Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) typically consists of a large number of distributed sensors interconnected through wireless links for physical and environmental monitoring purposes. Along with sensing and monitoring capabilities, wireless sensors cooperate and communicate with themselves to deliver, share and process sensed information and assist real-time decision-making procedures through triggering appropriate alerts and actions. Existing WSN applications have already made significant impacts on a variety of real world domains including military & homeland security, environmental monitoring, industrial machine-health monitoring and control, smart homes and intelligent buildings. However, reliability, security and privacy concerns have been identified as the major obstacles to the wide deployment of this technology in most application domains. The objective of this proposed research program is to address the challenges of reliability, security, and privacy in WSN. At the system level, intelligent software agent technologies will be applied to enhance the WSN capabilities on collaboration, coordination, self-configuration and fault tolerance so as to ensure the reliability and resilience of WSN. At the communication level, WSN security and privacy will be effectively enhanced by adopting robust and fault tolerant communication mechanisms and data integrity verification; and implementing accurate authentication of sensors and controllers. Specifically, communication relays among the WSN sensors will be introduced, where the additional security risks from the relay sensors will be controlled by the proposed authentication techniques. Finally, all the technologies and solutions developed during this research program will be demonstrated in the application domains of factory automation, smart home and intelligent building, in collaboration with industrial partners. Successful utilization of these technologies will significantly improve the usefulness and adoptability of wireless sensor networks for targeted application domains, and will ultimately provide and enhance automated and real time decision-making capabilities in Canada's manufacturing and construction industries, which in turn, help increase productivity and profitability of these industries.