Title: Sensing, Communication and Computation in Smart and Connected Systems
Abstract: The widespread deployment of sensors and sensor-rich devices have made ubiquitous sensing possible, with potential applications ranging from self-driving vehicles to remote healthcare. In such applications, tens of thousands of continuous data streams are collected, reported, and analyzed instantly for real-time monitoring and control, causing various challenges in sensing, communication, and computation.
This talk will address some of the challenges in sensing and communication existing in energy harvesting (EH) sensor networks. Our objective is to study the fundamental impacts of energy variability on the sensing and transmission performances, and design optimal sensing and transmission schemes to cope with the random, intermittent and non-uniform energy supply. I will first talk about an energy-aware adaptive sensing scheme, which dynamically adjusts the sensing rate of an EH sensor based on its instantaneous battery level, and explicitly characterize its performances in terms of battery size and EH statistics. I will then discuss the impact of energy variability on the maximum achievable rate for an EH channel in the finite blocklength regime, and analyze the backoff from channel capacity as a function of codeword length. I will conclude by briefly discussing other ongoing research projects and future plan.
Bio: Dr. Jing Yang received her Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2010. From 2010 to 2012, she was a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since 2012, she has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Her research interests include energy harvesting wireless sensor networks, delay-sensitive communications and networking, statistical signal processing and learning, with applications in energy delivery systems, neuroscience, etc. She received an NSF CAREER award in 2015.