Wireless sensor networks operate under light load and then suddenly become active in response to detected or monitored events. This results in potentially large, sudden, correlated impulses of data being generated by the sensor field that must be delivered to a small set of sinks without significantly disrupting the fidelity of sensing applications. We observe that it is during these impulse periods that congestion is likely and the information being transported of most importance - and therefore most likely to be lost. We believe that without solving this congestion problem the wide-scale adoption of self-organizing sensor network technology could be jeopardized. In this talk, we will discuss this problem and detail one solution for alleviating it called CODA (COngestion Detection and Avoidance).
Andrew T. Campbell is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University and a member of the COMET Group. Andrew is working on emerging architectures and programmability for wireless networks. He received his PhD in Computer Science in 1996, and the NSF CAREER Award for his research in programmable mobile networking in 1999. Currently, he is on sabbatical as a UK EPSRC Visiting Fellow at the Computer Lab, Cambridge University. http://comet.columbia.edu/~campbell/