Prof. Zussman Receives an NSF CAREER Award
01/03/2011
National Science Foundation (NSF). The $400,000 project entitled
"Networking Wireless Rechargeable Devices - Modeling and Resource
Allocation" will focus on the development and performance evaluation of
resource allocation algorithms for wireless networks composed of nodes
with rechargeable energy sources. Recent advances in energy harvesting
and ultra-low-power wireless communications will soon enable the
realization of such networks that will be used in disaster recovery,
supply chain management, industrial control, and health care applications.
Energy harvesting shifts the essence of resource allocation from
prolonging the finite lifespan of a device to enabling perpetual life,
thereby posing fundamentally new problems. To solve these problems, an
energy management module that determines the energy consumption level
will be developed. It will be based on solutions to new theoretical
utility maximization problems under various settings resulting from
different hardware characteristics and different harvesting
environments. It will provide important inputs to protocols responsible
for sleep-wake, power control, routing, and scheduling.
To enable the development of the module, the goals of the project are:
(i) experimentally characterize energy availability in various
environments; (ii) design resource allocation algorithms for
predictable, partially-predictable, and random energy sources; and (iii)
study the tradeoffs between the communication and computation
complexities of the algorithms, and experimentally evaluate their
performance. The module will eventually be integrated in the tags
developed in the collaborative Energy Harvesting Active Networked Tags
(EnHANTs) Project.