Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Recently, research on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has intensified, and applications of WSNs have spread from the military domain into civilian domains to perform important functions such as security surveillance, fire protection, and monitoring of environmental conditions, medical patients, forest resources, and wildlife habitats, etc. These potential applications of WSNs are at an early stage of development, and much research remains to be done to make the widespread deployment of WSNs commercially viable. The proposed project is intended to advance the frontiers of WSN research by developing techniques that enhance the performance and usefulness of WSNs. These techniques address the problems of efficiently and reliably collecting, processing, transmitting, receiving and routing sensor data from a collection of sensor nodes to the intended data sinks. Low power consumption of sensor nodes is paramount to enable a long operating lifetime for distributed sensor networks. In the physical layer, we pursue advancements of cooperative communication among sensor nodes for increased link range and to effectively combat the detrimental effects of fading, and signal modulation in sensor nodes to enable power-efficient transmission with low-cost hardware components and simple circuitry. In the network layer, we develop practical and robust distributed localization techniques that leverage the precise positioning of a small subset of all sensor nodes to allow other sensor nodes to accurately determine their positions, and efficient geographical routing techniques based on the accurate positioning information. We also develop light-weight mobile agents to enable situation-awareness between sensor nodes and enhance network operations. In the sensor data processing level, we pursue fundamental research on novel algorithms and analysis for shared situation assessment, networked sensor management and cooperative engagement capabilities based on sophisticated stochastic signal processing techniques. For proof-of-concept and technology transfer, we implement a WSN testbed based on IEEE 802.15.4 ZigBee technology, which will be used to evaluate networking and sensor data processing algorithms resulting from the research.