Robust and energy-efficient virtual sensor networks.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become a very popular concept throughout the last decade, due to their wide applicability in monitoring and control applications (e.g. traffic control, environmental monitoring). They are composed of low-cost, battery-powered, constrained and failure-prone sensors and actuators, which are densely, randomly and redundantly deployed, communicating using wireless radio technologies. Recently, the concept of virtualization was proposed for WSNs. It has been applied to facilitate the creation of virtual sensors that provide more meaningful information by combining readings of multiple physical sensors and to support multi-tenancy and sensor hardware reuse by collocating multiple virtual onto a single physical sensor. The goal of this project is to uncover other, unexplored, benefits of WSN virtualization. Concretely, we will develop fully distributed solutions that allow physical sensors and actuators to self-organize into highly resilient and energy-efficient virtual sensing platforms. Resilience will be provided by exploiting redundancy of sensing hardware and network functions within virtual sensors. Energy-efficiency will be improved by intelligently disabling redundant functionality. Optimizing this trade-off dynamically is the main driver of this project proposal. The first two phases will respectively study control aspects within and between virtual sensors. The third phase will extend the solutions to the highly challenging and mostly unexplored field of mobile sensors.

Keywords:WIRELESS NETWORKS, SENSOR NETWORKS, VIRTUALIZATION

Disciplines:Communication networks, Performance modelling, Data communications, Telecommunication and remote sensing, Wireless communications