Browsing by Author "Zong, Yan"

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    PkCOs: synchronisation of packet-coupled oscillators in blast wave monitoring networks
    (IEEE, 2021-11-08) Zong, Yan; Dai, Xuewu; Gao, Shang; Canyelles-Pericas, Pep; Liu, Shuxin
    Blast waves with a large amount of energy, from the use of explosive weapons, is a major cause of traumatic brain injury in armed and security forces. The monitoring of blast waves is required for defence and civil applications. The utilisation of wireless sensing technology to monitor blast waves has shown great advantages such as easy deployment and flexibility. However, due to drifting embedded clock frequency, the establishment of a common timescale among distributed blast monitoring sensors has been a challenge, which may lead to a network failing to estimate the precise acoustic source location. This work adopts a Packet-Coupled Oscillators (PkCOs) protocol to synchronise drifting clocks in a wireless blast wave monitoring network. In order to address packet collisions caused by the concurrent transmission, an anti-phase synchronisation solution is utilised to maintain clock synchronisation, and the corresponding superframe structure is developed to allow the hybrid transmission of the Sync packet and the blast wave monitoring data. As a network scales up and the hop distance grows, the packet exchange lag increases during a superframe. This, along with the drifting clock frequency, leads to the degradation of synchronisation performance while the clock frequency is usually assumed to be zero and non-drifting. Thus, a compensation strategy is proposed to eliminate the joint impacts and to improve the synchronisation precision. The theoretical performance analysis of the PkCOs algorithm in the network is presented along with verification by simulation means. Finally, the performance of the PkCOs synchronisation protocol is evaluated on an IEEE 802.15.4 hardware testbed. The experimental results show that the PkCOs algorithm provides an alternative clock synchronisation solution for blast wave monitoring networks.
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    Robust synchronised data acquisition for biometric authentication
    (IEEE, 2022-06-13) Zong, Yan; Liu, Shuxin; Liu, Xiaoxu; Gao, Shang; Dai, Xuewu; Gao, Zhiwei
    Owing to its unique, concealment and easy customisation by combining different wrist and hand gestures, High-Density surface electromyogram (HD-sEMG) is recognised as a potential solution to the next generation biometric authentication, which usually adopts a wireless Body Sensor Network (BSN) to acquire the multi-channel HD-sEMG biosignals from distributed electrode arrays. For more accurate and reliable classification, biometric authentication requires the distributed biosignals to be sampled simultaneously and be well-aligned, which means that the sampling jitters among the arrays need to be tiny. To synchronise data sampling clocks of a cluster of BSN nodes for biometric authentication, this paper modifies the Packet-Coupled Oscillators protocol by using a Dynamic controller (D-PkCOs). This protocol only involves one-way single packet exchange, which reduces the communication overhead significantly. For the purpose of maintaining precise sampling of these BSN nodes subject to drifting clock frequency and varying delays, the dynamic controller is designed via the H∞ robust method, and it is proved that all the BSN nodes’ sampling jitters are bounded. The experimental results demonstrate that the D-PkCOs protocol can keep the sampling jitters less than a microsecond in a 10-node IEEE 802.15.4 network. The application of D-PkCOs to the BSN shows that the HD-sEMG signal with a high signal-to-noise ratio is obtained, which leads to better gesture classification performance.
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    Robust time synchronisation for industrial internet of things by H∞ output feedback control
    (IEEE, 2022-01-20) Zong, Yan; Dai, Xuewu; Wei, Zhuangkun; Zou, Mengbang; Guo, Weisi; Gao, Zhiwei
    Precise timing over timestamped packet exchange communication is an enabling technology in the mission-critical industrial Internet of Things, particularly when satellite-based timing is unavailable. The main challenge is to ensure timing accuracy when the clock synchronisation system is subject to disturbances caused by the drifting frequency, time-varying delay, jitter, and timestamping uncertainty. In this work, a Robust Packet-Coupled Oscillators (R-PkCOs) protocol is proposed to reduce the effects of perturbations manifested in the drifting clock, timestamping uncertainty and delays. First, in the spanning tree clock topology, time synchronisation between an arbitrary pair of clocks is modelled as a state-space model, where clock states are coupled with each other by one-way timestamped packet exchange (referred to as packet coupling), and the impacts of both drifting frequency and delays are modelled as disturbances. A static output controller is adopted to adjust the drifting clock. The H∞ robust control design solution is proposed to guarantee that the ratio between the modulus of synchronisation precision and the magnitude of the disturbances is always less than a given value. Therefore, the proposed time synchronisation protocol is robust against the disturbances, which means that the impacts of drifting frequency and delays on the synchronisation accuracy are limited. The one-hour experimental results demonstrate that the proposed R-PkCOs protocol can realise time synchronisation with the precision of six microseconds in a 21-node IEEE 802.15.4 network. This work has widespread impacts in the process automation of automotive, mining, oil and gas industries.