Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering (PhD)

Administrative Home Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Advisor 1

Timothy C. Havens

Committee Member 1

Michael C. Roggemann

Committee Member 2

Jeremy P. Bos

Committee Member 3

Alexander E. Labovsky

Abstract

Complex network analysis is applied in numerous researches. Features and characteristics of complex networks provide information associated with a network feature called community structure. Naturally, nodes with similar attributes will be more likely to form a community. Community detection is described as the process by which complex network data are analyzed to uncover organizational properties, and structure; and ultimately to enable extraction of useful information. Analysis of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is considered as one of the most important categories of network analysis due to their enormous and emerging applications. Most WSN applications are location-aware, which entails precise localization of the deployed sensor nodes. However, localization of sensor nodes in very dense network is a challenging task. Among various challenges associated with localization of dense WSNs, anchor node selection is shown as a prominent open problem. Optimum anchor selection impacts overall sensor node localization in terms of accuracy and consumed energy. In this thesis, various approaches are developed to address both overlapping and non-overlapping community detection. The proposed approaches target small-size to very large-size networks in near linear time, which is important for very large, densely-connected networks. Performance of the proposed techniques are evaluated over real-world data-sets with up to 106 nodes and syntactic networks via Newman's Modularity and Normalized Mutual Information (NMI). Moreover, the proposed community detection approaches are extended to develop a novel criterion for range-free anchor selection in WSNs. Our approach uses novel objective functions based on nodes' community memberships to reveal a set of anchors among all available permutations of anchors-selection sets. The performance---the mean and variance of the localization error---of the proposed approach is evaluated for a variety of node deployment scenarios and compared with random anchor selection and the full-ranging approach. In order to study the effectiveness of our algorithm, the performance is evaluated over several simulations that randomly generate network configurations. By incorporating our proposed criteria, the accuracy of the position estimate is improved significantly relative to random anchor selection localization methods. Simulation results show that the proposed technique significantly improves both the accuracy and the precision of the location estimation.

Download

Share

COinS