This three-year award provides support for Douglas Blough of the Georgia Institute of Technology to work with Paolo Santi of Italy's National Research Council's (CNR) Institute for Informatics and Telematics.. The primary goal of their research is to investigate the scalability and energy efficiency of wireless ad hoc networks. In order to realize the ful potential of ad hoc networks, it is necessary to overcome current limitations in the areas of scalability and energy usage. The researchers plan to develop, evaluate, and compare new design approaches, protocols and algorithms that enable very-large-scale and energy-efficient wireless adhoc networking.
The two laboratories have complementary capabilities. The US laboratory will be responsible for continuing development of the wireless portion of the GTNetS simulation environment. The GTNetS simulator has the capability to efficiently model and simulate networks of up to 100,000 wireless nodes on a single computer. Analytical evaluations of the new approaches will be carried out at the CNR institute. The development of new algorithms and protocols, and design and implementation of simulation-based experiments will be done jointly by both institutions. The results of the research are expected to be applicable to the deployment of thousands of simple wireless sensor devices to monitor conditions of their environment.
