Low-power, High-throughput Protocol Design for Wireless Sensor Networks under Heterogeneous Interference

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "Low-power, High-throughput Protocol Design for Wireless Sensor Networks 
under Heterogeneous Interference"

by

Mr. Xiaolong ZHENG


Abstract:

The past decade has witnessed the great success of wireless sensor networks. 
Recently, an increasing number of WSN systems are deployed in indoor 
environments for the applications such as indoor environment monitoring and air 
condition control systems. Such a trend brings in new challenges to low-power 
and high-throughput protocol designs in WSNs because WSNs operate on the 2.4GHz 
license-free band, which is crowded by the heterogeneous interference caused by 
ever-developing wireless technologies in 2.4GHz such as WiFi and Bluetooth. 
This noisy environments leads to problems of existing methods as well as 
significant challenges for low-power and high-throughput protocol design.

In my first work, I study the impacts of heterogeneous interference on duty 
cycling techniques. We observe nodes wakes up more frequently but receive no 
valid packets under the interference environments. We investigate the reasons 
and then study how to keep the low duty cycle under heterogeneous interference 
environments. We propose a low-power MAC design to improve the energy efficient 
under interference.

In my second work, I study the performance of existing data collection methods 
under interference environments. We find that the throughput is harmed because 
the spectrum crowded by a variety of wireless technologies squeeze the free 
channel space for WSNs. Hence, I design a novel dynamic channel hopping method 
that always discovery and leverage the good channels accurately to improve the 
throughput under heterogeneous interference environments.

In my third work, I study the performance of data dissemination methods under 
various environments. We observe low throughput under both noisy and clean 
environments due to the improper usage of reliability-guarantee mechanisms. 
Hence, I propose a general data dissemination method that adopts different 
dissemination strategy according to the ambient environments for high 
throughput.


Date:			Tuesday, 19 August 2014

Time:                   10:30am - 12:30noon

Venue:                  Room 4483
                         lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Prof. Lionel Ni (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Gary Chan (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Qiong Luo
 			Dr. Ke Yi


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