Grant: Strategic Projects Supplemental Competition

Wireless networks are constantly evolving to support higher data rates and wider coverage at a lower cost. This in turn requires extensive signal processing which is severely affected by the existing limitations on "battery life". Meanwhile, the battery technology is advancing, however, at a much slower rate as compared to the projected needs. This makes the battery life the primary bottleneck in the cost effective realization of many future wireless networks. The projected needs over the next decade are far beyond the reach of the current technology and breakthroughs are needed to realize these urgent requirements. Traditionally, the problem of battery life has been an issue in the resource limited mobile units, however, there are many emerging scenarios in which the wireless access points also rely on batteries charged using solar cells. Access to such solar-powered wireless infrastructure is particularly important in a vast country like Canada with low population density and limited communication infrastructures. Such solar-powered wireless networks will make it possible to provide affordable communication to many distant areas which would be impossible otherwise due to the excessive cost in powering the remote wireless nodes using electrical wiring. Another example of large impact is wild life monitoring in the Northern Canada which have very low population density, and large-scale infrastructure surveillance in oil patch in Alberta. The proposed research will investigate several novel directions to increase the power efficiency of wireless systems, for both handheld units and the backbone network. This includes novel methods in the application of software engineering to the problem of "minimizing power consumption". In addition, most of the programs running on wireless nodes usually rely on input data that arrive with a random delay due to the nature of the underlying wireless network. The research investigates the statistical behavior of such delays towards providing: (i) design rules for optimized performance, and (ii) testing techniques to evaluate the performance under various network loads and transmission reliability.