is growing in industrial sectors. However, it is challenging to satisfy the requirements since constraints such as limited available energy and bandwidth are inherent in a wireless sensor network. To deal with timely delivery, one desirable approach is to improve network throughput so that more real-time applications with tighter time constraints can be satisfied in any given network. To deal with reliable delivery, the use of a carrier sense multiple access mechanism for data transmission is preferred, along with the use of a sharable slot within which multiple nodes compete to send data. Thus, we present a method of using multiple channels and a way to optimize the size of the sharable slot. The proposed channel-slot–scheduling algorithm tries to optimize the size of a sharable slot when multiple channels are used. The algorithm also deals with situations where nodes generate multiple data packets in each round of a data-gathering period. It is shown through simulation that our approach greatly outperforms others on some selected metrics.