[CUWiN-Dev] Node power

[David Young]

On Mon, Jun 26, 2006 at 01:48:10PM -0500, Wendy Edwards wrote:
> One night when I was having dinner with some CS/ECE friends, 
> someone mentioned that Doug Jones (an ECE professor) may have
> done some research related to solar-powered network nodes.
> Has anyone from CU-Win been in touch with him?  If not, I'd be
> happy to send him an email.

Wendy,

Solar-powered nodes are interesting to me.  ISTR a few years ago, when
I spec'd the power requirements for one of our Soekris-based nodes, it
would have doubled the price of a node to add to it a solar cell, battery,
and regulator that would keep it alive through even a few days of clouds.

These days, there are alternatives to the Soekris boards that draw about
1/3rd the power.

A neat wireless network would consist of oodles of cheap nodes powered
by small solar cells; the nodes would sleep (to recharge) and wake
on a schedule that guaranteed the network stayed connected.  No node
would have to stay on all the time, so the solar cells could be small.
Deploying such a network would be easy: you would lob the nodes, which
would be wholly self-contained, onto rooftops.  I read about somebody's
study on this kind of solar-powered network somewhere, I just forget who
and where.  I think they were concerned with powering "sensor networks."

I think it is an interesting question, how do you modify a linkstate
routing algorithm so that it spits out both a wake/sleep schedule for
every node, and shortest paths over the routers that are presently awake?
Also, is it very much more difficult to do this if your routers are
hazy-sighted?  There may already be answers in the literature.

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung at ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933