Scalable Data Collection in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract:
It is challenging to design wireless sensor networks that can operate at large scale despite severe constraints on resources such as energy, storage, and bandwidth. We show how mathematical modeling and optimization can provide rich insights into fundamental limitations and the design of efficient wireless sensor networks protocols through three case studies. In the first, we use a constrained-optimization framework to identify fundamental scaling laws for data-centric storage and querying, quantifying the application-specific conditions under which arbitrarily large networks may be deployed. In the second case study, we use renewal theory and derive an interesting optimality criterion to design a receiver-feedback enhancement of the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC protocol that ensures good throughput and energy performance even in highly dense settings. Finally, we show how Lagrange duality can be used to derive a market-based solution for the problem of fair and efficient rate allocation in tree-based data gathering.

Biographical Sketch:
Bhaskar Krishnamachari received his B.E. in Electrical Engineering from the Cooper Union in 1998 and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 1999 and 2002 respectively. He is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at USC, where he holds the Philip and Cayley MacDonald Early Career Chair. His research focuses on the analysis and design of efficient data gathering and self-configuration algorithms for wireless sensor networks. He received the 2004 NSF CAREER award, the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's outstanding junior faculty award in 2005, and has received best paper awards at IPSN '04 and MSWiM '06. He serves on the editorial boards of the Ad Hoc Networks journal, the Pervasive and Mobile Computing Journal, the ACM Mobile Computing and Communications Review and the EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, and is the Sensor Networks Track Vice Chair for IEEE ICDCS 2007. He is the author of a text titled "networking Wireless Sensors" , published by Cambridge University Press.