This article proposes a novel Airborne Internet of Things Network (AIN) system architecture for monitoring water quality, combining existing wireless technologies with the aid of a low altitude platform (LAP) to relay data over long distances in hilly terrain. The proposed system consists of water quality sensors, smart utility network (SUN) devices, long range (LoRa) wireless devices, an LAP air balloon, and Wi-Fi devices. A measurement campaign was conducted to assess the proposed system, focusing on the communication link reliability and the LAP stability and robustness. Several constraints, such as payload limit and safe weather conditions, were also highlighted for operating the LAP with extensive and reliable coverage. On the other hand, characterizing the wireless channel has become a crucial parameter for planning and deploying Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Accordingly, this work proposes a novel hybrid machine learning (ML)-based semi-empirical path loss (PL) model for LoRa wireless communication. The results validated the proposed system’s effectiveness, unique characteristics, and capability to monitor water quality in a harsh environment. Results also revealed a significant difference in packet delivery rate (PDR) for different gateway height and spreading factor (SF) configurations. For instance, switching SF7 to SF12 increased PDR by 28.7%. Meanwhile, increasing gateway height increased PDR by 29.2% for similar SF configurations. The evaluation also revealed that none of the established PL models are suitable to represent harsh tropical environments. Finally, the proposed model achieved nearly 90% prediction accuracy for testing samples and 95% accuracy for training and overall measurement samples, vastly outperforming conventional models.

We consider a method for developing a radio-wave propagation prediction model in a mountainous forested area. A new path loss development approach uses a free-space path loss (FSPL) model and an empirical path loss model. To improve the prediction accuracy, the transmission path distance, free space area, and forest area were calculated separately. We obtained the transmission path distance for free space and forest areas from the digital surface model (DSM), which represents surface elevation information, including vegetation and object height. In this study, the results showed that by combining the empirical model with FSPL for free space area, the accuracy for all the empirical models was improved. We confirmed that the transmission distance calculation of the free space area and forest area with a combination of the empirical models showed a better performance than the model with physical distance. The predicted model results were validated using the actual radio wave propagation in the 920 MHz band measurement data. The overall path loss prediction accuracy was improved for the empirical models average of 8.05 dB on the experimental data.

This paper proposes an air interface for ultra high-speed millimeter wave (60 GHz) systems which have been under standardization process at IEEE 802.15.3c: the proposed channel plan permits ease of portable device implementation employing the major crystal oscillator used in CDMA cellar phones. The proposed transmission modes offer much greater scalability, covering from several tens Mbps to over 4 Gbps. The proposed preamble employs Golay codes, providing sufficient robustness against wireless environment being subject to the characteristics of millimeter wave with reduced hardware complexity. Common mode is a novel technique to communicate with single carrier (SC) and OFDM camps with multi rates up to around 1.5 Gbps. This technique gives the proposed systems easy expandability from SC to OFDM or other SCs and vice versa.

Multipath TCP (MPTCP), which enables the use of multiple wireless links (e.g., Wi-Fi and LTE) for data transmissions, is an excellent technology for evolving multi-homing devices in mobile wireless networks. This paper explores concepts and feasibility of realizing MPTCP with path awareness (PA), in which the path-aware information is leveraged to reinforce the MPTCP transmissions. In particular, when aware of a network situation, a device can facilitate a mechanism that dynamically shifts the MPTCP traffic to a single path and vice versa. As a result, MPTCP with PA could solve the significant problem of negative aggregation benefit when the MPTCP throughput over divergent paths is worse than the best one of single-path TCP. We illustrate the feasibility of the proposed concept through our new implementation of a so-called MPTCP-LA (i.e., MPTCP with Loss Awareness). MPTCP-LA keeps the aggregation benefits non-negative by temporarily switching an MPTCP transmission on a path to a standby condition when the on-device observed loss reaches a threshold. We extensively evaluate MPTCP-LA in comparison to the standard MPTCP in an emulated environment. The results show that MPTCP-LA has better performance regarding enhancing throughput and saving networking resources.