During the past decades, we have witnessed significant research and development efforts related to Sensor Networks (SN) with both wired and wireless technologies. Those efforts resulted in the development of benchmark application paradigms for SNs with applications in both safety-critical and non-safety-critical fields, including environmental monitoring, military apps, tactics, smart sensing, underwater sensing, pollution sensing, fire alarms, and other hundreds of applications to improve our lifestyles. Similarly, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been promoting the emergence of various networking technologies with standardization efforts being carried out by the IEEE community. SNs have been proven to be the most investigated topic for enabling IoT applications. For example, sensors installed in a house may update the owner on his/her cell phone about any medical or security threat. However, to support such applications, SNs and IoT come up against several constraints, like low capacity processing capabilities, battery operated devices, limited transmission ranges, and limited data transmission capacity. One of the key issues in IoT and SNs is the efficient data forwarding in terms of energy consumption, multi-hop data retrieval, safety/emergency message dissemination, etc. The goal of this special issue is to present and highlight the novel advances, emerging technologies, and applications targeting the efficient data collection is the internet of things and sensor networks. This special issue contains thirteen regular papers which can be organized into three groups: data forwarding in SNs, energy efficiency in wireless body area networks, secure data forwarding in SNs.
The paper titled “Increasing Aggregation Convergecast Data Collection Frequency through Pipelining” proposes an optimized convergecast scheduling mechanism for WSNs. The authors present a cross-layer optimization scheme in the paper titled “Adaptive Transmission Power Control for Reliable Data Forwarding in Sensor Based Networks” to ensure reliable data communication in the network. The authors propose a synchronized duty cycled protocol with pipelined scheduling to minimize the energy consumption and the packet loss and improve the throughput in the paper titled “A Selective-Awakening MAC Protocol for Energy-Efficient Data Forwarding in Linear Sensor Networks”. A different approach is presented in the paper titled “Content-Based Efficient Messages Transmission in WSNs” that considers the information in the sensed data to forward notifications to specific nodes in the network. In the paper titled “Analysis of Factors Affecting Energy Aware Routing in Wireless Sensor Network”, the authors present an overview of multiple energy aware routing protocols and several factors that affect their performance. The authors in the paper titled “Efficient Data Forwarding for Machine Type Communications in Internet of Things Networks” present an efficient data forwarding mechanism to alleviate the congestion problem pertaining to the machine type communications for IoTs. In the paper titled “Performance Evaluation of LoRaWAN Communication Scalability in Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks”, the authors evaluate the performance of LoRaWAN protocol for the wireless sensor networks.
Some interesting works were received that targeted the recognition and utilization of sensor nodes for various technologies. For example, the authors in the paper titled “Equalized Energy Consumption in Wireless Body Area Networks for a Prolonged Network Lifetime” aim to minimize the energy consumption in wireless body area networks to maximize the network lifetime. Another approach in the area of WBAN that classifies the human activity based on artificial neural networks is presented in the paper titled “Recognition of Daily Human Activity using an Artificial Neural Network and Smartwatch”.
The authors present the effects of node selfishness problem and propose a solution for a cooperative network in the paper titled “A Security Framework for Cluster-Based Wireless Sensor Networks against the Selfishness Problem”. Similarly, the paper titled “ABS-DDoS: An Agent-Based Simulator about Strategies of Both DDoS Attacks and Their Defenses, to Achieve Efficient Data Forwarding in Sensor Networks and IoT Devices” presents an agent-based simulation solution for exploring strategies for defending from different DDoS attacks in the WSNs. The authors in the paper titled “A Mobility Link Service (MLS) for NDN Consumer Mobility” ensure a stable connection that minimizes the cost that occurred owing to the consumer mobility. In the paper titled “Weighted Domain Transfer Extreme Learning Machine and Its Online Version for Gas Sensor Drift Compensation in E-Nose Systems” an online and offline Weighted Domain Transfer Extreme Learning Machine mechanism is proposed that uses clustering information to classify the unlabelled samples.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
Acknowledgments
The guest editors would like to thank the authors for the great level of the contributions included in this special issue and the experts who participated in the review process to provide timely and constructive comments to the authors.
Dongkyun Kim
Houbing Song
Juan C. Cano
Wei Wang