Resource management of heterogeneous wireless networks

September 1, 2006
Tajana Simunic Rosing | University of California San Diego

Wireless communication today supports heterogeneous wireless devices with a number of different wireless network interfaces (WNICs). The goal of our work is to design novel scheduling and routing algorithms capable of providing good QoS to sensing applications while minimizing the energy consumption of the battery operated nodes. An already deployed High Performance Wireless Research and Educational Network (HPWREN) in San Diego area is a great example of the needs of a heterogeneous sensor network. HPWREN provides high speed wireless network access for a number of different sensors with varying resource requirements, such as large bandwidth requirements of the Palomar observatory, low bandwidth but tight real-time traffic deadlines of seismic sensor nodes, and long battery lifetime requirements of small and remotely deployed weather stations. It consists of a clustered sensor network with an additional wireless mesh overlay in the form of HPWREN. Small sensor node data is gathered by larger cluster heads that prepare the data for transmission. The data is transmitted when needed to the HPWREN wireless mesh backbone, which routes it out to the internet. QoS methodologies used for the internet do not apply in this situation due to highly variable wireless channel conditions and thus varying bandwidth constraints, the continually changing network topology, and stringent energy and computational requirements of the sensor nodes. In this talk we will provide an overview of HPWREN, along with an outline of recent results obtained by our newly developed scheduling algorithm. Our results show that the scheduler saves power and improves network throughput significantly in a highly loaded network – on average, 18% of throughput enhancement for real traffic and 79% of power reduction.

Speaker Details

Tajana Simunic Rosing is currently an Assistant Professor in Computer Science Department at UCSD. Her research interests are low-power system design, embedded systems and wireless system design. Prior to this she was a full time researcher at HP Labs while working part-time at Stanford University. At Stanford she has been involved with leading research of a number of graduate students and has taught graduate level classes. She finished her PhD in 2001 at Stanford University, concurrently with finishing her Masters in Engineering Management. Her PhD topic was Dynamic Management of Power Consumption. Prior to pursuing the PhD, she worked as a Senior Design Engineer at Altera Corporation. She obtained the MS in EE from University of Arizona. Her MS thesis topic was high-speed interconnect and driver-receiver circuit design. She has served at a number of Technical Paper Committees, and is currently an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems.