NeTS: Small: A Theoretical Approach to MAC Design for Communication Between Low Cost, Ultra-Low Power Devices

物联网正在通过在物体上放置标签而扩展到日常物理物体，这些标签具有感测环境的物理属性的能力，并且沿着物体的身份，中继信息以进行处理。当前的惯例是具有必须与强大的标签读取设备直接通信的无源标签，但是这限制了标签向读取器足够普遍的场景传达信息的能力。 一种替代的、更有效的范例是允许标签彼此交换信息，将信息标签到标签地传递，直到到达在网关（读取器）设备的范围内的标签。在后一种模式下，对象与网络“断开”的可能性将大大降低，使跟踪和监控更加普遍和完整。 放错地方的问题将成为过去，特别是在基础设施难以部署的地区，例如，在紧急情况和分诊环境中，通常面临着寻找物体或人员或评估状况的重大挑战。该项目将产生广泛的影响，为用户和整个社会带来重大利益。具体而言，拟议的研究将影响社会，促进将物联网领域扩展到日常物品的道路;实例包括跟踪日常物品，以及促进跟踪医学，建筑和航运等专业领域的对象。教育活动将为学生创造丰富的机会，让他们参与算法，建模和评估工作。该研究还将有助于教育部分，因为主要研究者（PI）已经并将继续围绕这一新兴主题设计课程，并将继续不仅让博士生参与，而且让高中生、本科生和硕士生参与与该提案直接相关的研究。PI从理论角度探索标签对标签通信的基本限制，特别是如何在这些超低功率设备必须休眠很长一段时间（以便收集/保存能量）并且以非同步方式操作的环境中最大化由这些超低功率设备构建的网络中的通信速率。 从实际的角度来看，协议将被设计和测试，可以执行传输速率接近这些基本限制。 该研究将建立一个随机优化框架，用于实际分布式协议的设计和开发。在这项研究中获得的理论算法也将使用实际的原型进行测试和实施。

The Internet-of-Things is being extended to everyday physical objects by placing tags on the objects, which have the ability to sense physical attributes of the environment and, along with the object's identity, relay information for processing. The current convention is to have passive tags that must communicate directly with a powerful tag-reading device, but this limits the tags' ability to convey information to scenarios where the readers are sufficiently prevalent. An alternative, more effective paradigm, is to allow the tags to exchange information with one another, passing information tag-to-tag until reaching a tag that is in range with a gateway (reader) device. Under this latter paradigm, the likelihood of objects being "disconnected" from the network will significantly reduce, making tracking and monitoring more ubiquitous and complete. Misplacing objects will become a problem of the past, especially in regions where infrastructure is difficult to deploy, e.g., in emergency and triage settings, which often have the major challenge of finding objects or people or assessing conditions. This project will have broad impact, bringing significant benefits to users and society at large. Specifically, the proposed research will impact society in facilitating the path toward extending the realm of the Internet-of-Things to everyday objects; instances include tracking of everyday objects, as well as facilitating the tracking of objects in specialized domains such as medicine, construction, and shipping. The educational activities will create a rich set of opportunities for students to involve themselves in algorithms, modeling, and evaluation work. The research will also contribute to the educational component as the principal investigators (PIs) have and will continue to design courses around this emerging topic and will continue to involve not only PhD students, but also high school, undergraduate, and masters students in research that directly relates to this proposal.The PIs explore, from a theoretical perspective, the fundamental limits of tag-to-tag communication, in particular how to maximize communication rates in networks built from these ultra-low power devices in environments where they must sleep for large fractions of time (in order to harvest/conserve energy) and operate in an unsynchronized manner. From a practical perspective, protocols will be designed and tested that can perform transmission at rates close to these fundamental limits. The research will create a stochastic optimization framework that is used in design and development of practical distributed protocols. The theoretical algorithms obtained in this research will be also tested and implemented using actual prototypes.