COLLOQUIUM
             Computer Science Department, Boston University

Speaker: Sonia Fahmy
         Purdue University

Date:  Monday, November 14
Time:  11:00
Place: Room MCS 135, 111 Cummington Street 
       (for directions, see www.cs.bu.edu/colloquium)

Title: An Energy-Efficient Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract:

Networked embedded systems provide a versatile computing platform for
supporting applications, such as environmental monitoring or military
field surveillance. In this talk, we explore a hierarchical architecture
for wireless sensor networks to distribute the load among neighboring
sensors, and reduce network communications by exploiting data
aggregation. This is motivated by the large scale of many sensor
deployments, the high energy cost of wireless communications, the
limited capabilities of sensor nodes, and the hostility of the
encompassing environment. We design completely distributed protocols for
constructing a two-tier network. These protocols are characterized by
rapid convergence and low overhead. We will show the results of our
topology management implementation in TinyOS for a data aggregation
application, and its evaluation on a testbed of sensor motes. We will
also present a time synchronization framework for hierarchical sensor
networks, which is necessary for applications performing aggregation of
timestamped data.

Biography:

Sonia Fahmy is currently an associate Professor of Computer Science at
Purdue University. She received her PhD in Computer and Information
Science from The Ohio State University in 1999.  Her research interests
are in the design and evaluation of network architectures and protocols.
She is currently investigating Internet tomography, overlay networks,
network security, and wireless sensor networks.  She received the
National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2003, the Schlumberger
foundation technical merit award in 2000 and 2001, and the OSU
presidential fellowship for dissertation research in 1998.

Some of the results of her work were incorporated in the ATM Forum
traffic management specifications 4.0 and 4.1, and a patent has been
awarded for her work on the ERICA algorithm for network congestion
control. She is currently serving on the editorial boards of the Journal
of High Speed Networks (IOS Press), and Computer Communications
(Elsevier). She has served on the organizing or technical program
committees of IEEE INFOCOM, ICNP, ICDCS, ICC, GLOBECOM, Hot
Interconnects, ICPP, and IPCCC. She chaired the first Workshop on Secure
Network Protocols (NPSec) in 2005, and co-chaired the first SPIE
conference on scalability and traffic control in IP networks in 2001.
She is a member of the ACM, Phi Kappa Phi, Sigma Xi, and Upsilon Pi
Epsilon, and a senior member of the IEEE.

Host: Azer Bestavros and Ibrahim Matta