NOSS: ARCADIA: An Asynchronous Communication Architecture Toward Novel Networking and Computation Paradigms in Wireless Sensor Networks

无线传感器网络在为大量应用提供准确和经济有效的监测方面显示出巨大的潜力。与以互联网为代表的传统数据转发网络形成鲜明对比的是，由于应用特定的要求，无线传感器网络的独特特征在于极低的数据速率，通常为每分钟几个字节。尽管在这一领域有许多突破性的工作，但底层通信技术，特别是在物理层和链路层，仍在沿着互联网的根及其无线扩展大部分发芽。此外，能源效率压倒性地依赖于协调的睡眠/唤醒方案，其中通信被同步到短时间窗口中。这将不可避免地增加冲突概率和无关数据包侦听，这两个主要的功耗组件在无线网络中。受半被动RFID技术的最新进展的启发，本项目将开发一种创新的异步通信架构，其中传感器节点被允许直接将数据写入一个特殊的，当接收节点的主平台（中央控制器）休眠时，驻留在接收节点上的反应模块（基于RFID标签）。由于传感器节点的低占空比，所提出的异步架构将通过充分利用时间作为一个维度的资源（不需要传统的MAC），从而实现高能量效率，从冲突和空闲监听中解放网络。此外，通过这种在能量受限系统中进行通信的全新范式，该项目还将研究覆盖计算范式，包括采样、网络内处理和路由，以适应、充分释放和展示其巨大的影响。

Wireless sensor networks have revealed vast potential in providing accurate and cost-effective monitoring for a plethora of applications. In stark contrast with traditional data forwarding networks exemplified by the Internet, wireless sensor networks are uniquely characterized by drastically low data rate, often at several bytes per minute, owing to application specific requirements. Despite numerous groundbreaking work in this field, the underlying communication techniques, particularly at the physical and link layers, are still largely germinating along the Internet root and its wireless extensions. Moreover, energy efficiency has overwhelmingly relied on coordinated sleep/wakeup schemes, where communications are synchronized into a short time window. Inevitably this will augment the collision probability and irrelevant packet listening, the two dominant power consumption components in wireless networks.Motivated by recent advancements in semi-passive RFID technology, this project will develop an innovative asynchronous communication architecture, in which 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 (the central controller) is asleep. Owing to the low duty cycle of a sensor node, the proposed asynchronous architecture will liberate the network from collisions and idle listening by fully exploiting time as one dimension of resource (no conventional MAC needed) and hence achieve high energy efficiency. Furthermore, with this fundamentally new paradigm for communication in energy-constrained systems, this project will also study the overlaying computation paradigm, including sampling, in-network processing, and routing, in order to accommodate, fully unleash, and demonstrate its enormous impact.