Base-Station Relocation for Increased Dependability of Wireless Sensor
Networks

Mohamed Younis

Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

University of Maryland Baltimore County

Baltimore, MD 21250

younis@cs.umbc.edu

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are composed of a number of sensors probing
their surroundings and disseminating the collected data to a base-station
for processing. WSN have attracted lots of attention in recent years due
to their potential in many applications such as border protection and
combat field surveillance. Given the criticality of such applications,
maintaining a dependable operation of the network is a fundamental
objective. However, the resource-constrained nature of sensor nodes and
the ad-hoc formation of the network, coupled with often an unattended
deployment, pose non-conventional challenges and motivate the need for
special techniques for the design and management of WSN. In this talk,
we highlight the potential of repositioning the base-station, which acts
as a sink node for the collected data, as a viable means for increasing
the dependability of WSN. We show that base-station relocation can be
very effective in optimizing the network functional and non-functional
performance objectives and in coping with dynamic changes in the
environment and available network resources. We further discuss a number
of interesting research problem that we are currently investigating.

Biography

Mohamed F. Younis is currently an assistant professor in the department
of computer science and electrical engineering at the university of
Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). Before joining UMBC, he was with the
Advanced Systems Technology Group, an Aerospace Electronic Systems R&D
organization of Honeywell International Inc. While at Honeywell he led
multiple projects for building integrated fault tolerant avionics, in
which a novel architecture and an operating system were developed. This
new technology has been incorporated by Honeywell in multiple products
and has received worldwide recognition by both the research and the
engineering communities. He also participated in the development the
Redundancy Management System, which is a key component of the Vehicle
and Mission Computer for NASA's X-33 space launch vehicle. Dr. Younis'
technical interest includes network architectures and protocols,
embedded systems, fault tolerant computing and distributed real-time
systems. Dr. Younis has four granted and three pending patents. He served
on multiple technical committees and published over 60 technical papers
in refereed conferences and journals.