Plenary

Tuesday, May 23
8:30 am - 9:30 am

P. R. Kumar
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

We address the problem of synchronizing clocks in large wireless networks. We show that it is possible to synchronize clocks to have a bounded offset error irrespective of the number of nodes, when the nodes are randomly located and all choose a common range. This has implications for communication protocols such as slotted medium access control. It also has implications for wireless sensor networks where applications such as motion estimation rely on accurate knowledge of time. It is also useful in networked control, where time driven computation is important in addition to event driven computation. We also demonstrate applications of our results.

[Joint work with Vivek Borkar, Arvind Giridhar, Kurt Plarre, and Roberto Solis]

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Biography:
P. R. Kumar is Franklin W. Woeltge Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a Research Professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory. He has worked on problems in game theory, adaptive control, stochastic control, simulated annealing, neural networks, machine learning, queueing networks, manufacturing systems, scheduling, and wafer fabrication plants. His current research interests are in wireless networks, sensor networks, and the convergence of control, communication and computation. He has presented plenary lectures at conferences including the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, the SIAM Conference on Optimization, the SIAM Annual Meeting, the International Symposium on Information Theory, and ACM SenSys. He received the Donald P. Eckman award of the American Automatic Control Council. He is the recipient of the 2006 IEEE Field Award in Control Systems.