CSE Colloquium: Energy-Aware Computation in Radio Networks

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ABSTRACT: Imagine a network of small sensors scattered in a remote environment, and communicating with each other via radio transceivers. These devices have small batteries, so we want to be sparing with our power usage. 

As technological progress leads to smaller devices, the energy costs associated with the radio communication increases compared with other costs, such as local computation. Additionally, the cost of listening for radio messages sent by other nodes becomes comparable to the cost of sending messages. Unfortunately, traditional approaches to network communications, including radio networks, have typically only taken the volume of sent messages into account, while completely ignoring the cost of listening for incoming messages. 

We present a clean new theoretical model that captures this aspect of radio communication networks, and investigate the question of low-energy algorithm design for some basic network communication protocols. This talk will focus in particular on the problems of broadcast and of breadth-first search, with the goal of obtaining exponentially reduced energy cost, compared to the standard naive algorithms. 

Joint work with Yi-Jun Chang (ETH Zurich), Varsha Dani (UNM), and Seth Pettie (U. Michigan). 

BIOGRAPHY: Thomas Hayes is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico. His research interests include randomized algorithms (especially Markov chains), probability, statistical physics, combinatorics, distributed systems, and machine learning.