WNCG Authors Present at Asilomar 2003

WNCG Masters student Balaji Rengarajan presented "Connectivity of Sensor Networks with Power Control" at the Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, November 9-12, 2003. Rengarajan co-authored the paper with fellow student Jeremy Chen, who is pursuing his Ph.D., and with Profs. Sanjay Shakkottai and Ted Rappaport. Many other WNCG faculty and students were also in attendance at the conference.

The paper considers a sensor network with an average of n nodes randomly placed over a region of unit area. The authors assume that each node is equipped with a wireless transceiver, and are interested in the minimum transmit power required for maintaining connectivity of the network when power control is employed (i.e., each node can choose a power level for transmission independent of any other node). The results show that the average power gain per node (the ratio of the transmit power required without and with power control) increases with the (average) number of nodes n as [log(n)]^(α/2), where α is the path loss exponent.

The Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers is a yearly Conference held on the Asilomar Grounds in Pacific Grove, California. It provides a forum for presenting work in various areas of theoretical and applied signal processing. It is organized in cooperation with the US Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, Mission Research Corporation Monterey, CA, and the IEEE Signal Processing Society.