Wireless and Sensor Networks

Nian-Feng Tzeng
Center for Advanced Computer Studies
University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Research topics of interest include wireless communications, sensor networks, and mobile computing systems, as stated below.

• Wireless Communications
  Abundant wireless communication gear and consumer products these days all operate in tunable "ISM" (for industrial, scientific, and medical applications) 2.4 GHz bands. Due to excessive and uncoordinated use of this license-free spectrum in a given area, however, these "ISM" bands often become heavily congested. This prompts great urgency in developing new wireless MAC protocols with optimized performance under high traffic loads and strong in-band interferences. We have been investigating such MAC protocols aiming for high channel efficiency.
  
  
• Sensor Networks
  Low-power, inexpensive wireless sensors have made their wide deployment possible in numerous monitoring, assessing, and control applications to advance science pursuits or improve productivity. They are usually deployed in a large quantity for a given application with significant converage redundancy to ensure proper functions required by the application. Many challenging issues in regard to wireless sensor networks are being considered.
  
  
• Mobile Computing Systems
  This deals with effective synchronization implementations in mobile computing systems.
  

Publications

• H. Wu, C. Wang, and N.-F. Tzeng, Novel Self-Configurable Positioning Technique for Multi-hop Wireless Networks, accepted for publication in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, scheduled to appear in June 2005.

• H. Wu, A. Utgikar, and N.-F. Tzeng, SYN-MAC: A Distributed MAC Protocol for Synchronized Wireless Networks, accepted for publication in Kluwer/ACM Journal on Special Topics in Mobile Networks & Applications (MONET), on WLAN Optimization at the MAC and Network Levels, 2004.

• N.-F. Tzeng, B. Kasula, and H. Wu, Efficient Barrier Synchronization on Wireless Computing Systems, accepted for presentation at 11th IEEE Int'l Conf. on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS-2005), July 2005.

• H. Chen, H. Wu, and N.-F. Tzeng, Grid-Based Approach for Working Node Selection in Wireless Sensor Networks, Proc. IEEE Int'l Conf. on Communications (ICC 2004), June 2004, paper no. WN02-7. PDF (148K).

• Y. Li, H. Wu, D. Perkins, N.-F. Tzeng, and M. Bayoumi, MAC-SCC: Medium Access Control with a Separate Control Channel for Multihop Wireless Networks, Proc. Workshop on Mobile and Wireless Networks (MWN '03), held in conjunction with 23rd IEEE Int'l Conf. on Distributed Computing Systems, May 2003, pp. 764-769. Abstract, PDF (193K).

Funding

• Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy under Award Number DE-FG02-04ER46136.
• Board of Regents, State of Louisiana under Contract Number DOE/LEQSF(2004-07)-ULL.
• National Science Foundation under Grant EIA-9871315.