- Title
- A dual-radio self-configurable heterogeneous area network architecture for machine-to-machine communications
- Creator
- Chen, Dong
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- Machine-to-machine (M2M) communications can be envisaged as an efficient means to provide automated data transmissions among low-power devices in large-scale geographical areas. The data from these devices from different systems such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Smart Grid must be accumulated and relayed to the cloud in a reliable manner. To do this, many networking technologies could be used to establish a heterogeneous networking environment, in which information exchange processes need to meet the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for various M2M applications. This research focuses on heterogeneous area networks comprised of the IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11g devices. The former has intrinsic shortcomings such as low throughput, high delays, the lack of end-to-end Internet Protocol (IP) connectivity and intra-network collisions, whereas the latter could cause inter-network collisions in a heterogeneous network when sharing the license-free band. As a result, mitigating the intra-and inter-cluster collisions and maintaining the QoS requirements for M2M applications are key challenges for the M2M communication network design. In addition, several M2M applications may need to support two-way communication links such as electric vehicles exchanging location and system information with charging stations. During this process, the downlink traffic mixed with the uplink traffic may experience traffic congestion, thus degrading the network performance. To tackle these challenges, new simulation models, techniques, link designs and algorithms were proposed in this research. To enable the IP end-to-end connectivity from the devices to the cloud, a 6LoWPAN-based wireless area network architecture for M2M applications was first proposed. To investigate the proposed architecture, several OPNET simulation models were developed. These models ensure IPv6 connectivity and serve as a cornerstone for the following research. After that, to mitigate the intra-network collisions caused by beacons and data packets, a staggered link design was proposed to superimpose the incoming superframe on the outgoing superframe to schedule packet transmissions. A packet aggregation technique, combined with the staggered link design, was proposed to further decrease the number of the transmitted packets in the network. Both the techniques can significantly mitigate the intra-network collisions, thus increasing the packet delivery ratio and lowering the end-to-end delay for a homogeneous wireless area network. In addition, a heterogeneous area network was proposed to extend the transmission range over a large geographical area and to maintain the QoS requirements for different M2M applications. However, the heterogeneous area network can cause inter-network collisions, which degrades the network performance. To solve this problem, a novel algorithm named as Blank Burst was proposed to schedule 6LoWPAN packet transmissions to avoid the inter-network collisions in the heterogeneous area network. This algorithm was further enhanced to a lifetime-based algorithm that schedules the packet flows and differentiates them as per their lifetimes and priorities to maintain the QoS of different M2M applications. Finally, to solve the downlink traffic congestion problem in the proposed heterogeneous area network, a congestion mitigation algorithm was proposed. The algorithm classifies the queue length into several intervals corresponding to different traffic flows and uses ACK packets to schedule the downlink traffic from the end device side. The main advantage of the proposed algorithm is that it can quickly detect the downlink traffic congestion, schedule the traffic and alleviate the network congestion. The simulation results showed that the proposed designs and algorithms can successfully tackle the above challenges and are superior to the existing solutions in the literature, especially in terms of mitigating the intra-and inter-network collisions while maintaining necessary QoS requirements for M2M applications.
- Subject
- M2M communications; 6LoWPAN; QoS requirements; OPNET modeler; open-ZB; 2.4 GHz unlicensed band; WLAN; IEEE 802.11g; heterogeneous area networks; inter-network collision mitigation; intra-network collisions mitigation; downlink congestion mitigation; two-way communications; IEEE 802.15.4
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1397772
- Identifier
- uon:34352
- Rights
- Copyright 2019 Dong Chen
- Language
- eng
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 7 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 147 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |