Unified Power Management Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks

Funded by NSF under NeTS-NOSS Grant CNS-0627126

Chenyang Lu (PI), Greg Hackmann

Alumni: Octav Chpara, Kevin Klues, Guoliang Xing

News

MLA (MAC Layer Architecture) has been upgraded for TinyOS 2.1.0. The component-based MAC architecture originally presented in the SenSys'07 paper is implemented as a tinyos-2.x contribs project and is now compatible with the recent tinyos-2.1.0 release. See the MLA page for the code and more details of MLA.

ART (Adaptive and Robust Topology Control) experimental data: The experimental data on transmission power control presented in the SenSys'08 paper has been released here. The data was collected on our wireless sensor network testbed.

Energy is an extremely limited resource in in many wireless sensor networks. While a multitude of different power management strategies have been proposed to help reduce the amount of energy wasted in these networks, application developers still face two fundamental challenges when developing systems with stringent power constraints. First, existing power management strategies are usually tightly coupled with network protocols and other system functionality. This monolithic approach has led to standalone solutions that cannot easily be reused or extended to other applications or platforms. Furthermore, different power management strategies make different and sometimes even conflicting assumptions about the rest of the system with which they need to interact. Without knowledge of which strategies are interoperable with which set of network protocols, it is difficult for application developers to make informed decisions as to which strategy is most appropriate for their particular application.

To address these challenges, we are developing a Unified Power Management Architecture (UPMA) that supports the flexible composition of different power management strategies based on application needs. We envision UPMA to consist of both low level programming interfaces, as well as high level modeling abstractions. These abstractions will be used to characterize the key properties of different applications, network protocols, and power management strategies. Using these properties, configuration tools can be created that match each application with the most appropriate network protocol and power management strategy suited to its needs.

Publications

G. Hackmann, W. Guo, G. Yan, C. Lu and S. Dyke, Cyber-Physical Codesign of Distributed Structural Health Monitoring With Wireless Sensor Networks, ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS'10), April 2010.

G. Hackmann, F. Sun, N. Castaneda, C. Lu and S. Dyke, A Holistic Approach to Decentralized Structural Damage Localization Using Wireless Sensor Networks, IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS'08), December 2008.

G. Hackmann, O. Chipara and C. Lu, Robust Topology Control for Indoor Wireless Sensor Networks, ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys'08), November 2008.

O. Chipara, C. Lu and G.-C. Roman, Real-time Query Scheduling for Wireless Sensor Networks, IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS'07), December 2007.

K. Klues, G. Hackmann, O. Chipara and C. Lu, A Component Based Architecture for Power-Efficient Media Access Control in Wireless Sensor Networks, ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys'07), November 2007.

K. Klues, V. Handziski, C. Lu, A. Wolisz, D. Culler, D. Gay and P. Levis, Integrating Concurrency Control and Energy Management in Device Drivers, ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP'07), October 2007.

G. Xing, C. Lu and R. Pless, Localized and Configurable Topology Control in Lossy Wireless Sensor Networks, International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN'07), August 2007. Note: Invited Paper.

G. Xing, C. Lu, Y. Zhang, Q. Huang and R. Pless, Minimum Power Configuration for Wireless Communication in Sensor Networks, ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, 3(2), June 2007.

K. Klues, G. Xing and C. Lu, Link Layer Support for Flexible Radio Power Management in Wireless Sensor Networks, International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN'07), April 2007.

K. Klues, G. Xing and C. Lu, Towards a Unified Radio Power Management Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks, International Workshop on Sensor Network Architecture (WWSNA'07), April 2007.