Ever since wireless communications became a reality there has been a growing demand
for a single sleek portable device that integrates voice communications with sensors and PDA-like
functionality. PDAs with built-in WiFi and support for Internet telephony can meet this demand.
Unfortunately, these devices are not very attractive because they drain out their battery quickly
and become unusable in only a few hours.
To be successful and competitive with cell phones, the challenge for researchers is to develop
technologies that will allow a PDA-phone device to last at least a day. In this talk,
we will address this challenge. We will describe a strategy, we call wake-on-wireless, which can
be used to increase the lifetime of any battery-operated device with a wireless connection.
As proof-of-concept we have built a device (a Universal Communicator) and supporting infrastructure
that incorporates the wake-on-wireless technique. We will describe this system and present its
performance. We will discuss its strengths and shortcomings and compare it with other alternative
approaches that one might consider. Lastly, we will show how our approach can be generalized to solve
several classical wireless networking problems.
Victor Bahl leads the Networking Research Group in Microsoft Research Redmond. He is investigating
problems related to low-power RF communications, wireless Internet access, mesh networking, location
determination techniques, sensor networks, and real-time audio-visual wireless communications. He is
the founder and chair of ACM SIGMOBILE, the founder and past editor-in-chief of ACM Mobile Computing
and Communications Review, the founder of ACM/USENIX MobiSys and author of over 50 scientific
publications. He has over 34 pending and issued patent applications in the areas of wireless
communications, digital signal processing and computer communications. He is the recipient of
Digital's doctoral engineering award and ACM SIGMOBILE's Distinguished Service award. He received
his Ph.D from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
