My Research Theme

In this first post, I will make a brief introduction of what is my research here in Japan about. This first post is going to be useful specifically to make you understand the next posts and to put me closer to people that are interested in the same research topic. To structure my explanation, I will divide it in 3 main questions: WHAT, WHY and HOW.

1. WHAT?

In my master's course, I study ways of minimizing the energy used for transmitting information in an individual wireless link. I consider the scenario of energy-limited ad-hoc wireless networks, such as wireless sensor networks (WSN), where network nodes are typically separated from each others by distances between 0 and 200 meters.

2. WHY?

Minimization of energy is crucial for these types of networks, because they are constituted by battery-powered nodes.

If a wireless sensor network is used to monitor something inside your house, then, when one of the node's battery is over, you simply go to the supermarket, buy a new battery and replace it. Problem solved, done! Unfortunately, WSNs are more used to monitor remote and difficult to access areas. Battery replacement is impractical or impossible in this scenario.

In this case, much closer to practical applications than my house-monitoring example, the less energy is used to transmit information, the longer is the network lifetime.

Besides this reason, the present worries with the global climate changes demand the development of energy-efficient systems and that's what this research topic is all about.

3. HOW?

The focus of my research are individual liks. So, the investigation is done considering one single transmitter node transmitting information to one single receiver node. Those nodes are separated by a distance d, like in the picture shown above:



The distance d is a variable in my research, it ranges from 0 (zero) to 200 meters. My objective is finding, for a given distance d:
a) What is the minimum energy needed for transmitting one information bit?
b) How is that minimum energy reached?

• For a given modulation type (ex:M-QAM), what would be the optimum constellation size (M)?
• Considering that I am using an error correcting code, what would be the ideal rate to reach this energy minimization?
• What is the time needed to transmit all my information bits with minimum energy consumption?

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That's a basic summary of my research. There are many details that I didn't talk here. They will be exactly the theme of the next posts. If you got interested by this topic, just get the pdf versions of my papers here. I recommend that you read the papers in the following order: VTC 2010, WBS 2009, GLOBECOM 2010, if you know what I mean. If you have no patience to read all, I recommend at least the VTC 2010 if you only wanna understand my research or the GLOBECOM 2010 if you already understood and wanna know my recent results.

That's it that's all. Next post, I will bring other details about my research.

Cheers,