Sustainable and Efficient Data Transmission in Duty-Cycling Sensor Networks

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Sustainable and Efficient Data Transmission
in Duty-Cycling Sensor Networks"

by

Mr. Zhenjiang Li


ABSTRACT:

To bridge the gap between the increasing demand of deploying sustainable 
sensor networks for practical applications and the limited energy supply 
of each low-profile sensor node, recent research studies suggest operating 
sensor nodes in a duty-cycling work mode to save energy. Although the 
duty-cycling technique turns out to notably increase the lifetime of 
sensor nodes, the network lifetime can still be largely limited due to the 
unevenly distributed network traffic load in many applications. In 
addition, excessive challenges are introduced for implementing a variety 
of basic operations with the duty-cycling technique, which could 
deteriorate the performances of a series of important network services, 
like information dissemination, data acquisition, end-to-end packet 
delivery, etc. In this proposal, we aim at studying fundamental 
challenges, and further achieving a sustainable and efficient 
communication design in duty-cycling sensor networks.

We first investigate the problem of controlling node sleep intervals so as 
to achieve the min-max energy fairness to maximize the network lifetime. 
We theoretically formulate the Sleep Interval Control (SIC) problem and 
find it a convex optimization problem. By utilizing the convex property, 
we decompose the original problem and propose a distributed algorithm, 
called GDSIC. In GDSIC, sensor nodes can tune sleep intervals through a 
local information exchange such that the maximum energy consumption rate 
in the network approaches to be minimized. After balancing the 
network-wide energy consumption, we further optimize the data collection 
service in duty-cycling networks. We propose a novel approach for the sink 
node to collect the network-wide data. The routing structure of data 
collection is additively updated with the movement of the sink node. With 
this approach, we only perform a local modification to update the routing 
structure while the routing performance is bounded and controlled compared 
to the optimal performance. The proposed protocol is easy to implement. 
Our analysis shows that the proposed approach is scalable in maintenance 
overheads, performs efficiently in the routing performance, and provides 
continuous data delivery in the network.


Date:                   Monday, 6 February 2012

Time:                   4:15pm - 6:15pm

Venue:                  Room 3304
                         lifts 17/18

Committee Members:      Dr. Yunhao Liu (Supervisor)
                         Dr. Ke Yi (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Lei Chen
 			Prof. Lionel Ni


**** ALL are Welcome ****