Rethinking Sensor Networks from the Physical Layer Up

SPEAKER: Prof. Upamanyu Madhow, UCSBABSTRACT: Sensor networks open up the exciting possibility of "googling" the physical world, with potential applications going well beyond the current focus on environmental monitoring, homeland security, and defence. Recent research activities in sensor networks at a variety of institutions have produced valuable experience in deploying networks of hundreds of sensor motes. While such moderate-sized networks are adequate for a large class of applications in the near term, we remain far from realizing the vision invoked by the phrase "Smart Dust", of hundreds of thousands of nodes providing comprehensive coverage of large geographic areas. In addition to the fundamental difficulties of networking such large numbers of nodes, another key constraint that is likely to persist for the foreseeable future is energy consumption: for large-scale deployments, sensor nodes must survive for long periods on a small battery, or to operate by scavenging energy from the environment. In this talk, we first provide a brief overview of the broad range of research activities in our group. We then focus on new concepts, and associated prototyping efforts, for scaling sensor nets up in size and ease of deployment, and down in energy consumption per node. These concepts include massively scalable Imaging Sensor Nets, in which "dumb" sensor nodes play the role of pixels imaged by sophisticated collector nodes, and distributed beamforming, in which "smart" sensor nodes collaborate to increase energy efficiency or range by emulating an antenna array.BIO: Upamanyu Madhow is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His prior appointments include serving as a faculty in the ECE Department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and as a research scientist at Bell Communications Research (now Telcordia). He received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, in 1985. He received the M. S. and Ph. D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1987 and 1990, respectively.Dr. Madhow's research interests are in wireless communication, sensor networks and multimedia security. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and recipient of the NSF CAREER award. He has served as Associate Editor for Spread Spectrum for the IEEE Transactions on Communications, and as Associate Editor for Detection and Estimation for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. He is a "highly cited" researcher (http://www.isihighlycited.com), and is among the top 10 most cited authors in computer science over the period 1993-2003, according to the ISI Web of Science (http://in-cites.com/top/2003/first03-com.html).Host: Professor Urbashi Mitra, ubli@usc.edu

Location: Hughes Aircraft Electrical Engineering Center (EEB) - -248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Mayumi Thrasher