CSE Colloquium Series
Efficient Bulk Transport in Data-intensive Wireless Sensor Networks
Guoliang Xing
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
City University of Hong Kong
Friday, May 9, 2008
Talk: 9:45 am - 10:45 am
3105 Engineering
Abstract
Recent years have seen the deployments of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in a number of data-intensive applications such as micro-climate monitoring, structural health monitoring, and emergency management. WSNs have made it possible to sample the physical environments at unprecedented spatiotemporal resolutions. However, the need to transport the massive amount of data generated by sensor nodes to base stations poses a fundamental challenge due to the limited node bandwidth and high power consumption of multi-hop wireless communication.
Bulk-data transport is an efficient communication paradigm for data-intensive sensor networks due to its low power consumption and overhead. In this talk, I will first describe the design and implementation of C-MAC, a model-driven wireless medium access control protocol for bulk data transmission. The key novelty of C-MAC is that nodes can assess the concurrency level of channel access based on online estimation of interference and power control models and thus maximize the aggregate throughput. C-MAC has been implemented in TinyOS and evaluated on a test-bed of 18 Tmote nodes. Our experiments show that C-MAC delivers a significantly higher network capacity than traditional MAC protocols. In the second part of this talk, I will present a novel bulk transport approach that utilizes controlled node mobility to reduce the network energy consumption. Mobiles can collect data from static sensors and carry data to the base station, significantly reducing the number of wireless transmissions needed for data transport. To reduce the data delivery delay caused by slow-moving mobiles, data are buffered at a set of rendezvous points before being picked up by mobiles. This approach achieves a desirable balance between network energy saving and data transport delay by combining the advantage of controlled mobility and in-network caching. I will conclude with an overview of several other related projects including mobility-assisted spatiotemporal detection and unified power management for wireless sensor networks.
Biography
Guoliang Xing is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the City University of Hong Kong. He received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and the M.S. degree in Computer Science from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China in 1998 and 2001, respectively. He received the DSc degree in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis in 2006. He is on a number of technical program committees for international conferences including MobiHoc and RTSS and holds several workshop chair positions including Program Co-chairs of the First ACM International Workshop on Heterogeneous Sensor and Actor Networks (HeterSanet) 2008 and the Fifth IEEE Workshop on Wireless Ad hoc and Sensor Networks (WWASN) 2008. His research interests include wireless sensor networks, mobile computing, and networked embedded systems.