MPhil Thesis Defence


"An Energy-efficient Media Access Control Protocol for Wireless Sensor
Networks"

By

Mr. Shi Chen


Abstract

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is an emerging technology due to its wide
range of potential applications. Several advantages have been witnessed
over traditional sensing devices including greater accuracy, larger
coverage area, and extraction of localized features. In order to realize
these potential gains, it is imperative that desired events are reliably
communicated to the sink over a long period of time. To accomplish this, a
reliable and energy-efficient transport system is particularly
indispensable. Nevertheless, the limited resources of sensor nodes such as
power, storage and bandwidth as well as the broadcast nature of wireless
medium rise extra challenges to the network protocol designs and make
existing conventional network protocols fail to meet the requirements.

In this thesis research, we present an energy-efficient media access
control protocol specifically designed for wireless sensor networks. As
energy efficiency and reliable multihop transmission are two major
concerns in the protocol design, our scheme addresses these two critical
issues through two complemented operation modes: all active mode and
adaptive sleeping mode. A hybrid token-based CSMA scheme is adopted in all
active mode which integrates the functionalities of media access control
and congestion control. In the adaptive sleeping mode, an
advertisement-based scheme is implemented to approximately approach the
minimum power consumption of wireless communications. Both operations
modes were implemented in Mica2 sensors nodes. Both simulation studies and
experimental measurements are used to verify the performance of the two
proposed operation modes.


Date:				Sunday, 30 July 2006

Time:				10:00a.m.-12:00noon

Venue:				Room 3464
				Lifts 25-26

Committee Members:		Prof. Lionel Ni (Supervisor)
				Dr. Qiong Luo (Chairperson)
				Dr. Yunhao Liu


**** ALL are Welcome ****