Speaker

Aakriti Jain, Ph.D. candidate, Wayne State University

Abstract

The rise in demand for Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications has spurred the emergence of various Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) technologies in recent years, with LoRa (Long Range) standing out as a prominent player. While LoRa networks are typically designed for infrequent communications, they occasionally face sudden data bursts triggered by unpredictable events such as forest fires or volcanic eruptions. These bursts can lead to significant collisions, retransmissions, and packet loss, causing rapid battery depletion in nodes, increased network delays, and drastically reduced throughput. Successfully transmitting this traffic without loss is critical, as it plays a vital role in alerting authorities and enabling timely responses, such as evacuations during emergencies. However, the existing Media Access Control (MAC) protocol for LoRa lacks a collision avoidance mechanism and cannot handle burst traffic effectively. Modifying this protocol is challenging due to LoRa nodes' severe bandwidth and energy constraints. This raises the question: is it possible to manage such sudden traffic surges without compromising network performance? The answer, with some thought, is yes! In this talk, I will introduce Burst-MAC, a novel solution we developed to efficiently handle burst traffic in LoRa networks. I will dive into the design and functionality of our protocol, highlighting how it addresses these challenges. Our results show that Burst-MAC significantly outperforms LoRaWAN in terms of latency, throughput, and energy efficiency, offering a robust solution to manage burst traffic effectively.

Bio

Aakriti Jain is a Ph.D. candidate from Embedded Systems Lab, Department of Computer Science at Wayne State University. Her areas of research include Internet of Things, Real-Time and Embedded Systems, Wireless Networks, and Cyber-Physical Systems. Her research aims at addressing the challenges pertaining to reliability, scalability, energy-efficiency, and performance optimization in these areas, considering applications in wide-area monitoring, smart city, smart farming, smart manufacturing, through novel theory and system design. Her work is accepted globally in top international conferences including ACM/IEEE Conference on Internet of Things Design and Implementation (IoTDI), ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS), her field's flagship conference, the Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS), and ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS). Welcome to her talk!