Cooperative MIMO Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks: Energy Efficient Cooperative MAC Protocol

Multiple sensor nodes can be used to transmit and receive cooperatively and such a configuration is known as a cooperative Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) system. Cooperative MIMO systems have been proven to reduce both transmission energy and latency in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). However, most current work in WSNs considers only the energy cost for the data transmission component and neglects the energy component responsible for establishing a cooperative mechanism. In this work, both transmission and circuit energies for both components are included in the performance models. Furthermore, in previous work, all sensor nodes are assumed to be always on which could lead to a shorter lifetime due to energy wastage caused by idle listening and overhearing. Low duty cycle MAC protocols have been proposed to tackle this challenge for non-cooperative systems. Also in this work, we propose a new cooperative low duty cycle MAC protocol (CMAC) for two cooperative MIMO schemes: Beamforming (CMACBF) and Spatial Multiplexing (CMACSM). Performance of the proposed CMAC protocol is evaluated in terms of total energy consumption and packet latency for both synchronous and asynchronous scenarios. All the required energy components are taken into consideration in the system performance modeling and a periodic monitoring application model is used. The impact of the clock jitter, the check interval and the number of cooperative nodes on the total energy consumption and latency is investigated. The CMACBF protocol with two transmit nodes is suggested as the optimal scheme when operating at the 250 ms check interval with the clock jitter difference below 0.6Tb where Tb is the bit period corresponding to the system bit rate

A Client-Centric Data Streaming Technique for Smartphones: An Energy Evaluation

With advances in microelectronic and wireless communication technologies, smartphones have computer-like capabilities in terms of computing power and communication bandwidth. They allow users to use advanced applications that used to be run on computers only. Web browsing, email fetching, gaming, social networking, and multimedia streaming are examples of wide-spread smartphone applications. Unsurprisingly, network-related applications are dominant in the realm of smartphones. Users love to be connected while they are mobile. Streaming applications, as a part of network-related applications, are getting increasingly popular. Mobile TV, video on demand, and video sharing are some popular streaming services in the mobile world. Thus, the expected operational time of smartphones is rising rapidly. On the other hand, the enormous growth of smartphone applications and services adds up to a significant increase in complexity in the context of computation and communication needs, and thus there is a growing demand for energy in smartphones. Unlike the exponential growth in computing and communication technologies, the growth in battery technologies is not keeping up with the rapidly growing energy demand of these devices. Therefore, the smartphone's utility has been severely constrained by its limited battery lifetime. It is very important to conserve the smartphone's battery power. Even though hardware components are the actual energy consumers, software applications utilize the hardware components through the operating system. Thus, by making smartphone applications energy-efficient, the battery lifetime can be extended. With this view, this work focuses on two main problems: i) developing an energy testing methodology for smartphone applications, and ii) evaluating the energy cost and designing an energy-friendly downloader for smartphone streaming applications. The detailed contributions of this thesis are as follows: (i) it gives a generalized framework for energy performance testing and shows a detailed flowchart that application developers can easily follow to test their applications; (ii) it evaluates the energy cost of some popular streaming applications showing how the download strategy that an application developer adopts may adversely affect the energy savings; (iii) it develops a model of an energy-friendly downloader for streaming applications and studies the effects of the downloader's parameters regarding energy consumption; and finally, (iv) it gives a mathematical model for the proposed downloader and validates it by means of experiments