PROBABILISTIC TOPOLOGY CONTROL IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "PROBABILISTIC TOPOLOGY CONTROL IN WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS"

by

Mr. Yunhuai LIU


Abstract:

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have attracted intensive research interests
due to the great potential on real-world applications. Among all the
energy-saving schemes, topology control has been well recognized as an
efficient one. By providing an appropriate support for routing protocols,
topology control enables more energy-efficient transmissions.

Traditional topology control algorithms are based on the deterministic
model that assumes a pair of nodes is either connected or disconnected. In
practice, however, most wireless links are intermittently connected,
called lossy links. By successfully leveraging these lossy links, more
energy-efficient topologies are available. To seize the opportunity of
lossy links, in this proposal I propose a new topology control scheme
called probabilistic topology control. The key concept in probabilistic
topology control is to quantify what percentage of nodes is expected to
connect to the network, in the presence of lossy links, called network
reachability. I prove that the probabilistic topology control is NP-hard.
To serve different communication paradigms and address the problem in
distributed environments, I propose two topology control algorithms called
CONREAP and BRASP. The former CONREAP is for sink-to-sensor communications
and BRASP is for general sensor-to-sensor communications. I prove that
CONREAP has guaranteed network reachability for the derived topology. The
worst running time is (|E|) and the space requirement is O(d). Preliminary
experimental results show that CONREAP can remarkably reduce the energy
cost. It is more appropriate for low requirement and large transitional
region environments.

My future work will be carried out along following directions. First, I
will conduct more experiments and simulations to comprehensively evaluate
the performance of CONREAP in different settings and environments. Second,
I will continue to design and implement BRASP for general communication
paradigms. Third, I plan to compare CONREAP and BRASP in a single setting
to get an integrated understanding of the advantages and weakness.


Date:     		Tuesday, 4 December 2007

Time:                   2:00p.m.-4:00p.m.

Venue:                  Room 3304
			lifts 17-18

Committee Members:      Prof. Lionel Ni (Supervisor)
                        Dr. Gary Chan (Chairperson)
			Dr. Lei Chen
			Dr. Qian Zhang


**** ALL are Welcome ****