Battery-less Fire Sensor

Forest fires are one of the most important and prevalent type of disasters and they can create great environmental problems for Nature. It is known that they are detectable and easily preventable. When a wildfire burns out of control, the size of the losses can be almost immeasurable. The cost of such disaster may be millions of trees, in addition to losses of structures, animals (wild and farm), and human life. Automated early fire detection systems have recently received a significant amount of attention due to their importance in protecting the global environment. The purpose of this project us is to explore the design of a battery wild-fire sensor. The sensor uses a power harvesting technology to power up and transmit temperature data. 

Status: Expected to be completed by December 2018 (ongoing)

Funded by: Sonoma County Water Agency through the Waters Collaborative

More Information: Later

Energy Efficient Optical Network

As the demand for new Internet services, such as 3-D online gaming, video conferencing and learning, video telephony and downloading, and high-definition video-on-demand, becomes more widespread, the amount of electricity used by servers, communication devices, and Internet infrastructure continue to be a major concern. Various studies show that in 2005 the total energy used by data centers (including their associated infrastructure) was about 1.5% of the total U.S. electricity consumption. This is equivalent to the electricity consumed by six million homes or about three billion dollars and eight million tons of CO2emission. It is estimated that the annual IP traffic in 2012 will be about eight times larger than its level in 2005, surging the total energy cost to about 24 billion dollars.

The objective of this research is to examine and compare the power consumption between optical cross-connect equipment based on electrical and photonic matrix switching. We also like to study modular optical node architecture that is capable of offering energy-awareness in QoS-enabled traffic grooming.

Status: Ongoing
Collaborators: University of Texas at Dallas, and Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa, Italy
Publications: Click here...

Green Optical Networking

The amount of energy spent for network infrastructures can be significantly reduces using energy-aware protocols. This in turn can reduce CO2 emission in order of million metric tons. Recently, the idea of energy conservation in network infrastructure has been presented in a number of works. However, thus far, less attentions are given on power-conserving issue for optical networks. Our research focus is to design new architectures and protocols to improve energy consumptions of optical networks. We are currently working on a number of approaches:
1- Using Optical Burst Switching as an underlying switching mechanism to reduce energy consumptions.
2- Designing an energy-aware approach to improve overall energy consumption of optical nodes.
3- A number of works in wireless sensor networks have suggested cluster-based energy-adaptive MAC protocols to conserve total network energy requirements. Similar approach can be used by utilizing bundle layer in optical networks.