Recent issues in wireless sensor networks
Hsiao‐Hwa Chen, Der‐Jiunn Deng, Rung‐Shiang Cheng, Naveen Chilamkurti, Qi‐Yue Yu · International Journal of Communication Systems · 2013
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become a highly active research area because of their potential of providing diverse services to a broad range of applications. The explosive growth of applications for the current and emerging user services creates a number of issues in WSNs. Emerging technologies and application services have posed various challenges to both academic and industry people, especially for the development of efficiency, scalability, and reliability in WSNs. These challenges motivate us to design and develop new protocols, architectures, and services for future WSNs. The goal of this special issue is to publish both state-of-the-art and prospective papers that present advances towards the performance enhancement of WSNs. The call for papers for this special issue attracted 15 submissions from different areas and countries covering a wide range of topics in the field of WSN. Each paper was carefully evaluated by at least two reviewers. This careful evaluation process has allowed us to select four high quality research papers. We strongly believe that the selected papers will make a significant contribution to researchers, practitioners, and students working in this field. The first paper, ‘Secured Flooding Time Synchronization Protocol with Moderator’ by Ding-Jie Huang et al., addresses the security vulnerability of the flooding time synchronization protocol (FTSP) and proposes several technologies to reinforce the structure of FTSP. Simulation results show that, by combining the root selection mechanism with the global time blacklist filter, the proposed mechanisms successfully defend against traitor attacks on FTSP. The second paper, ‘On The Impact of Temperature on Path Selection for Wireless Ad-hoc Sensor Networks’ by Chih-Cheng Tseng et al., takes the impacts of the temperature on the utilization of battery of mobile nodes into the problem of selecting paths in wireless ad hoc sensor networks. To address this issue, the authors propose a three-step systematic method to calculate the battery's utilization under different temperature of a mobile node's battery. Simulation results show that the battery's temperature is critical to the lifetime of ad hoc sensor networks if we let the method be applied to the power-aware source routing algorithm and the maximum path lifetime routing algorithm. The third paper, ‘Performance Analysis of S-MAC Protocol’ by Li-Wei Chang et al., investigates the design of energy-efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol for WSN. In this paper, the performance of the proposed sensor-MAC (S-MAC) is mathematically analyzed and verified by conducting extensive simulations. In addition, as compared with the conventional carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance protocol, the simulation results show that the S-MAC protocol performs better in terms of power consumption, delay, and collision rate. Sensor nodes are usually unevenly distributed in real situations. Efficient spatial index is essential for querying spatial sensor nodes in the context of smart city. In this setting, R-tree and its variants may cause large overlap and coverage among branch nodes, which impact the query efficiency greatly. Hence, the last paper, ‘Skewness-aware Clustering Tree for Unevenly Distributed Spatial Sensor Nodes in Smart City’ by Jine Tang et al., proposes a novel skewness-aware clustering tree (SWC-tree) that uses the clustering method to construct an index tree for spatial sensor nodes in the skewed distribution. Experimental results show that the SWC-tree has a better index performance than that of the traditional R-tree, especially when sensor nodes are unevenly distributed. As the guest editors of this special issue, we would like to thank all authors who have submitted papers to the special issue and in particular, those whose papers have been accepted for this special issue. Assistance from the editorial staff of the International Journal of Communication Systems is also much appreciated. Besides, the guest editors wish to acknowledge all those who have generously given their time to review the papers submitted for consideration for this special issue. Finally, our special thanks go to Professor Mohammand S. Obaidat (editor-in-chief) for his valuable support throughout the preparation of this special issue. Hsiao-Hwa Chen (S'89-M'91-SM'00-F'10) is currently a distinguished Professor in the Department of Engineering Science, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. He obtained his BS and MS degrees from Zhejiang University, China, and a PhD degree from the University of Oulu, Finland, in 1982, 1985, and 1991, respectively. He has authored or co-authored over 400 technical papers in major international journals and conferences, six books, and more than 10 book chapters in the areas of communications. He served as the general chair, TPC chair, and symposium chair for many international conferences. He served or is serving as an editor or/and guest editor for numerous technical journals. He is the founding editor-in-chief of Wiley's Security and Communication Networks Journal (www.interscience.wiley.com/journal/security). He is the recipient of the best paper award in IEEE WCNC 2008 and a recipient of IEEE Radio Communications Committee Outstanding Service Award in 2008. Currently, he is also serving as the editor-in-chief for IEEE Wireless Communications. He is a Fellow of IEEE, IET, and BCS. Der-Jiunn Deng received a PhD degree in electrical engineering from the National Taiwan University in 2005. He joined the National Changhua University of Education as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering in August 2005 and then became a full professor in February 2012. His research interests include multimedia communication, QoS, and wireless networks. In 2010, 2011, and 2012, he received the Research Excellency Award of National Changhua University of Education. In 2012, he also received the Outstanding Faculty Research Award of National Changhua University of Education. Dr. Deng served or is serving as an editor and guest editor for several technical journals. He also served or is serving on several symposium chairs and technical program committees for IEEE and other international conferences. Dr. Deng is a member of the IEEE. Rung-Shiang Cheng received an MS degree in computer science and information engineering from National Cheng Kung University, and a PhD degree in electrical engineering from National Cheng Kung University in 2001 and 2008, respectively. He joined Kun Shan University as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer and Communication in August 2008 and then became an associate professor in December 2011. His research interests include network simulation and performance analysis, wireless communications, and computer networks. Dr. Cheng is a member of the IEEE. Naveen Chilamkurti is currently working as a senior lecturer at the Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering, La Trobe University, Australia. He has a PhD from La Trobe University. He is also the inaugural editor-in-chief for the International Journal of Wireless Networks and Broadband Technologies starting from March 2011. He has published about 126 journal and conference papers. His current research areas include wireless multimedia, wireless sensor networks, Nano Communications, V2I and V2V communications, LTE, multimedia over cloud, video compression techniques, and Mobile Pervasive communications. He currently serves on editorial boards on several international journals. He is a senior member of IEEE. Qiyue Yu received her BS, MS, and PhD degrees in communications engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), China, in 2004, 2006, and 2010, respectively. Currently, she is a lecturer at the Department of Communications Engineering, HIT. She was selected through a rigid academia evaluation process organized by the China Scholarship Council (CSC) in 2006 and awarded a scholarship under the State Scholarship Fund. During April 2007–March 2008, she studied in Adachi Lab, Tohoku University, Japan and was a research assistant of Tohoku University Global COE program. In 2010, she was invited to the City University of Hong Kong to research on multi-user MIMO technology. Her research interests include modulation and coding, multi-access techniques, and MIMO for broadband wireless communications.