Seminar • Systems and Networking • Large-scale Environmental Sensing of Remote Areas on a Budget

Please note: This seminar will take place in DC 1304 and online.

Jörg Liebeherr, Professor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto

By enabling large-scale in-situ environmental monitoring of remote areas, the Internet-of-Things (IoT) can play a crucial role in quantifying and responding to climate change. Sensing of uninhabited and many rural regions creates a need for inexpensive battery-powered IoT systems that can be deployed across large areas. Today, such systems are woefully unavailable.

We present a scalable IoT architecture for low-cost and low-power in-situ environmental sensing. The architecture is anchored by self-organizing LoRa mesh networks that can be scaled to a hundred nodes, covering a hundred or more square kilometers, at a unit cost of less than US-$ 15. A low-power design enables nodes to operate for years on two AA batteries in many sensing applications. LoRa mesh networks connect to a cloud-based IoT backend via a battery-powered modular gateway, which supports Internet access over a WiFi network, a cellular network, and a low-earth orbit satellite system.

The talk presents joint work with Dixin Wu and Alexandru Bogdan.

Bio: Jörg Liebeherr received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1991. After a Postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia in 1992. Since Fall 2005, he is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Toronto.

He was Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Network in 1999–2000. He was co-recipient of a best paper award at ACM Sigmetrics 2005. He was elected to the Board of Governors of the IEEE Communications Society for 2003–2005, and chair of the IEEE Communications Society Technical Committee on Computer Communications in 2004–2005. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. His current research interests include network calculus and self-organizing networks.

To join this seminar on Zoom, please go to https://uwaterloo.zoom.us/j/95770982150?pwd=anA1alZhd1QzcnJrU2laTHYyRnU5QT09. You can also attend in person in DC 1304.