CAREER: Exploiting Sensing Diversity and Conquering Communication Reality to Meet User Requirements in Performance-Critical Wireless Sensor Networks

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Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are an important new class of networked systems that integrate sensing, communication, and computation capabilities on a single, inexpensive platform. The significant scale and deep integration with their environments enable WSNs to monitor the physical world and human subjects with an unprecedented spatial and temporal granularity. WSNs designed for performance-critical applications must achieve user requirements on both sensing and communication performance, such as high detection probabilities, low false alarm rates, and bounded time delays and throughputs. Failure to meet these requirements often leads to undesirable or even catastrophic consequences. In a real deployment, both the sensing diversity, i.e., the sensing capability differences among individual sensors or sensor clusters in the deployment, and the lossy, irregular, and heterogeneous WSN communication reality must be addressed. In this project, three research thrusts with seven detailed research tasks are proposed to exploit sensing diversity and conquer communication reality so as to ensure user-requested sensing and communication performance in performance-critical WSNs. This research will enable meeting performance requirements in a number of critical application domains, including homeland security and surveillance, healthcare and assisted living, natural and physical hazard detection, etc., even when complexity and uncertainty exist in the deployed environment. It will enable psychologists to collect previously unattainable data for advancing their physiological and mental health research. It will also benefit community and health providers for their geriatric driving and aging projects. Benefits to senior residents and local retirement communities will be delivered through collaboration with the Center for Excellence in Aging and Geriatric Health. This project will also be integrated into three courses to expose undergraduate and graduate students to advanced sensor networking and system designs. It will bring students in psychology and students in computer science together to work on applying WSN technologies to physiological and mental health study of older adults. A series of planned week-long day camps and annual open houses will provide hands-on opportunities to a diverse group of minority students and high-schoolers. Distributing the research-based outcomes of this proposal through NCWIT will help increase the number of women in the field of computing.