1. Cascading : An Overview of the Strategy Yujie Zhu and Raghupathy Sivakumar GNAN Research Group, Georgia Tech Energy-Efficient Communication Strategy for Wireless Sensor Networks Implementation  Point-to-point link, one sender, one receiver  CtS strategy is used to send randomly generated data packets  Both sender and receiver are implemented using RF transceiver modules  Chipcon CC1010 – single chip RF transceiver Multiplexing : Fast-forwarding: The energy consumed for transmitting each bit of data decreases inverse linearly with data packet size Motivation:  Need for energy-efficient communication from light sensors to sink  Traditional communication strategy conveys information between the sender and the receiver using energy (EbT) only  Energy consumption is ke b, where k is the length of the bit-stream and e b is energy per bit  Can we use time as an added dimension to convey information? Communication through Silence (CtS):  A new communication strategy that conveys information using silent periods in tandem with small amount of energy  Procedure:  Sender interprets the information to be transmitted as a data value  Sender transmits start signal  Receiver starts to count from 0 upon receiving start signal  Sender and receiver are synchronized in counting clock  Sender transmits stop signal when receiver counts up to the desired value  Information delivered!  The energy consumption for CtS is always 2e b irrespective of the amount of information being sent EbT CtS The Energy Throughput Tradeoff The time taken to transmit a packet of s bits is 2 s using Cts  The throughput of CtS decreases as s/ 2 s Example: 10Mbps data rate, 10 bit data packet size Energy improvement: 5 times Effective throughput: 10Kbps  The CtS strategy incurs exponential throughput decrease Optimization Strategies – Throughput Improvement  Two or more contending sender-receiver pairs can transmit at the same time as along as the start/stop signals do not overlap  Enabled by the typical long silent intervals between start and stop signals in CtS  Not possible in EbT since a sender-receiver pair has to occupy the channel exclusively during transmissions  Consecutive data values that are monotonically increasing or decreasing can be sent in a combined “signal train” consist of one start signal, multiple intermediate signals and one stop signal instead of multiple consecutive start/stop signals  The same counting process can be used for multiple packets at the same time for CtS  Not possible in EbT since overlapped data packets confuse the receiver  For multihop CtS communication, a relay node can forward start/intermediate signals before the stop signal is received  Enabled by the separable signals of each packet and possibility of simultaneous counting in CtS  Not possible in EbT because a packet has to be received in full before forwarding to ensure content integrity Performance Evaluation of Optimized CtS :  The throughput of integrated CtS is up to twice that of EbT  The energy consumption of EbT increases faster with path length than integrated CtS Summary: The energy-delay trade-off of basic CtS strategy can be alleviated by  Proper combination of optimization strategies  Adaptation of parameters Protocol Design : Test bed Implementation :  Hardware design  MAC layer solutions: reliability, addressing, sequencing CC1010 senderCC1010 receiver CtS link