Human activity recognition (HAR) is a fundamental sensing and analysis technique that supports diverse applications, such as smart homes and healthcare. In device-free and non-intrusive HAR, WiFi channel state information (CSI) captures wireless signal variations caused by human interference without the need for video cameras or on-body sensors. However, current CSI-based HAR performance is hampered by incomplete CSI recordings due to fixed window sizes in CSI collection and human/machine errors that incur missing values in CSI. To address these issues, we propose DiffAR, a temporal-augmented HAR approach that improves HAR performance by augmenting CSI. DiffAR devises a novel Adaptive Conditional Diffusion Model (ACDM) to synthesize augmented CSI, which tackles the issue of fixed windows by forecasting and handles missing values with imputation. Compared to existing diffusion models, ACDM improves the synthesis quality by guiding progressive synthesis with step-specific conditions. DiffAR further exploits an ensemble classifier for activity recognition using both raw and augmented CSI. Extensive experiments on four public datasets show that DiffAR achieves the best synthesis quality of augmented CSI and outperforms state-of-the-art CSI-based HAR methods in recognition performance. The source code of DiffAR is available at https://github.com/huangshk/DiffAR.

LoRaWAN deployments follow anad hocdeployment model that has organically led to overlapping communication networks, sharing the wireless spectrum, and completely unaware of each other. LoRaWAN uses ALOHA-style communication where it is almost impossible to schedule transmission between networks belonging to different owners properly. The inability to schedule overlapping networks will cause internetwork interference, which will increase node-to-gateway message losses and gateway-to-node acknowledgment failures. This problem is likely to get worse as the number of LoRaWAN networks increases. In response to this problem, we propose IRONWAN, a wireless overlay network that shares communication resources without modifications to underlying protocols. It utilizes the broadcast nature of radio communication and enables gateway-to-gateway communication to facilitate the search for failed messages and transmit failed acknowledgments already received and cached in overlapping network’s gateways. IRONWAN uses two novel algorithms: 1) a real-time message interarrival predictor, to highlight when a server has not received an expected uplink message and 2) the interference predictor, to ensure that extra gateway-to-gateway communication does not negatively impact the communication bandwidth. We evaluate IRONWAN on a 1000-node simulator with up to ten gateways and a 10-node testbed with 2-gateways. The results show that IRONWAN can achieve up to 12% higher packet delivery ratio (PDR) and total messages received per node while increasing the minimum PDR by up to 28%. These improvements save up to 50% node’s energy. Finally, we demonstrate that IRONWAN has comparable performance to an optimal solution (wired and centralized) but with 2–32 times lower communication costs. IRONWAN also has up to 14% better PDR when compared to FLIP, a wired-distributed gateway-to-gateway protocol in certain scenarios.

As sensor-based networks become more prevalent, scaling to unmanageable numbers or deployed in difficult to reach areas, real-time failure localisation is becoming essential for continued operation. Network tomography, a system and application-independent approach, has been successful in localising complex failures (i.e., observable by end-to-end global analysis) in traditional networks. Applying network tomography to wireless sensor networks (WSNs), however, is challenging. First, WSN topology changes due to environmental interactions (e.g., interference). Additionally, the selection of devices for running network monitoring processes (monitors) is an NP-hard problem. Monitors observe end-to-end in-network properties to identify failures, with their placement impacting the number of identifiable failures. Since monitoring consumes more in-node resources, it is essential to minimise their number while maintaining network tomography’s effectiveness. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art solutions solve this optimisation problem using time-consuming greedy heuristics. In this article, we propose two solutions for efficiently applying Network Tomography in WSNs: a graph compression scheme, enabling faster monitor placement by reducing the number of edges in the network, and an adaptive monitor placement algorithm for recovering the monitor placement given topology changes. The experiments show that our solution is at least 1,000× faster than the state-of-the-art approaches and efficiently copes with topology variations in large-scale WSNs.

LoRaWAN is one of the leading Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) architectures. It was originally designed for systems consisting of static sensor or Internet of Things (IoT) devices and static gateways. It was recently updated to introduce new features such as nano-second timestamps which open up applications to enable LoRaWAN to be adopted for mobile device tracking and localisation. In such mobile scenarios, devices could temporarily lose communication with the gateways because of interference from obstacles or deep fading, causing throughput reduction and delays in data transmission. To overcome this problem, we propose a new data forwarding scheme. Instead of holding the data until the next contact with gateways, devices can forward their data to nearby devices that have a higher probability of being in contact with gateways. We propose a new network metric called Real-Time Contact-Aware Expected Transmission Count (RCA-ETX) to model this contact probability in real-time. Without making any assumption on mobility models, this metric exploits data transmission delays to model complex device mobility. We also extend RCA-ETX with a throughput-optimal stochastic backpressure routing scheme and propose Real-Time Opportunistic Backpressure Collection (ROBC), a protocol to counter the stochastic behaviours resulting from the dynamics associated with mobility. To apply our approaches seamlessly to LoRaWAN-enabled devices, we further propose two new LaRaWAN classes, namely Modified Class-C and Queue-based Class-A. Both of them are compatible with LoRaWAN Class-A devices. Our data-driven experiments, based on the London bus network, show that our approaches can reduce data transmission delays up to 25% and provide a 53% throughput improvement in data transfer performance.

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications range from domestic Internet of Things systems like temperature monitoring of homes to the monitoring and control of large-scale critical infrastructures. The greatest risk with the use of WSNs in critical infrastructure is their vulnerability to malicious network level attacks. Their radio communication network can be disrupted, causing them to lose or delay data which will compromise system functionality. This paper presents Antilizer, a lightweight, fully-distributed solution to enable WSNs to detect and recover from common network level attack scenarios. In Antilizer each sensor node builds a self-referenced trust model of its neighbourhood using network overhearing. The node uses the trust model to autonomously adapt its communication decisions. In the case of a network attack, a node can make neighbour collaboration routing decisions to avoid affected regions of the network. Mobile agents further bound the damage caused by attacks. These agents enable a simple notification scheme which propagates collaborative decisions from the nodes to the base station. A filtering mechanism at the base station further validates the authenticity of the information shared by mobile agents. We evaluate Antilizer in simulation against several routing attacks. Our results show that Antilizer reduces data loss down to 1% (4% on average), with operational overheads of less than 1% and provides fast network-wide convergence.

Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks (EH-WSNs) have been attracting increasing interest in recent years. Most current EH-WSN approaches focus on sensing and networking algorithm design, and therefore only consider the energy consumed by sensors and wireless transceivers for sensing and data transmissions respectively. In this paper, we incorporate CPU-intensive edge operations that constitute in-network data processing (e.g. data aggregation/fusion/compression) with sensing and networking; to jointly optimize their performance, while ensuring sustainable network operation (i.e. no sensor node runs out of energy). Based on realistic energy and network models, we formulate a stochastic optimization problem, and propose a lightweight on-line algorithm, namely Recycling Wasted Energy (RWE), to solve it. Through rigorous theoretical analysis, we prove that RWE achieves asymptotical optimality, bounded data queue size, and sustainable network operation. We implement RWE on a popular IoT operating system, Contiki OS, and evaluate its performance using both real-world experiments based on the FIT IoT-LAB testbed, and extensive trace-driven simulations using Cooja. The evaluation results verify our theoretical analysis, and demonstrate that RWE can recycle more than 90% wasted energy caused by battery overflow, and achieve around 300% network utility gain in practical EH-WSNs.