Title:  Wireless Systems for Energy-Efficient Data Acquisition and Position Estimation in Dense Wide Area Networks

Committee:

Dr. Gordon Stuber, ECE, Chair , Advisor

Dr. John Barry, ECE

Dr. Douglas Blough, ECE

Dr. Mary Ann Weitnauer, ECE, ECE

Dr. Suhail Al-Dharrab, King Fahd University

Abstract: Wide area networks for surveying applications continue to grow in area, node density, and data traffic. In particular, seismic data acquisition presents a challenging application wherein real-time data delivery is expected from nearly 10,000-30,000 devices called geophones, that are deployed across areas as large as 100 square kilometers, to obtain images of the Earth's subsurface. Unlike typical sensor networks, data generation rates at each of the geophones are relatively high (0.1-1 Mbps), implying an aggregate rate of several Gigabits per second at the sink node. Various standards-compliant network architectures based on the use of IEEE 802.11af, 802.11ac, 802.11ad, UAVs, and free space optical communication have been evaluated in terms of the latency and power consumption performance for both the data acquisition and relaying scenarios. Analytical frameworks have been developed to capture the impact of all layers of the protocol stack, based on which an optimization framework is formulated and solved to yield optimal values for the transmit power, modulation and coding scheme, frame aggregation length, and sleep duration. The aforementioned schemes for onshore surveys have also been extended to the case of marine acquisition. Additionally, the subject of position estimation of the geophones has been investigated in terms of the Cramér-Rao bounds on the position error for mm-wave cooperative localization. Overall, this research lays the groundwork for designing real-time, energy-efficient, scalable, and standards-compliant wireless systems that can find application in seismic acquisition, offshore surveys, large-scale environmental monitoring, meteorological studies, industrial networks, and cellular/mobile backhaul.