Thales will be giving a lecture. You can come in from 12:45 to get free lunch. The lecture will start at 13:00.

The subject of the lecture will be: "Energy efficient networking"

Today’s wireless (personal) communication systems (such as those under development by Thales) support a variety of computation and  communication functions. The autonomy requirement puts heavy constraints on for these nodes on the capability to manage their limited battery capacity. The fact that these devices should be able to connect in an ad-hoc fashion, with nodes relaying traffic for others, adds to the complexity of these issues.  In such networks there are two aspects to the concept system lifetime. One is the lifetime of the individual nodes in the network, which depends on the (local) workload and processing efficiency.  The other aspect is the lifetime of the whole network (the network is “the system”). Here, the network  lifetime is defined as the time until the first node runs out of energy. Under the uncertain energy supply functions, it is important to maximize the network lifetime and to switch of nodes whenever the energy supply seems to be insufficient.  The network lifetime depends on the interaction between the nodes. In particular, the network lifetime depends on the assigned transmit powers and the chosen routing algorithm.  Though many open problems exist, both lifetime modeling of individual nodes, and the network lifetime problem (in its various forms) have received considerable attention in literature. The talk is centered around the following general question: what are good practically useful energy prediction algorithms, transmit power assignment and routing algorithms that maximize the network lifetime.