This work analyzes several drift compensation mechanisms in wireless sensor networks (WSN). Temperature is an environmental factor that greatly affects oscillators shipped in every WSN mote. This behavior creates the need of improving drift compensation mechanisms in synchronization protocols. Using the Flooding Time Synchronization Protocol (FTSP), this work demonstrates that crystal oscillators are affected by temperature variations. Thus, the influence of temperature provokes a low performance of FTSP in changing conditions of temperature. This article proposes an innovative correction factor that minimizes the impact of temperature in the clock skew. By means of this factor, two new mechanisms are proposed in this paper: the Adjusted Temperature (AT) and the Advanced Adjusted Temperature (A2T). These mechanisms have been combined with FTSP to produce AT-FTSP and A2T-FTSP Both have been tested in a network of TelosB motes running TinyOS. Results show that both AT-FTSP and A2T-FTSP improve the average synchronization errors compared to FTSP and other temperature-compensated protocols (Environment-Aware Clock Skew Estimation and Synchronization for WSN (EACS) and Temperature Compensated Time Synchronization (TCTS)).

Autonomous vehicle systems are currently the object of intense research within scientific and industrial communities; however, many problems remain to be solved. One of the most critical aspects addressed in both autonomous driving and robotics is environment perception, since it consists of the ability to understand the surroundings of the vehicle to estimate risks and make decisions on future movements. In recent years, the Bayesian Occupancy Filter (BOF) method has been developed to evaluate occupancy by tessellation of the environment. A review of the BOF and its variants is presented in this paper. Moreover, we propose a detailed taxonomy where the BOF is decomposed into five progressive layers, from the level closest to the sensor to the highest abstract level of risk assessment. In addition, we present a study of implemented use cases to provide a practical understanding on the main uses of the BOF and its taxonomy.

Abstract:In this paper we present a method for autofocusing images of sputum smears taken from a microscope which combines the finding of the optimal focus distance with an algorithm for extending the depth of field (EDoF). Our multifocus fusion method produces an unique image where all the relevant objects of the analyzed scene are well focused, independently to their distance to the sensor. This process is computationally expensive which makes unfeasible its automation using traditional embedded processors. For this purpose a low-cost optimized implementation is proposed using limited resources embedded GPU integrated on cutting-edge NVIDIA system on chip. The extensive tests performed on different sputum smear image sets show the real-time capabilities of our implementation maintaining the quality of the output image.

To exploit distributed computation in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) time synchronisation protocols are required. These protocols support advanced distributed and synchronous tasks between several nodes. Temperature changes have a strong influence in oscillators and may vary the clock of the nodes. The flooding time synchronisation protocol (FTSP) is a common time-sync protocol in WSNs. It cannot deal with rapid temperature changes and needs several long periods to readjust the clock drift. Proposed is an innovative correction factor, implemented in a module called advanced adjustment temperature (A2T), that minimises the impact of temperature in the clock skew. This module may be placed on top of any clock-skew based time synchronisation protocol with minimum coding modifications. For this work, the module has been linked to the FTSP, producing A2T-FTSP. Experiments show that A2T-FTSP reduces noticeably the average synchronisation errors compared to FTSP for the same varying temperature conditions.

Internet of Things (IoT) presents a promising technology concept for a wide range of applications due to the possibility of interconnecting any device with connection to Internet in order to improve the daily life of human beings. This fact, along with the increasing use of devices with wireless capabilities has created a saturation problem in the use of the radio-electric spectrum, which decreases the performance of wireless communications. A way to solve this problem is to develop policies for communicating nodes in different spectrum channels by means of the use of a dual radio scheme, which permits the communication in the same network using several channels. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of a dualradio scheme in IEEE 802.15.4 networks for the Ad-Hoc Ondemand Distance Vector routing protocol (AODV). The evaluation of our proposal has been done by developing a new IEEE 802.15.4 dual-radio module for OMNeT++ Network Simulator. Our simulation results show up to 36 % increase of network throughput when dual-radio schemes are used in the nodes, reaching a maximum of 20 % increase in the energy consumption.