Initial Project Proposal

Goals: Explore and understand the link layer design tradeoffs and
constraints for short range, single channel wireless devices with
low-power requirement. We plan to focus our design on infrastructure
network mode, instead of ad hoc mode, with multiple base stations
interacting with a population of MOTES.
 
These are the issues and design parameters currently under
consideration:

Physical layer: 
    1) various bit encoding scheme (such as NRZ, Manchester...etc) over
       ON-OFF-Keying.
    2) (optional) variable transmission power and receiving sensitivity.
 
Link Layer:
    1) Framing: fixed frame vs. variable sized
    2) Bandwidth utilization
    3) Power conservation scheme
    4) Error detection: checksumming vs. CRC (also possible error correction like FEC)
    5) Naming: a la Ethernet MAC address?
    6) Multiple access algorithm (hard!)
    7) Compression? Special coding for low power?
 
Metrics for evaluation:
    1) bandwidth utilization of various scheme
    2) link-to-link latency
    3) energy cost (J/bit sent)
    4) MAC Layer
        a) efficiency
            i) bandwidth utilization
            ii) latency
        b) scalability
        c) "ad hoc-ness", how well it adaptes to dynamics of device population/density
 
Issues beyond this project:
    1) Link-to-link Reliability: assume application uses end-to-end reliable transmission
    2) Network layer/transport layer
    3) Fragmentation/Reassembly