Research

Ad hoc networking for robotic swarms

Ultra-wideband swarm ranging and positioning

Collision avoidance and path planning for UAV swarms

UAV-aided edge computing

Source seeking and tracking

Swarm collaboration algorithms and applications

Networking for energy harvesting systems

「Older research」Energy efficient wireless networking

Ad hoc networking for robotic swarms

Nowadays, aerial and ground robots, wearable and portable devices are becoming smaller, lighter, cheaper, and thus popular. It is now possible to utilize tens and thousands of them to form a swarm to complete complicated cooperative tasks, such as searching, rescuing, and mapping. Low lantency ad hoc networking is critical for such applications to ensure wireless communication within such dense and dynamic swarms. This project proposes specifically designed ad hoc routing protocols for dense and dynamic swarms based on the existing optimized link state routing protocol.

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Ultra-wideband swarm ranging and positioning

Ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless technology is becoming widely adopted in everyday life, especially after the IEEE 802.15.4z standard was published in 2020. Nowadays, the newest iPhone, and AirTags from Apple, the newest Galaxy, and SmartTag from Samsung, are all supporting UWB. In the future, not only mobile devices, but also ground and aerial robots will be equipped UWB capability. This project improves the ranging protocol and the indoor positioning for dynamic and dense swarm of devices and robots.

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Related Research

  • Feng Shan, Haodong Huo, Jiaxin Zeng, Zengbao Li, Weiwei Wu, and Junzhou Luo, Paper Code
    "Ultra-Wideband Swarm Ranging Protocol for Dynamic and Dense Networks,"
    IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN), to appear. Accepted on June 11, 2022. Bibtex DOI
  • @article{shan2022ultra, title={Ultra-Wideband Swarm Ranging Protocol for Dynamic and Dense Networks}, author={Shan, Feng and Huo, Haodong and Zeng, Jiaxin and Li, Zengbao and Wu, Weiwei and Luo, Junzhou}, journal={IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking}, year={2022}, publisher={IEEE} }
  • Feng Shan, Jiaxin Zeng, Zengbao Li, Junzhou Luo, and Weiwei Wu,, Paper Slide Video Code
    "Ultra-Wideband Swarm Ranging,"
    IEEE INFOCOM 2021, Virtual Conference, May 10-13, 2021. Bibtex DOI
  • @inproceedings{shan2021ultra, title={Ultra-Wideband Swarm Ranging}, author={Shan, Feng and Zeng, Jiaxin and Li, Zengbao and Luo, Junzhou and Wu, Weiwei}, booktitle={IEEE INFOCOM 2021-IEEE Conference on Computer Communications}, pages={1--10}, year={2021}, organization={IEEE} }

Collision avoidance and path planning for UAV swarms

Collision avoidance is one of the essential needs of dynamic and dense robotic and device swarms. Moreover, Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are being widely exploited for various applications, e.g., traverse to collect data from ground sensors, patrol to monitor key facilities, move to aid mobile edge computing. We study the UAV path planning problem aiming at minimizing flight energy consumption, which is critical due to its limited onboard storage capacity. A practical speed-related energy consumption model is adopted, that is, the power consumption first decreases and then increases as speed increases.

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Related Research

  • Feng Shan, Jianping Huang, Runqun Xiong, Fang Dong, Junzhou Luo and Suyang Wang, Paper
    "Energy-Efficient General PoI-Visiting by UAV with a Practical Flight Energy Model,"
    IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), to appear. Accepted on Aug. 4, 2022. Bibtex DOI
  • @ARTICLE{shan2022tmc, author={Shan, Feng and Huang, Jianping and Xiong, Runqun and Dong, Fang and Luo, Junzhou and Wang, Suyang}, journal={IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing}, title={Energy-Efficient General PoI-Visiting by UAV with a Practical Flight Energy Model}, year={2022}, doi={10.1109/TMC.2022.3199237} }
  • Jianping Huang, Feng Shan, Runqun Xiong, Yuchao Shao, and Junzhou Luo, Paper
    "Energy-Efficient UAV Flight Planning for a General PoI-Visiting Problem with a Practical Energy Model,"
    IEEE ICCCN 2021, Athens, Greece, July 19-22, 2021. Bibtex DOI
  • @inproceedings{huang2021energy, title={Energy-Efficient UAV Flight Planning for a General PoI-Visiting Problem with a Practical Energy Model}, author={Huang, Jianping and Shan, Feng and Xiong, Runqun and Shao, Yuchao and Luo, Junzhou}, booktitle={2021 International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN)}, pages={1--10}, year={2021}, organization={IEEE} }
  • Feng Shan, Junzhou Luo, Runqun Xiong, Wenjia Wu, and Jiashuo Li, Paper Slide
    "Looking before Crossing: An Optimal Algorithm to Minimize UAV Energy by Speed Scheduling with a Practical Flight Energy Model,"
    IEEE INFOCOM 2020, Virtual Conference, July 6-9, 2020. Bibtex DOI
  • @inproceedings{shan2020looking, title={Looking before crossing: An optimal algorithm to minimize UAV energy by speed scheduling with a practical flight energy model}, author={Shan, Feng and Luo, Junzhou and Xiong, Runqun and Wu, Wenjia and Li, Jiashuo}, booktitle={IEEE INFOCOM 2020-IEEE Conference on Computer Communications}, pages={1758--1767}, year={2020}, organization={IEEE} }
  • Ziyao Huang, Weiwei Wu, Feng Shan, Yuxin Bian, Kejie Lu, Zhenjiang Li, Jianping Wang, and Jin Wang, Paper
    "CoUAS: Enable Cooperation for Unmanned Aerial Systems,"
    ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN) vol. 16, no. 3 (2020): 24:1-24:19. Bibtex DOI
  • @article{huang2020couas, title={Couas: Enable cooperation for unmanned aerial systems}, author={Huang, Ziyao and Wu, Weiwei and Shan, Feng and Bian, Yuxin and Lu, Kejie and Li, Zhenjiang and Wang, Jianping and Wang, Jin}, journal={ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN)}, volume={16}, number={3}, pages={1--19}, year={2020}, publisher={ACM New York, NY, USA} }

UAV-aided edge computing

Millions of Internet of Thing (IoT) devices have been widely deployed to support applications such as smart city, industrial Internet, and smart transportation. These IoT devices periodically upload their collected data and reconfigure themselves to adapt to the dynamic environment. Both operations are resource consuming for low-end IoT devices. An edge computing enabled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is proposed to fly over to collect data and complete reconfiguration computing tasks from IoT devices.

Related Research

  • Weidu Ye, Junzhou Luo, Feng Shan, Wenjia Wu, and Ming Yang, Paper
    "Offspeeding: Optimal energy-efficient flight speed scheduling for UAV-assisted edge computing,"
    Elsevier Computer Networks (COMNET), vol. 183 (2020): 107577. Bibtex DOI
  • @article{ye2020offspeeding, title={Offspeeding: Optimal energy-efficient flight speed scheduling for uav-assisted edge computing}, author={Ye, Weidu and Luo, Junzhou and Shan, Feng and Wu, Wenjia and Yang, Ming}, journal={Computer Networks}, volume={183}, pages={107577}, year={2020}, publisher={Elsevier} }

Source seeking and tracking

There are various type of sources that needs to be sought or tracked, such as wireless radio sources, thermal source, nuclear radiation source, and gas leakage source. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) fly quickly and freely in the sky, so they are suitable for source seeking and tracking, especially in a time critical scenario. However, the UAV can only sense the source strenght at its current location, how to design a moving strategy such that the source is found in the minimum steps is very challenging. This project design theoretically sound solutions for this research goal and build practically working systems.

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Swarm collaboration algorithms and applications

How to coordinate the collaboration for a swarm of moving things for a specific application is a challenging topic. We have made a few attempts. For example, three Crazyflie form a regular triangle with only distance information, and stage preformance.

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Networking for energy harvesting systems

Energy harvesting is a promising technique to address the energy hunger problem for thousands of wireless devices. In Radio Frequency (RF) energy harvesting systems, a wireless device first harvests energy and then transmits data with this energy, hence the ‘harvest-then-transmit’ (HTT) principle is widely adopted. We must carefully design the HTT schedule, i.e., schedule the timing between harvesting and transmission, and decide the data transmission power such that the throughput can be maximized or the delay can be minimized.

Related Research

  • Feng Shan, Junzhou Luo, Weiwei Wu, and Xiaojun Shen, Paper
    "Delay Minimization for Data Transmission in Wireless Power Transfer Systems,"
    IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), vol. 37, no. 2 (2019): 298-312. Bibtex DOI
  • @article{shan2018delay, title={Delay minimization for data transmission in wireless power transfer systems}, author={Shan, Feng and Luo, Junzhou and Wu, Weiwei and Shen, Xiaojun}, journal={IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications}, volume={37}, number={2}, pages={298--312}, year={2018}, publisher={IEEE} }
  • Weiwei Wu, Jianping Wang, Xiumin Wang, Feng Shan, and Junzhou Luo, Paper
    "Online Throughput Maximization for Energy Harvesting Communication Systems with Battery Overflow,"
    IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), vol. 16, no. 1 (2017): 185-197. Bibtex DOI
  • @article{wu2016online, title={Online throughput maximization for energy harvesting communication systems with battery overflow}, author={Wu, Weiwei and Wang, Jianping and Wang, Xiumin and Shan, Feng and Luo, Junzhou}, journal={IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing}, volume={16}, number={1}, pages={185--197}, year={2016}, publisher={IEEE} }
  • Feng Shan, Junzhou Luo, Weiwei Wu, and Xiaojun Shen, Paper Slide
    "Optimal Wireless Power Transfer Scheduling for Delay Minimization,"
    IEEE INFOCOM 2016, San Francisco, CA, USA, April 10-15, 2016. Bibtex DOI
  • @inproceedings{shan2016optimal, title={Optimal wireless power transfer scheduling for delay minimization}, author={Shan, Feng and Luo, Junzhou and Wu, Weiwei and Shen, Xiaojun}, booktitle={IEEE INFOCOM 2016-The 35th Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications}, pages={1--9}, year={2016}, organization={IEEE} }
  • Feng Shan, Junzhou Luo, Weiwei Wu, Minming Li, and Xiaojun Shen, Paper
    "Discrete Rate Scheduling for Packets with Individual Deadlines in Energy Harvesting Systems,"
    IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), vol. 33, no. 3 (2015): 438-451. Bibtex DOI
  • @article{shan2015discrete, title={Discrete rate scheduling for packets with individual deadlines in energy harvesting systems}, author={Shan, Feng and Luo, Junzhou and Wu, Weiwei and Li, Minming and Shen, Xiaojun}, journal={IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications}, volume={33}, number={3}, pages={438--451}, year={2015}, publisher={IEEE} }

「Older research」Energy efficient wireless networking

More and more Internet of Things (IoT) wireless devices have been providing ubiquitous services over the recent years. Since most of these devices are powered by batteries, a fundamental trade-off to be addressed is the depleted energy and the achieved data throughput in wireless data transmission. By exploiting the rate-adaptive capacities of wireless devices, we design rate-adaptive transmission policies to maximize the amount of transmitted data bits under the energy constraints of devices with deadline constraints.

Related Research

  • Feng Shan, Junzhou Luo, Jiahui Jin, and Weiwei Wu, Paper
    "Offloading Delay Constrained Transparent Computing Tasks with Energy-Efficient Transmission Power Scheduling in Wireless IoT Environment,"
    IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoT-J), vol. 6, no. 3 (2019): 4411-4422. Bibtex DOI
  • @article{shan2018offloading, title={Offloading delay constrained transparent computing tasks with energy-efficient transmission power scheduling in wireless IoT environment}, author={Shan, Feng and Luo, Junzhou and Jin, Jiahui and Wu, Weiwei}, journal={IEEE Internet of Things Journal}, volume={6}, number={3}, pages={4411--4422}, year={2018}, publisher={IEEE} }
  • Weiwei Wu, Jianping Wang, Minming Li, Kai Liu, Feng Shan, and Junzhou Luo, Paper
    "Energy-efficient Transmission with Data Sharing in Participatory Sensing Systems,"
    IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), vol. 34, no. 12 (2016): 4048-4062. Bibtex DOI
  • @article{wu2016energy, title={Energy-efficient transmission with data sharing in participatory sensing systems}, author={Wu, Weiwei and Wang, Jianping and Li, Minming and Liu, Kai and Shan, Feng and Luo, Junzhou}, journal={IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications}, volume={34}, number={12}, pages={4048--4062}, year={2016}, publisher={IEEE} }
  • Feng Shan, Junzhou Luo, and Xiaojun Shen, Paper
    "Optimal energy efficient packet scheduling with arbitrary individual deadline guarantee,"
    Elsevier Computer Networks (COMNET), vol. 75 (2014): 351-366. Bibtex DOI
  • @article{shan2014optimal, title={Optimal energy efficient packet scheduling with arbitrary individual deadline guarantee}, author={Shan, Feng and Luo, Junzhou and Shen, Xiaojun}, journal={Computer Networks}, volume={75}, pages={351--366}, year={2014}, publisher={Elsevier} }