Since the emergence of wireless communication networks, a plethora of research papers focus their attention on the quality aspects of wireless links. The analysis of the rich body of existing literature on link quality estimation using models developed from data traces indicates that the techniques used for modeling link quality estimation are becoming increasingly sophisticated. A number of recent estimators leverage Machine Learning (ML) techniques that require a sophisticated design and development process, each of which has a great potential to significantly affect the overall model performance. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey on link quality estimators developed from empirical data and then focus on the subset that use ML algorithms. We analyze ML-based Link Quality Estimation (LQE) models from two perspectives using performance data. Firstly, we focus on how they address quality requirements that are important from the perspective of the applications they serve. Secondly, we analyze how they approach the standard design steps commonly used in the ML community. Having analyzed the scientific body of the survey, we review existing open source datasets suitable for LQE research. Finally, we round up our survey with the lessons learned and design guidelines for ML-based LQE development and dataset collection.

Data science or “data-driven research” is a research approach that uses real-life data to gain insight about the behavior of systems. It enables the analysis of small, simple as well as large and more complex systems in order to assess whether they function according to the intended design and as seen in simulation. Data science approaches have been successfully applied to analyze networked interactions in several research areas such as large-scale social networks, advanced business and healthcare processes. Wireless networks can exhibit unpredictable interactions between algorithms from multiple protocol layers, interactions between multiple devices, and hardware specific influences. These interactions can lead to a difference between real-world functioning and design time functioning. Data science methods can help to detect the actual behavior and possibly help to correct it. Data science is increasingly used in wireless research. To support data-driven research in wireless networks, this paper illustrates the step-by-step methodology that has to be applied to extract knowledge from raw data traces. To this end, the paper (i) clarifies when, why and how to use data science in wireless network research; (ii) provides a generic framework for applying data science in wireless networks; (iii) gives an overview of existing research papers that utilized data science approaches in wireless networks; (iv) illustrates the overall knowledge discovery process through an extensive example in which device types are identified based on their traffic patterns; (v) provides the reader the necessary datasets and scripts to go through the tutorial steps themselves.

Using Machine Learning on Sensor Data

The number of end devices that use the last-mile wireless connectivity is dramatically increasing with the rise of smart infrastructures and requires reliable functioning to support smooth and efficient business processes. To efficiently manage such massive wireless networks, more advanced and accurate network monitoring and malfunction detection solutions are required. In this article, we perform a first-time analysis of image-based representation techniques for wireless anomaly detection using recurrence plots (RPs) and Gramian angular fields and propose a new deep learning architecture enabling accurate anomaly detection. We elaborate on the design considerations for developing a resource-aware architecture and propose a new model using time series to image transformation using RPs. We show that the proposed model: 1) outperforms the one based on Gramian angular fields by up to 14% points; 2) outperforms classical ML models using dynamic time warping by up to 24% points; 3) outperforms or performs on par with mainstream architectures, such as AlexNet and VGG11 while having <10x their weights and up to ≈ 8% of their computational complexity; and d) outperforms the state of the art in the respective application area by up to 55% points. Finally, we also explain on randomly chosen examples how the classifier takes decisions.

After decades of research, Internet of Things (IoT) is finally permeating real-life and helps improve the efficiency of infrastructures and processes as well as our health. As massive number of IoT devices are deployed, they naturally incurs great operational costs to ensure intended operations. To effectively handle such intended operations in massive IoT networks, automatic detection of malfunctioning, namely anomaly detection, becomes a critical but challenging task. In this paper, motivated by a real-world experimental IoT deployment, we introduce four types of wireless network anomalies that are identified at the link layer. We study the performance of threshold-and machine learning (ML)-based classifiers to automatically detect these anomalies. We examine the relative performance of three supervised and three unsupervised ML techniques on both non-encoded and encoded (autoencoder) feature representations. Our results demonstrate that; i) selected supervised approaches are able to detect anomalies with F1 scores of above 0.98, while unsupervised ones are also capable of detecting the said anomalies with F1 scores of, on average, 0:90, and ii) OC-SVM outperforms all the other unsupervised ML approaches reaching at F1 scores of 0:99 for SuddenD, 0:95 for SuddenR, 0:93 for InstaD and 0:95 for SlowD.