JOINT ECE/CS Colloquium: Gathering Data from a Sensor Network: Spatio-Temporal Sampling Rates and Energy Efficiency

Abstract

A multi-hop network of wireless sensors can be used to gather spatio-temporal samples of a physical phenomenon and transmit these samples to a processing center. This paper addresses an important issue in the design of such networks: determining the spatio-temporal sampling rate of the network under conditions of minimum energy usage. A new collision-free protocol for gathering sensor data is used to obtain analytical results that characterize the tradeoffs among sensor density, energy usage, throughput, delay, temporal sampling rates and spatial sampling rates in wireless sensor networks.

We also show that the lower bound on the delay incurred in gathering data is O(k2n) in a clustered network of n sensors with at most k hops between any sensor and its CH. Simulation results on the tradeoff between the achievable spatial sampling rates and the achievable temporal sampling rates when IEEE 802.11 DCF is used as the media access scheme are provided and compared with the analytical results presented in this talk.

An overview of the Center for Wireless Systems and Applications will also be provided.

Speaker Bio Edward J. Coyle received his BSEE degree from the University of Delaware in 1978, and Master's and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University in 1980 and 1982. Since 1982, he has been with Purdue University, where he is currently Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Since Spring 2000 he has held a part-time appointment as Assistant Vice Provost for Research in Computing and Communications.

His research interests include the performance analysis of computer networks and nonlinear digital signal and image processing. He was a co-recipient of both the Myril B. Reed Best Paper Award from the 32nd Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems and the 1986 Best Paper Award for Authors under 30 from the Signal Processing Society of the IEEE. He has served as an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems and was an elected member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. He was the general chair of the 1997 IEEE/EURASIP Workshop on Nonlinear Signal and Image Processing. For four years, 2000 - 2004, he was the Assistant Vice Provost for Research in Computing and Communications at Purdue. Dr. Coyle is a Fellow of the IEEE and in 1998 was named an Outstanding Engineering Alumnus of the University of Delaware.