Dr. Dana Madison, professor of mathematics at Clarion University, is the co-author of a paper "Energy Efficient Data Gathering In Dynamic Mobile Cloud Environments" accepted at the International Conference on Cloud Computing and Virtualization 2010, which will be held at the National University of Singapore in May.

            The paper explains that a wireless sensor networking cloud (WS-Cloud) consists of sensor nodes with limited battery power and wireless communications. The research work involved  the designing of cluster-based WS-Cloud architecture to provide for the on-demand message packet passing protocols that supports data fusion techniques. The main goal was to collect and aggregate data in an energy efficient manner so that network lifetime is prolonged. The key challenge was to overcome the constraint of limited battery power to extend the network lifetime. 

            A key outcome of the research was a cluster-based architecture that can be scalable and supports different data fusion protocols. They investigated data gathering operation by proposing a cluster-based routing protocol and analyzing the performance of the protocol through quantitative analysis.

            The protocol, named Series Number Based Depth-First Data Gathering (SNBDPF, or DPFDG), is based on a new cluster architecture induced from an existing sensor network model. The new architecture consists of one or more complete clusters that are suitable for wireless intra-cluster data gathering operation. The protocol uses a serial-number-based control schedule at MAC layer to avoid collision, cluster-head rotation to control topology change and to balance energy consumption, and depth-first routing all coordinated to reduce energy dissipation.    

            Extensive simulations and analysis show that the proposed SNBDPF protocol outperforms some existing data gathering protocols such as Direct Diffusion, LEACH, HEED and PEGASIS in terms of energy efficiency, energy consumption, and network lifetime. The simulations also demonstrate that the proposed SNBDPF protocol achieves more uniform energy consumption among sensor nodes than existing protocols.

            Madison has taught in both the mathematics and computer information science departments at Clarion University since 1993. He earned his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Naval Postgraduate School and B.S. and M.A. in mathematics from the State University of New York, College at Brockport.

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