Self-Organizing, Energy Efficient, Scalable and Cost-Effective Wireless Backbone to Monitor and Administer Large Remote DoD Acreage

San Diego Research Center (SDRC) offers a team of experts in wireless sensor networks, embedded networking, mesh networking, and military communication systems to design, analyze, and prototype a MANET-based wireless backbone that not only enables remote monitoring and data acquisition from heterogeneous sensor networks over the vast remote DoD lands and facilities, but also supports cooperation between sensor networks to accomplish complex tasks and to improve energy efficiency and scalability. During Phase I, the primary focus is to develop an validate the wireless backbone architecture, adapt the connectionless network (CN) concepts and algorithms to the specific requirements of the wireless backbone, integrate environmental energy harvest-aware duty cycling, MAC and routing protocols into the CN framework, design a common software and hardware platform for the backbone nodes, and evaluate the performance of the overall system through analysis and simulations. We will leverage three bodies of prior and ongoing research to design and validate the architecture concepts and subsystem technologies: (i) the successful prior work on CN radio developed at SDRC; (ii) the large body of prior work on wireless sensor networks and related tools and technologies developed at UCLA; and (iii) optimal RF planning tools developed by SDRC.