Title: Self-organizing sensor networks

Speaker: Stephan Olariu
         Sensor Network Research Group
         Department of Computer Science
         Old Dominion University

Abstract: 
Networking unattended wireless sensors is expected to have significant 
impact on the efficiency of a large array of military and non-military 
applications. The main goal of wireless sensor networks is to obtain 
globally meaningful information from strictly local gleaned by individual 
sensor nodes. The network is deployed such that the sensors are embedded, 
possibly at random, in a target environment. Utilizing the basic 
capabilities of sensor nodes in the network different types of monitoring 
and control applications that address the target environment can be 
developed. Depending on the application at hand, the interface between 
a sensor network and the outside world is provided by aircraft, 
helicopters, ground-based vehicles, satellites, co-located sink-nodes, etc.

An individual sensor is a cheap, commodity device that has three basic 
capabilities: 
* data acquisition, 
* data processing/fusion, and 
* wireless data transmission. 

A defining characteristic of the wireless sensor network is that each 
sensor node assumes both an application level role and a network level 
role. In general, each sensor node hosts an application process (for 
data acquisition and manipulation,) as well as communication processes 
(for implementation of networking protocols, for example, routing protocols). 
Coordinated management of the operation of all sensor nodes in the 
presence of various constraints, most notably power limitations, is the 
key challenge in wireless sensor networks.  The major post-deployment 
tasks are for the sensors to acquire situation-awareness and to self-organize 
into a wireless network. Due to very stringent power limitations, these 
tasks must be performed as energy-efficiently as possible. 

This talk discusses in detail:
* our vision of post-deployment activities including training and 
  self-organization
* our transaction-based management paradigm.

Various applications of sensor networks to monitoring, surveillance and 
security will also be reviewed.

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