NeTS:Small:Supporting Multi-Missions in Wireless Sensor Networks

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

Wireless sensor networks have been applied to many military and commercial applications. However, the sensor network envisioned so far is targeted for a single mission and often designed for some particular application. As sensors become widely deployed, multiple missions, each with different requirements, may share common sensors to achieve their goals. Each mission may have its own requirements for the type of data being reported, the sampling rate, accuracy, and location of the sampling. From resource management point of view, it will be cost effective for sensor networks to support multiple missions instead of a single mission. The specific goal of this project is to support multi-missions in wireless sensor networks.

The project addresses four intertwined issues: (i) various mission-driven scheduling protocols which can optimize the sensor coverage will be designed, implemented, and evaluated; (ii) novel techniques will be developed to disseminate the mission switch code/command to the affected sensor nodes quickly and efficiently; (iii) mission-driven sensor assignment schemes will be designed to maximize the network utility; (iv) mission-specific network configurations will be investigated to meet the real-time requirements of data transfer for dynamic and competing missions. This project will make significant theoretical advances in understanding and designing multi-mission oriented sensor networks, and will develop comprehensive protocols to support multi-missions in sensor networks. The success of this project is likely to have a broader impact on making wireless sensor networks more affordable and amenable to commercial, civilian, and military applications. The results of the project will be disseminated widely through high quality publications and presentations. The proposed research will also be integrated with the education curricula at Penn State University.