This paper presents a novel wireless sensor networking technique using ultrasonic signal as the carrier wave for binary
data exchange. Using the properties of lamb wave propagation through metal substrates, the proposed network structure
can be used for runtime transport of structural fault information to ultrasound access points. Primary applications of the
proposed sensor networking technique will include conveying fault information on an aircraft wing or on a bridge to an
ultrasonic access point using ultrasonic wave through the structure itself (i.e. wing or bridge). Once a fault event has
been detected, a mechanical pulse is forwarded to the access node using shortest path multi-hop ultrasonic pulse routing.
The advantages of mechanical waves over traditional radio transmission using pulses are the following: First, unlike
radio frequency, surface acoustic waves are not detectable outside the medium, which increases the inherent security for
sensitive environments in respect to tapping. Second, event detection can be represented by the injection of a single
mechanical pulse at a specific temporal position, whereas radio messages usually take several bits. The contributions of
this paper are: 1) Development of a transceiver for transmitting/receiving ultrasound pulses with a pulse loss rate below
2·10-5 and false positive rate with an upper bound of 2·10-4. 2) A novel one-hop distance estimation based on the properties of lamb wave propagation with an accuracy of above 80%. 3) Implementation of a wireless sensor network
using mechanical wave propagation for event detection on a 2024 aluminum alloy commonly used for aircraft skin
construction.
This paper presents a novel energy-efficient distributed self-organized pulse switching architecture with a cell based
event localization for wireless sensor and actuator network applications. The key idea of this pulse switching architecture
is to abstract a single pulse, as opposed to multi-bit packets, as the information exchange mechanism. Unlike multi-bit
packet communication, the proposed pulse switching architecture is based on pulse communications where a node either
transmits a pulse or keeps silent at every time unit. Specifically, an event can be coded as a single pulse in a specific time
unit with respect to the global clock. Then the pulse is transported multi-hop while preserving the event’s localization
information in the form of temporal pulse position representing its originating cell, destination cell and next-hop cell.
The proposed distributed pulse switching is shown to be energy-efficient compared to traditional packet switching
especially for binary event sensing and actuation applications. Binary event sensing and actuation with conventional
packet transport can be prohibitively energy-inefficient due to the communication, processing, and buffering overheads
of the large number of bits within a packet’s data, header, and preambles. This paper presents a joint MAC and Routing
architecture for self-organized distributed pulse switching. Through simulation experiments, it is shown that pulse
switching can be an effective distributed means for event based networking in wireless sensor and actuator networks,
which can potentially replace the packet transport when the information to be transported is binary in nature.
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