The University of Texas at Arlington
Office of Media Relations

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media contact: Sue Stevens, (817) 272-3317, sstevens@uta.edu

ARLINGTON— The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $450,000 grant to Computer Science and Engineering researchers at The University of Texas at Arlington to support investigations into asynchronous wireless sensor network architecture for ultra energy efficiency and extended network life time.

The project, titled “ARCADIA: An Asynchronous Communication Architecture toward Novel Networking and Computation Paradigms in Wireless Sensor Networks,” is under the direction of Assistant Professor Yonghe Liu, who is being assisted by Professors Sajal K. Das and Mohan Kumar.

Wireless sensor networks have revealed their vast potential in a plethora of applications including precision agriculture, environmental monitoring, and border control. In contrast with traditional data forwarding networks exemplified by the Internet, wireless sensor networks are uniquely characterized by dramatically low data rates, often at only several bytes per minute. Unfortunately, the underlying communication techniques, particularly at the physical and link layers, are still largely germinating along the Internet root and its wireless extensions, originally designed for data forwarding networks, which often has been proven to be neither energy efficient nor ad-hoc operation friendly.

To solve this problem and achieve ultra energy efficiency, project ARCADIA will take a fundamental departure from existing designs by introducing innovative asynchronous communication architecture. In this architecture, a sensor node is allowed to directly write data into a special, reactive module (RFID tag-based) residing on the receiving node while its main platform is asleep. This way, individual sensors can schedule their own transmission without demanding any network-wide or local synchronization.

The innovative design of ARCADIA will enable unprecedented energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks and unleash various potential applications that demand long-term operation, such as habitat, oceanic, and planetary monitoring.

For more information, contact Roger Tuttle, (817) 272-3682 or tuttle@uta.edu.

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