ITR: (NHS+ASE) - (int+dmc) - Activity-Driven Computing and Communication for Cooperative Distributed Networks

自然和人为灾害本质上是不可预测和罕见的，因此，任何用于检测这类事件的监测基础设施都将以极低的占空比运行。覆盖率、可扩展性和寿命是判断此类网络有效性的关键指标，而不是延迟和带宽等传统指标。这项研究从最大限度地减少所有抽象级别的能量使用的角度来检查监控网络：电路、节点架构、信号处理、通信和联网。总体目标是开发能够使传感器网络具有前所未有的寿命的技术-数年而不是几天或几周。节点设计的研究重点是开发一种针对传感器网络应用进行优化的超低功耗异步微处理器。异步电路实现了极细粒度的电源管理，并显著减少了每次操作的能量以及活动状态和空闲状态之间的转换时间。通信和网络的研究主要集中在协同信号处理技术上。系统中的节点在物理层进行协作，从而同时减少了信息提取所需的能量和延迟。这两个研究载体都将在本项目过程中开发的实验硬件试验台的背景下进行评估。

Natural and man-made disasters are, by their very nature, unpredictable and rare and thus any monitoring infrastructure for detection of such events will operate with an extremely low duty cycle. Coverage, scalability, and longevity are the key metrics to judge the effectiveness of such networks rather than traditional metrics like latency and bandwidth. This investigation examines monitoring networks from the perspective of minimizing energy usage at all levels of abstraction: circuit, node architecture, signalprocessing, communication, and networking. The overall goal is to develop technologies that enable sensor networks that have unprecedented longevity---on the order of years rather than days or weeks.Research on node design focuses on the development of an ultra-low-power asynchronous microprocessor optimized for sensornetwork applications. Asynchronous circuits enable extremely fine-grained power management, and lead to a significant reduction in energy per operation as well as transition times between active and idle states. Research on communication and networking focuses on collaborative signal processing techniques. Nodes in the system cooperate at the physical layer, resulting in a simultaneous reductionin the energy and latency required for information extraction. Both these research vectors are to be evaluated in the context of an experimental hardware testbed developed over the course of thisproject.