Energy efficient wireless infrastructure

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This project will address key issues relating to the design and operation of energy efficient and energy sustainable wireless network infrastructure. Our long-term goal is to enable the cost-effective deployment of wireless infrastructure which will be needed in a variety of future applications. This includes mesh-networked wireless LAN infrastructure, and infrastructure to be used in such diverse applications as sensor deployments and vehicular road-side networks. As the Internet becomes more ubiquitous, wireless connectivity is needed over much more diverse and expansive areas, where wired power connections are unavailable or prohibitively expensive. In addition, wireless infrastructure is becoming increasingly portable, and will be operated solely from rechargeable battery sources. The key to enabling these types of infrastructure is the development of energy efficient protocols, efficient energy resource provisioning methods and node placement techniques. This area is a relatively new one, in that classical infrastructure has been typically designed assuming fixed power grid connections. The proposed activities address these objectives in a number of novel ways. The work will include: i) the development of energy resource provisioning techniques for practical network deployments, ii) an assessment of the power consumption benefits from using realistic battery effects, iii) an investigation of the potential for energy efficiency improvement using opportunistic vehicular access, iv) the design of energy efficient vehicular road-side infrastructure, and, v) protocol design for energy efficient mobile hot-spot infrastructure. This work will address some of the key barriers to the enabling of cost-effective wireless network infrastructure.