Title: Wireless Network Analysis

Speaker: Peter Sholander, Sandia National Laboratories

Date/Time: Thursday, June 28, 2007, 10:00am - 11:00am

Location: CSRI Building, Room 90 (Sandia NM)

Brief Abstract:   This talk will reprise presentations given at IEEE MILCOM and the SDR Technical Forum.  This first half of the presentation will describe the problem of exfiltrating data from a large, self-forming unattended ground-based sensor (UGS) network via multiple, parallel satellite communications channels subject to the following operational and design constraints.  The delay constraints for the bulk-data upload preclude the use of one central exfiltration point, so that a cluster-head based approach is required.  However, the available RF spectrum requires the assignment of non-overlapping frequency / time-slot / code assignments to each pair of adjacent clusters.   Results will be presented based on both graph-theoretic and analytical approaches.   

The second half of the presentation will describe an “exo-atmospheric network” that is composed of nodes in space connected in a star topology where data transfer within the network is coordinated using a polling mechanism.  The outlying nodes and the center node (“access point”) may have different antenna patterns (i.e. dipole or patch), arbitrary time-variant attitudes, and different trajectories.   Though the propagation loss may be R2, the rotation of the nodes coupled with the non-isotropic antenna patterns introduces a fading channel between the nodes and the access point.   Additionally, the network must meet certain prescribed reliability, throughput, and resource requirements.  As such, a performance analysis of two different polling mechanisms for exo-atmospheric networks will be presented.

CSRI POC: Jim Ang, 505-844-0068