Seminar Connected and Mobile Systems (Bachelor)

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be used in various scenarios like smart farming or Industry 4.0. The similarity between most WSNs is that the sensor nodes are subject to significant energy constraints.

There are multiple approaches to increase the lifetime of the sensor nodes by either harvesting energy from the environment or minimizing the energy consumption as far as possible. The most energy-consuming part of a typical duty cycle is the communication with other nodes. To minimize the energy consumption during communication different power control techniques have been proposed. What are the general concepts of those techniques? Give an overview about transmission power control techniques and describe one or two in detail.

• Transmission power control techniques for wireless sensor networks
• ATPC: Adaptive Transmission Power Control for Wireless Sensor Networks
• On Power Control for Wireless Sensor Networks: System Model, Middleware Component and Experimental Evaluation

The market penetration of vehicular communication is still very limited. Also there is only a small amount of services using that technology and therefore spectrum. However, this will change in the future and the resources one communication channel can provide will not suffice anymore. Luckily, the frequency band allocated for vehicular commication includes more than one channel. Research and summarise approaches for multi-channel communication developed for specificly for vehicular communication and approaches from other fields which you deem suitable as well.

• A multi-channel VANET providing concurrent safety and commercial services
• A survey on multi-channel communication in wireless sensor networks

The two terms Transiently Powered Computing (TPC) and Intermittent Computing (IC) describe a class of systems where energy is very limited. Systems are often powered for a short amount of time.

Define the two terms and present current research and highlight important open questions.

• QuickRecall: A HW/SW Approach for Computing across Power Cycles in Transiently Powered Computers
• Intermittent Computing: Challenges and Opportunities

UAV networks are an emerging technology in various fields, such as disaster management, smart farming, search and rescue and many others. A key challenge in these networks is reliable communication with regard to the specific requirements of a given application. In this seminar existing approaches for realizing UAV network communication shall be presented, analyzed and compared with special focus on the PHY and MAC layer.

• Survey of Important Issues in UAV Communication Networks

Communication between vehicles opens up new possibilities in automated driving. In research as well as in the automotive industry new concepts and use cases are developed. Some of these new applications, such as cooperative maneuver planning, requires higher data rates than the current communication technology ITS-G5, which is based on IEEE 802.11p, cannot provide. Therefore, the IEEE is currently standardizing the successor technology IEEE 802.11bd to enable ITS applications with high demand.

Compare the both technologies. How do they work? What are their advantages and disadvantages? How does 802.11bd improve its predecessors?

• Cooperative intelligent transport systems standards in europe
• IEEE 802.11bd and 5G NR V2X: Evolution of Radio Access Technologies for V2X Communications

Rust has gained a lot of traction lately and seems, due to its design as a systems level programming language, to be a possible contender for the currently mostly prevalent C and C++ in the MCU space.

As Rust has a lot of builtin guarantees regarding memory and thread safety, the language is a very promising candidate for devices that have to be highly reliable. Almost all of these promises are realised by compile time checks, so the performance hit is quite limited.
These obviously desirable qualities come with some drawbacks, e.g. as Rust heavily relies on the LLVM infrastructure, only hardware with a corresponding LLVM backend can be used as a target, currently most prevalent being ARM M-based MCUs like the STM32 lineup.

Sum up the current status of Rust as a programming language for microcontrollers and draw a conclusion if it would be worthwhile to use it for example for new sensor node projects.

• The Embedded Rust Book
• Embedded Rust - curated list of supported hardware

With the introduction of TSCH in IEEE 802.15.4e many of the limitations of traditional IEEE 802.15.4 networks have been addressed. Especially the robustness of networks in noisy environments should be improved by using channel hoping. Since the introduction of TSCH, some real world implementations have emerged, i.e. in Contiki-NG an OpenWSN. To gain an understanding of the current state of real world IEEE 802.15.4 TSCH deployments, relevant studies in the literature shall be researched and their evaluation methods and results presented and discussed.

• TSCH Networks for Health IoT: Design, Evaluation, and Trials in the Wild
• On the performance of 802.15.4e in the real world
• An Empirical Study of the Performance of IEEE 802.15.4e TSCH for Wireless Body Area Networks

The development of applications and services for V2X communication in Europe is harmonized by the ESTI, where members of the automotive industry and the research community meet and form consensus. But the choice for the access layer technology is still highly controversial. On one hand, the decentralized approach, called ITS-G5, is competing against the centralized one, named Cellular-V2X.

Compare the both technologies. How do they work? What are their advantages and disadvantages? Why can only one technology push through?

• Cooperative intelligent transport systems standards in europe
• A Comparison of the V2X Communication Systems: ITS-G5 and C-V2X