CAREER: Collaborative Signal and Information Processing in Sensor Networks

Summary

A sensor network forms a loosely-coupled distributed environment where collaborative processing among multiple sensor nodes is essential in order to compensate for each other's limited capability in sensing, processing, power supply, and to tolerate faults. The extremely constraint resources of sensor networks have presented unique challenges to CSIP, the biggest of which is the contradictory requirements between energy efficiency and fault tolerance. While energy-efficient approaches try to limit the redundancy such that minimum amount of energy is required for fulfilling a certain task, redundancy is needed for providing fault tolerance since sensors might be faulty, malfunctioning, or even malicious. A balance has to be struck between these two objectives.

An integrated research plan is proposed that tackles the unique challenges presented by sensor networks. This plan concerns not only the development of effective processing algorithms, it also studies the design of supporting computing paradigms and protocols which play an important role in facilitating the collaborative processing. In particular, the following topics are studied:

• Self-deployable mobile sensor network
• Sensor network security
• Energy-efficient visual sensor network
• In-network collaborative processing for multiple target detection, unknown target identification, and robust intelligence

Both the research and educational results will be made available through the Twiki collaboration platform on the Internet.

Students

• Lidan Miao (Ph.D.)
• Ortal Arazi (Ph.D.)
• Raghul Gunasekarn (M.S.)
• Chris Beall (M.S.)

Publications

• O. Arazi, H. Qi, "Self-certified group key generation for ad hoc clusters in wireless sensor networks," IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN), San Diego, CA, October, 2005.
• L. Miao, H. Qi, F. Wang, "Biologically-inspired self-deployable heterogeneous mobile sensor networks," IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, August 2-6, 2005.