PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


"Energy-Efficient Event Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks"

by

Mr. Yanmin Zhu


Abstract:

The wireless sensor network (WSN) technology is attracting increasing
attention from both industry and academia due to its promising potential
as a low-cost solution to a wide spectrum of real-world challenges.
Event detection is a very compelling class of applications for WSNs. For
event detection applications, the design objectives are twofold.
First, the system needs to provide quality event detection. Performance
metrics include detection latency and detectability. Second, the system
should be functional for a long lifetime, e.g., several months or even
years. In this proposal, I focus on a novel approach to event detection
using low duty-cycled sensor networks.

I propose to solve three critical issues. First, there is an intrinsic
tradeoff between event detection and energy efficiency. I characterize
the fundamental tradeoff through theoretical analysis. This is
fundamental for guiding the deployment of low duty-cycled sensor
networks for event detection. Second, when the duty cycle of the sensors
is fixed, it is highly desirable for detection applications to minimize
event detection latency. I intend to design a distributed protocol, CAS,
to cooperatively coordinate wakeups of the sensors to reduce detection
latency. Third, many applications need to guarantee that the detection
latency of any event within the sensing field be bounded by a certain
value specified the application. I intend to develop a fully distributed
protocol, PAD, to prolong the system lifetime while probabilistically
bounding the detection latency of any event. Preliminary results
demonstrate that the protocols are viable.


Date:     		Friday, 15 December 2006

Time:                   4:00p.m.-6:00p.m.

Venue:                  Room 1403
			lifts 25-26

Committee Members:      Prof. Lionel Ni (Supervisor)
                        Dr. Qiong Luo (Chairperson)
			Dr. Yunhao Liu
			Dr. Qian Zhang


**** ALL are Welcome ****