Karin Anna Hummel, ETH Zürich, Communication Systems Group
Where and When? - Mobility-aware Transmission Scheduling in Networks of Micro Aerial Vehicles
Abstract
Micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) are becoming increasingly popular in various application domains such as surveillance, entertainment, search and rescue, farming, or smart production. Yet, networks of MAVs are challenged by the characteristics of the MAV systems, namely the often sparse deployment of MAVs and their movement dynamics, as well as obstructions of signal propagation by the MAV's own frame and antenna properties. As a consequence, traditional wireless networks and routing protocols have to be reviewed as soon as they become airborne. In this talk, I will summarize major experimental findings of IEEE 802.11-based aerial links. Then, I will show how the fact that MAVs are flying robots equipped with various sensors and the ability to control movement can be exploited. Instead of transmitting as soon as coming in range, MAVs may leverage own and other’s current location and mobility information to determine the anticipated best place and time to transmit, following a concept termed delayed gratification. I will conclude my talk with recent insights on multi-hop networking from our experimental aerial testbed used in the SWARMIX project (www.swarmix.org) and provide an outlook on open research questions.
Bio
Karin Anna Hummel is a senior researcher, lecturer, and former Marie Curie Fellow at ETH Zurich, Communication Systems Group. Before joining ETH, she was a researcher and lecturer at the University of Vienna, Distributed Systems Group. She received her Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Vienna University of Technology in 2005, with honors. Her main research interests focus on the interplay between networking and physical mobility, targeting the fields of wireless and mobile networking in general, ad-hoc and opportunistic networking, aerial communications, and human mobility characterization. Dr. Hummel is an author of more than 75 peer-reviewed articles and books/book chapters on mobility-aware computing, self-organization, energy efficiency, mobility characterization, and (wireless) networking.