Abstract:

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) composed of smart sensors interconnected over wireless links are quickly becoming the technology of choice for monitoring and measuring geographically distributed physical, chemical, or biological phenomena in real time. Dynamic WSN environments encountered in environmental monitoring, surveillance, pollution control, and reconnaissance applications, require responsive management of WSN resources and their adaptive allocation to sensing, networking support, localization, and planning tasks, based on user requests and changes in the environment. A specified quality of service should however be ensured for criteria such as resolution of the raw-data, latency, network reconfiguration delay, and resource utilization in the steady-state. This project develops an integrated cross-layered approach to networking, databases, control, mobility management, and information processing in WSNs. In particular, context-aware and energy-efficient solutions are pursued that are based on opportunistic sensing and processing techniques, dynamic indexing structures, novel query language constructs, reactive mobility control algorithms, and distributed compression based routing algorithms.

The technological advances from this research will significantly simplify the deployment of WSNs and lead to novel context-aware applications. The advances will directly benefit domains such as emergency-response management, environmental threat remediation, and biological habitat monitoring. Apart from developing the required algorithms, the project will implement simulation platforms and a monitoring environment using physical devices. The platforms will provide students with new educational opportunities to actively explore information acquisition and resource management in resource-constrained environments. All project resources will be shared with the public through a project webpage.

Investigators:

Ashfaq Khokhar ashfaq@uic.edu (Principal Investigator)
Ajay Kshemkalyani (Co-Principal Investigator)
Aris Ouksel (Co-Principal Investigator)
Milos Zefran (Co-Principal Investigator)
Rashid Ansari (Co-Principal Investigator)

Graduate Student:

Wen Jiang