Run-time and Design-time Exploration of Field-level Energy, Space, Time and Fidelity Trade-offs in Distributed Sensor Networks

由于微电子技术的进步，廉价而微小的处理器，无线电，传感器和执行器正在导致一类新的嵌入式系统，通常称为无线传感器网络，它由大量物理耦合，能量受限，空间分布（通常以ad hoc方式）和无线联网的单个节点组成。这些系统提供了有关物理环境的信息，在一个前所未有的细节水平，并操纵物理环境的基础上，这些信息，在不同的应用，如安全和监视，野生动物栖息地的监测，智能传感器仪表环境，和基于条件的复杂系统的维护。 本研究涉及系统设计，优化和管理无线传感器网络的技术研究，以满足应用需求，如系统应该持续多长时间，它应该覆盖什么空间，以及如何准确和如何快速地感知环境。无线传感器网络是一种自治的、自配置的、自适应的分布式系统，它在能量受限的节点之间进行协同计算，以产生关于物理世界的所需信息。 这项研究正在开发设计时的资源分配和运行时的资源管理方法，这样的系统，同时利用能源，空间，时间和准确性方面的相互作用，在这些系统中的服务质量的概念。重点是权衡，体现在整个“传感器场”的水平，而不是个别传感器节点。这项研究是很重要的了解无线传感器网络的基本性能限制，以及为开发实用的方法来系统地部署和操作传感器网络的特定应用。

Cheap and tiny processors, radios, sensors, and actuators resulting from progress in microelectronics are leading to a new class of embedded systems, often called Wireless Sensor Networks, that consist of a large number of individual nodes that are physically-coupled, energy-constrained, spatially-distributed (often in an ad hoc fashion), and wirelessly-networked. Such systems provide information about the physical environment at an unprecedented level of detail, and to manipulate the physical environment based on this information, in diverse applications such as security and surveillance, monitoring of wildlife habitats, smart sensor-instrumented environments, and condition-based maintenance of complex systems. This research involves the study of techniques to systematically design, optimize, and manage Wireless Sensor Networks so as to meet applications requirements such as how long the system should last, what space should it cover, and how accurately and how rapidly should it sense the environment. Wireless Sensor Networks are autonomous, self-configuring, and adaptive distributed systems that perform collaborative computation among energy-constrained nodes to produce the desired information about the physical world. The study is developing design-time resource allocation and run-time resource management methods for such systems while exploiting the inter-play of energy, space, time, and accuracy dimensions that underlies the notion of quality of service in these systems. The focus is on trade-offs that manifest themselves at the level of the entire "sensor field' as opposed to the individual sensor nodes. This study is important both for understanding the fundamental performance limits of wireless sensor networks, as well as for developing practical methods to systematically deploy and operate sensor networks for specific applications.