Reza Abdolee

Mohammad Maroufi, Reza Abdolee, Behzad Mozaffari Tazekand

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology will soon become an integral part of our daily lives to facilitate the control and monitoring of processes and objects and revolutionize the ways that human interacts with the physical world. For all features of IoT to become fully functional in practice, there are several obstacles on the way to be surmounted and critical challenges to be addressed. These include, but are not limited to cybersecurity, data privacy, energy consumption, and scalability. The Blockchain decentralized nature and its multi-faceted procedures offer a useful mechanism to tackle several of these IoT challenges. However, applying the Blockchain protocols to IoT without considering their tremendous computational loads, delays, and bandwidth overhead can let to a new set of problems. This review evaluates some of the main challenges we face in the integration of Blockchain and IoT technologies and provides insights and high-level solutions that can potentially handle the shortcomings and constraints of both IoT and Blockchain technologies.

Reza Abdolee, Benoit Champagne

We study the performance of centralized least mean-squares (CLMS) algorithms in wireless sensor networks where nodes transmit their data over fading channels to a central processing unit (e.g., fusion center or cluster head), for parameter estimation. Wireless channel impairments, including fading and path loss, distort the transmitted data, cause link failure and degrade the performance of the adaptive solutions. To address this problem, we propose a novel CLMS algorithm that uses a refined version of the transmitted data and benefits from a link failure alarm strategy to discard severely distorted data. Furthermore, to remove the bias due to communication noise from the estimate, we introduce a bias-elimination scheme that also leads to a lower steady-state mean-square error. Our theoretical findings are supported by numerical simulation results.

Reza Abdolee, Benoit Champagne

We investigate the performance of distributed least-mean square (LMS) algorithms for parameter estimation over sensor networks where the regression data of each node are corrupted by white measurement noise. Under this condition, we show that the estimates produced by distributed LMS algorithms will be biased if the regression noise is excluded from consideration. We propose a bias-elimination technique and develop a novel class of diffusion LMS algorithms that can mitigate the effect of regression noise and obtain an unbiased estimate of the unknown parameter vector over the network. In our development, we first assume that the variances of the regression noises are known a-priori. Later, we relax this assumption by estimating these variances in real-time. We analyze the stability and convergence of the proposed algorithms and derive closed-form expressions to characterize their mean-square error performance in transient and steady-state regimes. We further provide computer experiment results that illustrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms and support the analytical findings.

Reza Abdolee, Benoit Champagne, Ali H. Sayed

We study the performance of diffusion least-mean-square algorithms for distributed parameter estimation in multi-agent networks when nodes exchange information over wireless communication links. Wireless channel impairments, such as fading and path-loss, adversely affect the exchanged data and cause instability and performance degradation if left unattended. To mitigate these effects, we incorporate equalization coefficients into the diffusion combination step and update the combination weights dynamically in the face of randomly changing neighborhoods due to fading conditions. When channel state information (CSI) is unavailable, we determine the equalization factors from pilot-aided channel coefficient estimates. The analysis reveals that by properly monitoring the CSI over the network and choosing sufficiently small adaptation step-sizes, the diffusion strategies are able to deliver satisfactory performance in the presence of fading and path loss.

Reza Abdolee, Benoit Champagne, Ali H. Sayed

We study the problem of distributed adaptive estimation over networks where nodes cooperate to estimate physical parameters that can vary over both space and time domains. We use a set of basis functions to characterize the space-varying nature of the parameters and propose a diffusion least mean-squares (LMS) strategy to recover these parameters from successive time measurements. We analyze the stability and convergence of the proposed algorithm, and derive closed-form expressions to predict its learning behavior and steady-state performance in terms of mean-square error. We find that in the estimation of the space-varying parameters using distributed approaches, the covariance matrix of the regression data at each node becomes rank-deficient. Our analysis reveals that the proposed algorithm can overcome this difficulty to a large extent by benefiting from the network stochastic matrices that are used to combine exchanged information between nodes. We provide computer experiments to illustrate and support the theoretical findings.