On April 2, 2025, Gaosheng Liu defended his PhD thesis titled “Efficient Communication and Data Aggregation in Battery-Free Internet-of-Things” at VU Amsterdam. Gaosheng was advised by Prof. Lin Wang and Prof. Henri Bal (VU Amsterdam). The thesis committee consists of Prof. Antonio Fernández Anta (IMDEA Software Institute), Prof. Nirvana Meratnia (TU/e), Prof. Qing Wang (TU Delft), Prof. Aart van Halteren (Philips and VU Amsterdam), and Prof. Ivano Malavolta (VU Amsterdam).
Gaosheng's thesis deals with the communication and networking problems in Internet-of-Things (IoT) powered by battery-free IoT devices. While providing better sustainability, battery-free IoT devices work intermittently, which brings significant challenges to the design of communication protocols. In light of this problem, Gaosheng's thesis explores the device discovery and synchronization among battery-free devices under varying environmental conditions (that affect the intermittency patterns of devices) and proposes several novel protocols to facilitate the communication and in particular data aggregation among battery-free devices. More details about the thesis can be found here.
