CPS: Breakthrough: Energy and Delay: Network Optimization in Cyber Physical Human Sensing Systems

无线人体区域传感网络(WBAN)具有在近期内给医疗保健带来革命性变化的潜力，并增强其他应用领域，包括体育、娱乐、军事和紧急情况。这些广域网代表了一种新的网络物理系统，它将工程系统、自然界和人类个体联系在一起。生物传感器与无线基础设施相结合，能够持续实时监测个体的健康、环境和相关行为，并通过灵活、自适应和个性化的干预提供实时反馈。低功率集成电路、信号处理和无线通信领域的最新技术进步使微型、低成本、轻量化、智能医疗设备、传感器和网络平台的设计成为可能，这些设备、传感器和网络平台有可能使真正普及的无线传感器网络的概念成为现实。为了发展未来的广域网络，这项突破性的研究将追求传感、通信和控制的接口。本项目旨在研究无线体域网络的健康监测应用中的能量和延迟敏感的传感、通信、决策和控制。在这些系统中，传感器以不同的精度观察不同来源的信号，这些信号必须经过处理和通信，并用于推理和决策目的。所有这些操作都必须在传感器的功率和能量资源受到限制、通信和计算能力有限以及从信息感知到最终使用之间具有低端到端延迟的情况下进行。在这个项目中，采用了一种全局(端到端)的观点来优化网络运行，以改善信息质量和延长网络的寿命，特别关注传感器资源的优化使用，例如能量，平衡信息质量和能量消耗的新的传感和通信范例，以及为信息传输提供严格延迟保证的实时编码和解码方法。这项工作将有助于传感器资源的优化分配、自适应感知方法、实时编解码和基于事件的通信等领域的研究。拟议研究的教育影响将来自于培训新的信息技术专业人员和具有跨学科研究专长的科学家，根据拟议的研究活动开发新课程，以及继续努力将妇女和代表性不足的少数群体纳入研究计划。

Wireless body area sensing networks (WBANs) have the potential to revolutionize health care in the near term and enhance other application domains including sports, entertainment, military and emergency situations. These WBANs represent a novel cyber-physical system that unites engineering systems, the natural world and human individuals. The coupling of bio-sensors with a wireless infrastructure enables the real-time monitoring of an individual's health, environment and related behaviors continuously, as well as the provision of real-time feedback with nimble, adaptive, and personalized interventions. Recent technological advances in low power integrated circuits, signal processing and wireless communications have enabled the design of tiny, low cost, lightweight, intelligent medical devices, sensors and networking platforms that have the potential to make the concept of truly pervasive wireless sensor networks a reality. To develop the WBANs of the future, this breakthrough research will pursue the interfaces of sensing, communication and control.This project aims to investigate energy and delay sensitive sensing, communication, decision-making and control for health monitoring application of wireless body area networks. In these systems, sensors with varying accuracy observe heterogeneous source signals that must be processed and communicated and used for inference and decision-making purposes. All of these operations must be carried out in the presence of constraints on power and energy resources at the sensors, limited communication and computational abilities and with low end-to-end delay between the sensing of information to its eventual utilization. In this project, a global (end-to end) perspective is adopted that optimizes network operation to improve the information quality and enhance the lifetime of the network, focusing in particular on optimal use of sensor resources such as energy, new sensing and communication paradigms that balance information quality and energy expenditure, and real-time encoding and decoding methods that provide strict delay guarantees on information delivery. The proposed work will contribute to several research areas including optimal resource allocation at sensors, adaptive sensing methods, real-time encoding and decoding and event-based communication. The educational impact of the proposed research will come through the training of new information technology professionals and scientists with expertise in cross-disciplinary research, development of new courses based on the proposed research activity and continued efforts to include women and under-represented minorities in the research program.