Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

In recent years, advances in miniaturization; low-power circuit design; simple, low power, yet reasonably efficient wireless communication equipment; and improved small-scale energy supplies have combined with reduced manufacturing costs to make a new technological vision possible: Wireless sensor networks. A sensor network is composed of a large number of sensor/actuator nodes, which are densely deployed either inside the phenomenon or very close to it. The position of nodes need not be engineered or pre-determined. This allows random deployment in inaccessible terrains or disaster relief operation. The aim is to develop and facilitate the use of scalable and modular wireless heterogeneous sensor/actuator networks in the e-Society. The proposed research is to advance fundamentally the tools we have developed in the past for Wireless Sensor Network Applications. In particular, the focus will be on Wireless Heterogeneous Sensor Networks (WHSNs) for the Internet of Things (IOT) with enhanced intelligence. The goal is to develop and facilitate the use of scalable, modular, reliable, intelligent, secure and cost effective WHSNs in order to meet the increasing variety of applications in the emerging e-Society. The objective is to develop network architectures along with supporting protocols and algorithms and network control mechanisms, with enhanced intelligence, for supporting sensors/actuators interoperating via different types of wireless networks. We plan to address and investigate challenges facing designers in establishing such networks within the framework of the IOT with AI and Machine Learning support. The focus will be on a number of applications such as smart grids, intelligent vehicular networks whether terrestrial or aerial, and smart cities. Depending on the application, one or more wireless network technology, such as WiFi, ad hoc networks, along with wireless mesh, Internet access, cloud and fog computing, 5G and 6G cellular systems would be deployed. It is part of the research objective to investigate tools and techniques for the development of different intelligent WHSN applications. To achieve this goal, we will be working on six different themes: 1) ICT in Sustainable Energy Smart Grid; 2) Connected and Autonomous Electric Vehicles; 3) Mobile Edge Cloud Computing; 4) Network Security and Privacy; 5) Self-organized, Distributed Systems; and 6) Test-bed Development. Performance evaluation methods for various architectures, protocols, algorithms, and software applications will be carried out using analytical, AI and machine learning algorithms, and simulation approaches as well as actual emulation and lab measurements over wireless sensor network test-beds.