Resource management of heterogeneous wireless networks

Wireless communication today supports heterogeneous wireless devices with a number of different wireless network interfaces (WNICs). The goal of our work is to design novel scheduling and routing algorithms capable of providing good QoS to sensing applications while minimizing the energy consumption of the battery operated nodes. An already deployed High Performance Wireless Research and Educational Network (HPWREN) in San Diego area is a great example of the needs of a heterogeneous sensor network. HPWREN provides high speed wireless network access for a number of different sensors with varying resource requirements, such as large bandwidth requirements of the Palomar observatory, low bandwidth but tight real-time traffic deadlines of seismic sensor nodes, and long battery lifetime requirements of small and remotely deployed weather stations. It consists of a clustered sensor network with an additional wireless mesh overlay in the form of HPWREN. Small sensor node data is gathered by larger cluster heads that prepare the data for transmission. The data is transmitted when needed to the HPWREN wireless mesh backbone, which routes it out to the internet. QoS methodologies used for the internet do not apply in this situation due to highly variable wireless channel conditions and thus varying bandwidth constraints, the continually changing network topology, and stringent energy and computational requirements of the sensor nodes. In this talk we will provide an overview of HPWREN, along with an outline of recent results obtained by our newly developed scheduling algorithm. Our results show that the scheduler saves power and improves network throughput significantly in a highly loaded network – on average, 18 of power reduction. .