Efficient Medium Access Control for Low-Latency Industrial M2M Communications

Efficient medium access control (MAC) is critical for enabling low-latency and reliable communication in industrial Machine-to-Machine (M2M) net-works, where timely data delivery is essential for seamless operation. The presence of multi-priority data in high-risk industrial environments further adds to the challenges. The development of tens of MAC schemes over the past decade often makes it a tough choice to deploy the most efficient solu-tion. Therefore, a comprehensive cross-comparison of major MAC protocols across a range of performance parameters appears necessary to gain deeper insights into their relative strengths and limitations. This paper presents a comparison of Contention window-based MAC scheme BoP-MAC with a fragmentation based, FROG-MAC; both protocols focus on reducing the delay for higher priority traffic, while taking a diverse approach. BoP-MAC assigns a differentiated back-off value to the multi-priority traffic, whereas FROG-MAC enables early transmission of higher-priority packets by fragmenting lower-priority traffic. Simulations were performed on Contiki by varying the number of nodes for two traffic priorities. It has been shown that when work-ing with multi-priority heterogenous data in the industrial environment, FROG-MAC results better both in terms of delay and throughput.

IoT-Enabled Sleep Monitoring and Cognitive Assessment for Evaluating Teacher Well-Being

Sleep quality is an important indicator of the efficient cognitive function for high school teachers. Due to the high work stress and multi-tasking expectations, the teachers often face issues with their sleep quality and cognitive function, which has a clearly negative influence on their teaching abilities. In this work, we propose a unique but simple method of deploying Internet of Things (IoT) technology to monitor the sleep quality of high school teachers at Pakistan. Smart watches embedded with pulse rate and SpO2 sensors were used to collect data and categorize the sleep quality as "poor", "fair" or "good". Moreover, we used a psychological tool, Cognitive Assessment Questionnaire (CAQ) for the self-assessment of teachers' cognitive function. The study was conducted over 208 high school teachers from across Pakistan. It has been found that most of the teachers had a poor sleep quality and cognitive function; The link between these two variables indicate that the workload and other factors must be improved for the teachers to ensure their well-being, which will in turn have a positive impact on their teaching quality.

A Nano-Architecture for Fertility Monitoring via Intra-body Communication

Fertility monitoring in humans for either natural conception or artificial insemination and fertilization has been a critical challenge both for the treating physician and the treated patients. Eggs in human female can be fertilized when they reach the Fallopian tube from the upper parts of the reproductive system. However, no technology, till date, on its own could detect the presence of eggs in the Fallopian tube and communicate their presence to the consulting physician or nurse and the patient, so that the next step can be initiated in a timely fashion. In this paper, we propose a conceptual architecture from a communications engineering point of view. The architecture combines intra-body nano-sensor network for detecting Fallopian tube activity, with body-area network for receiving information from the intra-body network and communicating the same over-the-air to the involved personnel (physician/nurse/patient). Preliminary simulations have been conducted using particle based stochastic simulator to investigate the relationship between achievable information rates, signal to noise ratio (SNR) and distance. It has been found that data rate as high as 300 Mbps is achievable at SNR 45. Hence, the proposed architecture ensures transfer of information with near-zero latency and minimum energy along with high throughput, so that necessary action can be taken within the short time-window of the Fallopian tube activity.