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The threat posed by wildfires or bushfires has become a severe global issue due to the increase in human activities in forested areas and the impact of climate change. Consequently, there is a surge in the development of automatic wildfire detection methods. Approaches based on long-distance imagery from satellites or watchtowers encounter limitations, such as restricted visibility, which results in delayed response times. To address and overcome these challenges, research interest has grown in the implementation of ground-based Internet of Things (IoT) sensing systems for early wildfire detection. However, research on energy consumption, detection latency, and detection accuracy of IoT sensing systems, as well as the performance of various anomaly detection algorithms when evaluated using these metrics, is lacking. Therefore, in this article, we present an overview of current IoT ground sensing systems for early wildfire detection. Camera and environmental sensing technologies suitable for early wildfire detection are discussed, as well as vision-based detection algorithms and detection algorithms for environmental sensing. Challenges related to the development and implementation of IoT ground sensing systems for early wildfire detection and the future research directions important for creating a robust detection system to combat the growing threat of wildfires worldwide are discussed.

In this work, we propose an adaptive system design for an Internet of Things (IoT) monitoring network with latency and reliability requirements, where IoT devices generate time-critical and event-triggered bursty traffic, and an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aggregates and relays sensed data to the base station. Existing transmission schemes based on the overall average traffic rates over-utilize network resources when traffic is smooth, and suffer from packet collisions when traffic is bursty which occurs in an event of interest. We address such problems by designing an adaptive transmission scheme employing multiuser shared access (MUSA) based grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access and use short packet communication for low latency of the IoT-to-UAV communication. Specifically, to accommodate bursty traffic, we design an analytical framework and formulate an optimization problem to maximize the performance by determining the optimal number of transmission time slots, subject to the stringent reliability and latency constraints. We compare the performance of the proposed scheme with a non-adaptive power-diversity based scheme with a fixed number of time slots. Our results show that the proposed scheme has superior reliability and stability in comparison to the state-of-the-art scheme at moderate to high average traffic rates, while satisfying the stringent latency requirements., Comment: Submitted for possible journal publication

Federated learning (FL) promotes predictive model training at the Internet of things (IoT) devices by evading data collection cost in terms of energy, time, and privacy. We model the learning gain achieved by an IoT device against its participation cost as its utility. Due to the device-heterogeneity, the local model learning cost and its quality, which can be time-varying, differs from device to device. We show that this variation results in utility unfairness because the same global model is shared among the devices. By default, the master is unaware of the local model computation and transmission costs of the devices, thus it is unable to address the utility unfairness problem. Also, a device may exploit this lack of knowledge at the master to intentionally reduce its expenditure and thereby enhance its utility. We propose to control the quality of the global model shared with the devices, in each round, based on their contribution and expenditure. This is achieved by employing differential privacy to curtail global model divulgence based on the learning contribution. In addition, we devise adaptive computation and transmission policies for each device to control its expenditure in order to mitigate utility unfairness. Our results show that the proposed scheme reduces the standard deviation of the energy cost of devices by 99% in comparison to the benchmark scheme, while the standard deviation of the training loss of devices varies around 0.103., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2109.05267

We study spectrum allocation for terahertz (THz) band communication (THzCom) systems, while considering the frequency and distance-dependent nature of THz channels. Different from existing studies, we explore multi-band-based spectrum allocation with adaptive sub-band bandwidth (ASB) by allowing the spectrum of interest to be divided into sub-bands with unequal bandwidths. Also, we investigate the impact of sub-band assignment on multi-connectivity (MC) enabled THzCom systems, where users associate and communicate with multiple access points simultaneously. We formulate resource allocation problems, with the primary focus on spectrum allocation, to determine sub-band assignment, sub-band bandwidth, and optimal transmit power. Thereafter, we propose reasonable approximations and transformations, and develop iterative algorithms based on the successive convex approximation technique to analytically solve the formulated problems. Aided by numerical results, we show that by enabling and optimizing ASB, significantly higher throughput can be achieved as compared to adopting equal sub-band bandwidth, and this throughput gain is most profound when the power budget constraint is more stringent. We also show that our sub-band assignment strategy in MC-enabled THzCom systems outperforms the state-of-the-art sub-band assignment strategies and the performance gain is most profound when the spectrum with the lowest average molecular absorption coefficient is selected during spectrum allocation., Comment: This work has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transaction on Communications

Federated learning (FL) allows predictive model training on the sensed data in a wireless Internet of things (IoT) network evading data collection cost in terms of energy, time, and privacy. In this paper, for a FL setting, we model the learning gain achieved by an IoT device against its participation cost as its utility. The local model quality and the associated cost differs from device to device due to the device-heterogeneity which could be time-varying. We identify that this results in utility unfairness because the same global model is shared among the devices. In the vanilla FL setting, the master is unaware of devices' local model computation and transmission costs, thus it is unable to address the utility unfairness problem. In addition, a device may exploit this lack of knowledge at the master to intentionally reduce its expenditure and thereby boost its utility. We propose to control the quality of the global model shared with the devices, in each round, based on their contribution and expenditure. This is achieved by employing differential privacy to curtail global model divulgence based on the learning contribution. Furthermore, we devise adaptive computation and transmission policies for each device to control its expenditure in order to mitigate utility unfairness. Our results show that the proposed scheme reduces the standard deviation of the energy cost of devices by 99% in comparison to the benchmark scheme, while the standard deviation of the training loss of devices varies around 0.103.

In this paper, we propose joint sequencing and scheduling optimization for uplink machine-type communication (MTC). We consider multiple energy-constrained MTC devices that transmit data to a base station following the time division multiple access (TDMA) protocol. Conventionally, the energy efficiency performance in TDMA is optimized through multi-user scheduling, i.e., changing the transmission block length allocated to different devices. In such a system, the sequence of devices for transmission, i.e., who transmits first and who transmits second, etc., has not been considered as it does not have any impact on the energy efficiency. In this work, we consider that data compression is performed before transmission and show that the multi-user sequencing is indeed important. We apply three popular energy-minimization system objectives, which differ in terms of the overall system performance and fairness among the devices. We jointly optimize both multi-user sequencing and scheduling along with the compression and transmission rate control. Our results show that multi-user sequence optimization significantly improves the energy efficiency performance of the system. Notably, it makes the TDMA-based multi-user transmissions more likely to be feasible in the lower latency regime, and the performance gain is larger when the delay bound is stringent., Comment: Submitted in the IEEE for possible publication

We consider a system that is composed of an energy constrained sensor node and a sink node, and devise optimal data compression and transmission policies with an objective to prolong the lifetime of the sensor node. While applying compression before transmission reduces the energy consumption of transmitting the sensed data, blindly applying too much compression may even exceed the cost of transmitting raw data, thereby losing its purpose. Hence, it is important to investigate the trade-off between data compression and transmission energy costs. In this paper, we study the joint optimal compression-transmission design in three scenarios which differ in terms of the available channel information at the sensor node, and cover a wide range of practical situations. We formulate and solve joint optimization problems aiming to maximize the lifetime of the sensor node whilst satisfying specific delay and bit error rate (BER) constraints. Our results show that a jointly optimized compression-transmission policy achieves significantly longer lifetime (90% to 2000%) as compared to optimizing transmission only without compression. Importantly, this performance advantage is most profound when the delay constraint is stringent, which demonstrates its suitability for low latency communication in future wireless networks., Comment: accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communicaitons