​​With an optimistic assumption that a WiFi Access Point (AP) is idle for 50% of the time, an approximate energy waste caused exclusively by WiFi APs worldwide is estimated to be a striking 4.7 Billion KWh/year. Furthermore, many other types of future wireless network devices are expected to spend substantial amounts of energy in their idle listening modes, including wireless sensor and actuator nodes, wireless smart meters, mobile phones, and cellular base stations. Reducing the immense energy waste caused by idle listening is imperative to achieving sustainable ICT ecosystems. Another challenge for the future networks is scalability. The substantial increase in the number of wireless devices requires scalable and adaptive networking approaches to efficiently handle large quantities of traffic generated by these devices. In this talk I will introduce select studies that I have participated in, with the aim to tackle these challenges for future wireless networks.

Wake-up Radio (WuR) demonstrates a futuristic solution to idle listening which allows remote triggering of wireless nodes to ‘wake up’ from energy-saving, deep-sleep modes. I will first present potential applications that can benefit from WuR. Through various physical experiments and simulation studies, I will show the potential performance improvements that can be achieved by the use of WuR compared to the conventional duty-cycling solution for several application scenarios. Results prove that the WuR has great potential over duty-cycling approach in terms of energy efficiency, while providing similar latency and packet delivery performances.

Under the scalability topic, I will target ZigBee, which is a widely accepted Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) and Wireless Home Area Network (WHAN) specification that is built on IEEE 802.15.4 standard. I will introduce the physical experiment results achieved under different traffic scenarios for different network configurations. The evaluations have shown that the mechanisms and the configuration parameters from different layers of the ZigBee specification have a significant effect on the overall network performance. Moreover, the default and allowed settings of these parameters result in poor scalability. Based on these findings, we recommend the ZigBee Alliance and the IEEE 802.15.4 Task Group to update the default configuration and/or relax the allowed range of settings for the investigated parameters and mechanisms accordingly.

About Ilker Demirkol:

Ilker Demirkol is Postdoctoral Research Associate in Telematics Engineering at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, where he targets communication protocol development on wireless networks, including wireless mesh, ad hoc and sensor networks, along with wake-up radio systems, performance evaluation and optimization. Dr. Demirkol received his B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Engineering from the Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey in 1998, 2002 and 2008, respectively. Over the years he has worked in a number of research laboratories and corporations, holding several positions both in academia and industry, while publishing more than 40 journal and conference papers. He has participated in the technical program committees of more than 15 international conferences, including IEEE ICC, IEEE GLOBECOM, and EWSN. He has served as reviewer for many prestigious journals and also for the EU Framework Programme. Dr. Demirkol is the recipient of the 2010 Best Mentor Award from Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of University of Rochester. He has received a three-year research grant from the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain in 2011.

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This event will be conducted in English

Image: Wikimedia Commons – By AnonMoos