Toronto Networking Seminar


Organized by Department of Computer Science and
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto







A SWiss Army Knife for Wireless Sensor Networks





Ioanis Nikolaidis


Department of Computer Science


University of Alberta




Date:  Friday, November  14,  2pm

Location: BA 1210 



Abstract:






Despite the numerous proposals for protocols & applications for wireless sensor
networks, very few have been tested on real platforms. Experience has shown
that application development on sensor networks can be challenging.  We
perceive this "bottleneck" to generating production grade code for small,
underpowered, wireless sensor devices as an impediment to fully understanding
the impact and potential of proposed protocols & applications.  We seek a
programming paradigm, set of abstractions, and run-time support with properties
akin to those of a good Swiss Army Knife: incorporating just enough elements
that are good for most (hopefully for all) tasks one is likely to encounter.
While similarities with the task of programming large scale distributed systems
exist, the resource (including energy) constraints and the unreliable nature of
sensor nodes call for a more careful examination of what might be useful
abstractions that would work best in this environment.  We will briefly review
the research efforts in this area, and summarize the abstractions, techniques,
and mechanisms that have emerged as promising.  Subsequently, we will pay
particular attention to two issues: (a) application description in the form of
(interacting) concurrent FSM-like components and how they are successfully
supported on a small footprint operating system for sensor networks (PicOS),
and (b) we will expand on how one promising logical topology abstraction, that
of a connected dominating set (CDS), can be quite powerful not only for routing
(as it has happened in the past) but also for the efficient implementation of a
family of database queries.




This is joint work with Prof. Pawel Gburzynski, Prof. Mario Nascimento,
Nicholas Boers, and Baljeet Malhotra.






Bio:



Ioanis Nikolaidis is a Professor with the Computing Science Department at the
University of Alberta. He received his B.Sc.  from the University of Patras,
Greece, in 1989 and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech
in 1991 and 1994, respectively. Between 1994 and 1996 he worked for the
European Computer.Industry Research Center in Munich, Germany, in the area of
distributed computing. He joined the University of Alberta in January 1997.  He
has published more than sixty articles in books, journals, and conference
proceedings in the area of computer networking.  His research interest range
from network modeling and simulation, to large scale data delivery systems, to
mobile and secure networking.  Since 1999 he has been a member of the editorial
board (and is currently the Editor in Chief) of the IEEE Network magazine. He
is also a member of the editorial for the Computer Networks journal (Elsevier),
and of the Journal of Internet Engineering (JIE). He has served in the
technical program committees of numerous conferences, including ICC, Globecom,
INFOCOM, LCN, IPCCC, PerCom, IFIP Networking, and CNSR. He is in the steering
committee of WLN (co-located annually with IEEE LCN) and in the steering
committee of the ADHOCNOW conference. He was the conference co-chair of
ADHOCNOW 2004. He is a member of IEEE and ACM.




Host of the talk



Shahrokh Valaee (valaee@comm.utoronto.ca)