Project Title:  Distributed Energy-Aware Data-Centric Routing and Storage for Unpredictable Events Detection and Tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks.

PI: Dr. Weiying Zhu (Electrical Engineering Dept.)

Funding:  This is a project funded by Missile Defense Agency (MDA), DOD. The total amount of this grant is $145,086 for two years (Dec 21, 2007 to Dec 20, 2009).

Project Abstract: In the area of routing service in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), much less research attention has been given to the type of applications where WSNs is mainly used to detect unpredictable events and/or track their movement such as the intrusion of enemy troops/vehicles in military surveillance, and the emerging of overloaded or dangerous cargos in security monitoring on public or private properties. Generally speaking, in such kind of applications, user prefers the just-in-time report of unpredictable events, which can be derived locally using raw data sensed by one or multiple sensor nodes, rather than the large amount of raw data gathered periodically.

In order to address this open issue, this research project proposes to design and develop a distributed energy-aware data-centric routing and storage framework for unpredictable events detection and tracking in wireless sensor networks. This framework is expected to (1) achieve energy saving through energy efficiency design, (2) locally detect the happen of unpredictable events using raw data collected from one or several data sources, (3) proactively report the happen of unpredictable events to data sinks, (4) distributedly store detected events and respond to user's query through data-centric storage design for non-real time event detection/tracking applications.

As a major assessment tool in this research area, simulation will be used to test protocol functionalities, evaluate protocol performances, and compare the performance of the protocols proposed in this project with other state-of-art protocols. Modeling and simulation system will be developed for this purpose.