Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

With the recent technological development in wireless networks, and multi-functional sensors with digital processing, power supply, diverse sensing and communication capabilities, wireless sensor networks have been undergoing a revolution that promises to have a significant impact throughout our society, from environmental applications (such as fire detection, flood detection, precision agriculture), health applications (such as telemonitoring of human physiological data) to home applications (such as smart environments and home automation). All of these applications are, in no doubt, quite beneficial to our Canadian society and economy.     In this project, we focus on applications that require fine-grain monitoring of physical environments subject to critical conditions, such as fire, leaking of toxic gases and explosions. These scenarios pose a great challenge to sensor network protocols which must provide a fast, reliable, fault-tolerant and energy-aware channel for events diffusion, which meet the requirements of query-based, event-driven and periodic sensor networks application scenarios. These requirements have to be met even in the presence of emergency conditions that can lead to node failures and path disruption to the central controller.     It is, therefore, our goal to design of novel fault-tolerant, reliable, low latency and energy aware framework for wireless sensor networks, and a web-based security surveillance for critical conditions monitoring of context aware physical environments. In such situations, it is important that information be sensed from the physical environments while the emergency state is in progress, since more precise information can be used by security and rescue teams, for operation management and improved strategic decisions.      The PIs are responding to the growing demands from the public safety and emergency preparedness department within Ontario and Canada to design a robust and reliable wireless sensors infrastructure for critical monitoring of context aware physical environments and protecting our critical infrastructures.