Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is very important. It can be used in various applications one of these applications is the Fire Rescue system. Localization means the determination of geographical locations of sensor nodes, consequently detecting the event location and to initiate a prompt action whenever necessary. The localization process passes with three phases which are distance and/or angle estimation phase, position phase, and algorithm phase. There are many techniques can be used in each phase, some of these techniques that may add additional devices, cost, power consumption, or delay to the network. This paper studied the most popular localization algorithms for WSN in each phase then demonstrated their problems with some suggestions for their solutions. Finally, the suitable Localization techniques for different categories of fire rescue system application will be recommended.

Smart Home Wireless Sensor Networks (SHWSN) are now capable of incorporating large amounts of computing power to monitor the activities of its occupants and anticipate their needs. They can provide elders and disabilities with complex customization options to allow them to tailor their environment to precise requirements. According to the latest government projections in South Korea that 38% of its population will be defined as elderly by 2050, due to life expectancy rising and birthrates falling to record lows [1], [2], and since the U.S.A. population aged over 65 reached 14% of population in 2010 with about 16% of the U.S. adults have a disability, actually for all of these high percentages, many governments are beginning to see smart home technology as a viable option in reducing the financial burden of supporting elder people through their retirement as well as for disabled people. This paper will give a snapshot on the state of the art in the smart home technology for elders and disabilities people. Also it proposes a new Elders/Disabilities Wireless Smart Home for assistive independent living (E/D-WSH) with its approximate cost compared with the Indian home automation market.

In this paper, a multilevel minimised delay clustering protocol (MMDCP) is proposed. MMDCP is proved to extend the lifetime of wireless sensor networks through levelling and through a better choice of cluster heads. MMDCP assigns the number of the lower level cluster heads and the leaf nodes in the network so as to minimise the end-to-end delay. When comparing MMDCP to LEACH-C, THCHP and Delay-Aware protocols; MMDCP succeeds in extending the lifetime of the network and in minimising the end-to-end delay and also in increasing throughput values. MMDCP also improves the structure of the network of delay-aware protocol. Two radio models are used in evaluation, the first order radio model and the discrete radio model. The obtained results are proved analytically and via simulation. These results make the proposed protocol a very good candidate for use in crises management applications like pre-expectation of landslides and early control of slum fires.

In this paper, a Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy Centralized Sleeping Protocol (LEACH-CS) for wireless sensor networks has been proposed. LEACH-CS extends the lifetime of wireless sensor networks by proposing a mechanism that performs an intelligent choice of functioning nodes depending on the data sensed at the time being. If the data received from certain clusters appears insignificant in a period of time, these clusters are set to sleeping mode till the next data round. An algorithm named Intelligent Sleeping Mechanism (ISM) has been proposed for choice of nodes modes of functionality. When comparing LEACH-CS to the famous LEACH-C protocol through simulations, LEACH-CS succeeds in extending the lifetime of the network by on average 35% more than LEACH-C through network scaling and minimizing the end-to-end delay of data sending by an average 50% less than LEACH-C. LEACH-CS has been proposed for cultivation applications, where conditions may remain stable for a while and are not critical from one second to the other.

This paper proposes an implementation for the directed diffusion paradigm aids in studying this paradigm’s operations and evaluates its behavior according to this implementation. The directed diffusion is evaluated with respect to the loss percentage, lifetime, end-to-end delay, and throughput. From these evaluations some suggestions and modifications are proposed to improve the directed diffusion behavior according to this implementation with respect to these metrics. The proposed modifications reflect the effect of local path repair by introducing a technique called Loop-free Local Path Repair (LLPR) which improves the directed diffusion behavior especially with respect to packet loss percentage by about 92.69%. Also LLPR improves the throughput and end-to-end delay by about 55.31% and 14.06% respectively, while the lifetime decreases by about 29.79%.

As selecting an appropriate number of nodes before Wireless Sensor Network deployment is important and it is difficult and inefficient to be done by simulation, a method for achieving that is requisite. This paper represents a performance modification to the Low Loss Energy_Aware routing Protocol (LLEAP) by developing a new algorithm consists of simple mathematical equations for determining the suitable number of nodes for Wireless Sensor Network applications’ deployments and applying it to LLEAP network such that the essential node redundancy in Wireless Sensor Network could be exploited such that a good behavior with respect to lifetime, accuracy, fault tolerance, coverage, and connectivity are attained. Also this paper proposes a coverage method suitable to theproposed nodes’ number determination method and applies it to the LLEAP protocol to test its performance. The simulation results show that the modified protocol, which is the Adaptive Low Loss Energy_Aware routing Protocol (ALLEAP), improves LLEAP in terms of lifetime and throughput by on average 22.34% and 40.7% respectively, and the delay is decreased only by about 2.1%, so the modified protocol (ALLEAP) is better for the applications that require long lifetime and are tolerable to delay.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of small nodes with sensing, computation, and wireless communications capabilities. Many routing, power management, and data dissemination protocols have been specifically designed for WSNs. Routing protocols in WSNs might differ depending on the application and network architecture. However, wireless sensor networks have several restrictions, e.g. limited energy supply, limited computing power, and limited bandwidth, and hence, one of the main design goals of WSNs is to carry out data communication while trying to prolong the lifetime of the network and prevent connectivity degradation by employing efficient energy management techniques. This chapter will give a detailed description of the characteristics of routing in wireless sensor networks; it describes the routing protocols used in these networks pointing out the advantages and disadvantages of each.

But, as the energy-efficiency is critical for periodical data gathering applications in wireless sensor networks, it has the highest priority in algorithms design; also the latency, packet loss, and throughput are important factors and should be addressed. This chapter proposes a routing protocol inspired by an energy-efficient cluster-based routing protocol called Energy-Aware Routing Protocol (EAP). The new enhanced protocol that is called Low Loss Energy-Aware Routing Protocol (LLEAP) enhances the performance of EAP in terms of some quality of service parameters by adding a second iteration for constructing the tree structure for multi-hop communication among cluster heads, by modifying the used weights of the cluster heads and parent node selection, and finally by selecting suitable aggregation method to decrease losses and delay. Simulation results showed that LLEAP significantly outperforms EAP in terms of packet loss percentage by on average 93.4%.

Because sensor nodes typically are battery-powered and in most cases it may not be possible to change or recharge batteries, the key challenge in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) design is the energy-efficiency and how to deal with the trade-off between it and the QoS parameters required by some applications. This paper studies the QoS of an energy-efficient cluster-based routing protocol called Energy-Aware routing Protocol (EAP) in terms of lifetime, delay, loss percentage, and throughput, and proposes some modifications on it to enhance its performance. The modified protocol offers better characteristics in terms of packets loss, delay, and throughput, but slightly affects lifetime negatively. Simulation results showed that the modified protocol significantly outperforms EAP in terms of packet loss percentage by on average 93.4%.

In recent years, WLAN technology has been gaining popularity around the world with its sub standard 802.11b receiving major deployments in many indoor and outdoor environments. In this article we investigate the performance of IEEE 802.11b infrastructure networks in the lossless and lossy environments by means of a simulation study. Also, this study shows how the FIFO discipline of the 802.11b MAC affects on the global performance when at least one channel is under the influence of the bursty errors. Furthermore, this paper proposes a channel aware backoff algorithm for the Access Point (AP) to prioritize its transmissions and to accelerate the transmissions in the poor radio channels to enhance the performance of the real time applications. The final results of this simulation study showed that the proposed algorithm is able to enhance the throughput and the delay in lossy environment by an average of 49% and 83% respectively.

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET) rely on wireless connections between mobile nodes, which mean limited bandwidth & high rate of disconnections between nodes. So there is a great need for a new routing protocol that have low routing message overhead to enhance the performance of MANET. The reduction of routing message overhead will decrease the wasted portions of bandwidth that used for exchange routing messages between nodes, and increase the bandwidth available for transferring data, which in turn increases the network throughput and decreases the latency. This paper proposes a new MANET routing protocol that decreases both of the routing message overhead and the average end to end delay by on average 27.9%, 13.7% respectively less than the well known AODV routing protocol. This led to increase the throughput by 23.87% more than AODV routing protocol.

Development of QoS approaches has become mandatory to comply with the requirements of the new applications. Delay, loss, and jitter are the major and essential constraints to provide QoS, for example packet loss will cause chip and skips effects for voice traffic and also cause glitches and cutouts problems for video traffic. There are two policing algorithms developed by Cisco called Committed Access Rate (CAR) and Class-Based (CB). CAR is considered as a legacy approach to police traffic whereas CB is a newer configuration which is recommended by Cisco to be used for policing. This paper proposes a new policing algorithm; called Historical Based Token Bucket (HTB) algorithm. This paper also studies the impact of deploying HTB algorithm on real time traffic from the delay and losses point of view. The results of this paper concluded that the HTB algorithm reduces the losses by on average 72% and 99% less than the CB algorithm for different types of video and voice respectively, whereas the HTB algorithm increases the delay by about 4% and 9% more than the CB algorithm for different types of video and voice respectively.

The existence of a practical QoS pricing model is essential to facilitate practicing QoS commercially, a proposed model should satisfy certain properties as the ease of implementation and to be understood by participating parties. The Model presented here, is a resource based pricing model for QoS sessions. This model declares the relations between the QoS session parameters and the associated physical resources consumption. Also, in this paper, many case studies have been presented to give the proposed model a more visibility of implementation. Finally it has been concluded that both delay and bandwidth requirements for a session have the major influence over the session cost than the buffer parameter, and the obtained prices are very reasonable (on the average and based on the paper's assumptions, 1.2 USD/hour for a voice over IP session and 3 USD/hour for a video on demand session).