Surviving Screen-off Battery through Out-of-Band Wi-Fi Communication

The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to connect all physical devices, many powered by battery. Improving battery lifespan is one of the key factors to the success of this technology. In my recent research in combating the battle of battery life, we discover a novel paradigm, Out-of-Band Wi-Fi Communication, for client-to-client communications, which exploits Wi-Fi Beacon to create a free side-channel between clients. Exploiting this new paradigm, we develop a new power saving strategy for screen-off Wi-Fi communication, which regulates clients to send and receive packets in batches and coordinates multiple clients to communicate at different slots. Through our experiments with smartphones, we demonstrate that Out-of-Band Communication can be used to convey coordination information with close to 100% accuracy.In addition, I will give an overview about my research work centred around IoT, and share my recent effort of leading an Australia IoT Initiative, which aims to build partnerships between academia and industry to boost economic growth with significant investment in IoT.

Speaker bio: Tao Gu is currently an Associate Professor in Computer Science and IT at RMIT University. His research interests include Internet of Things, ubiquitous and mobile computing, wireless communications, sensor networks, and data analytics. In his academic career, he has always been passionate about his research, in which innovations and new ideas being discovered not only in theory, but also being deployed in real life. He has published significantly in top venues including flagship journals such as IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications and ACM/IEEE Transactions on Networking and flagship conferences such as INFOCOM and UBICOMP. He serves as many Journal Editorial Board members including IEEE Internet of Things Journal, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies. For more information, please visit https://sites.google.com/site/gutao98/ .