Energy Efficient Reliable Data Delivery in Wireless Sensor Networks

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Energy Efficient Reliable Data Delivery in Wireless Sensor Networks"

by

Mr. Junhua Zhu


Abstract:

Due to their tremendous potential in civil and military applications,
wireless sensor networks have raised intense research interests in recent
years. The fundamental function of wireless sensor networks is the
collection of information from an area of interest by sensor nodes, and
the processing of such information by sink nodes according to some
particular application. Delivering the gathered information from sensor
nodes to sink nodes effectively is one of the fundamental challenges in
wireless sensor networks. To achieve flexibility in deployment, sensor
nodes are generally battery-driven. Furthermore, battery replacement is
not likely, if possible at all; thus, sensor nodes, and as a consequence
the sensor network, have a limited operational time. Hence, energy
efficiency is a key issue in the design, deployment and operation of
wireless sensor networks. To improve the performance of wireless sensor
networks, data delivery in sensor networks should be both energy efficient
and effective, which is the focus of this thesis proposal.

First, we observe the conflicts of objectives -- viz., the application
performance and the network lifetime -- when optimizing the performance of
wireless sensor networks. We find that the tradeoff between these
objectives can be studied by investigating the interaction between the
network lifetime maximization problem and the rate allocation problem.
Then, we formulate the tradeoff problem as a constrained convex
optimization problem by introducing a tradeoff factor and first tackle
this problem at the transport layer, and then from a cross layer
perspective. Using Lagrange dual decomposition, algorithms are obtained to
achieve the best tradeoff. Second, we note that the notion of reliability
in certain wireless sensor networks is probabilistic. Based on this, the
problem of providing minimum energy probabilistic reliable data delivery
is studied. It is tackled at the MAC layer, using p-persistent protocols.
Adaptive algorithms are derived to tune the persistence probability of
these protocols based on Lagrange dual decomposition method.


Date:     		Friday, 1 February 2008

Time:                   10:30a.m.-12:30p.m.

Venue:                  Room 4480
			lifts 25-26

Committee Members:      Dr. Brahim Bensaou (Supervisor)
			Dr. Jogesh Muppala (Chairperson)
                        Dr. Gary Chan
			Prof. Mounir Hamdi


**** ALL are Welcome ****