Design and Application of Wireless Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Networks
Date
2014-12-24
Authors
Zheng, Lei
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Abstract
In the past decades, wireless Machine-to-Machine (M2M) networks have been developed in various industrial and public service areas and envisioned to improve our daily life in next decades, e.g., energy, manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, and safety. With the advantage of low cost, flexible deployment, and wide coverage as compared to wired communications, wireless communications play an essential role in providing information exchange among the distributed devices in wireless M2M networks. However, an intrinsic problem with wireless communications is that the limited radio spectrum resources may result in unsatisfactory performance in the M2M networks. With the number of M2M devices projected to reach 20 to 50 billion by 2020, there is a critical need to solve the problems related to the design and applications in the wireless M2M networks.
In this dissertation work, we study the wireless M2M networks design from three closely related aspects, the wireless M2M communication reliability, efficiency, and Demand Response (DR) control in smart grid, an important M2M application taking the advantage of reliable and efficient wireless communications. First, for the communication reliability issue, multiple factors that affect communication reliability are considered, including the shadowing and fading characteristics of wireless channels, and random network topology. A general framework has been proposed to evaluate the reliability for data exchange in both infrastructure-based single-hop networks and multi-hop mesh networks. Second, for the communication efficiency issue, we study two challenging scenarios in wireless M2M networks: one is a network with a large number of end devices, and the other is a network with long, heterogeneous, and/or varying propagation delays. Media Access Control (MAC) protocols are designed and performance analysis are conducted for both scenarios by considering their unique features. Finally, we study the DR control in smart grid. Using Lyapunov optimization as a tool, we design a novel demand response control strategy considering consumer’s comfort requirements and fluctuations in both the renewable energy supply and customers’ load demands. By considering those unique features of M2M networks in data collection and distribution, the analysis, design and optimize techniques proposed in this dissertation can enable the deployment of wireless M2M networks with a large number of end devices and be essential for future proliferation of wireless M2M networks.
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Keywords
Machine-to-Machine Networks, Wireless communications, Smart grid, Communication efficiency, Communication reliability, Dense wireless networks, IEEE 802.11ah, MAC Protocol Design, Model and Analysis, Demand response control