The Intrusion Detection, Tracking and Information Collection in Mobile Sensor Networks

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering


PhD Thesis Defence


Title: "The Intrusion Detection, Tracking and Information Collection in Mobile Sensor 
Networks"

By

Mr. Yik KEUNG


Abstract

Recently there has been an increased interest in the development of wireless 
sensor networks (WSNs), which consist of a large number of tiny sensor nodes 
with wireless communication ability. With different sensing components and 
limited computational capability from onboard microprocessors, sensor nodes are 
able to gather different local sensing information and process them. Unlike 
WSNs which are composed of stationary sensors, mobile sensor networks (MSNs) 
have a new feature of sensor mobility, and are expected to be applied in a 
variety of applications such as battlefield surveillance, hostile environment 
monitoring, and wild animal tracking. This dissertation mainly focuses on the 
challenges and research works of information collection, intrusion detection 
and tracking in MSNs. It shows that sensor mobility brings a lot of challenges 
in MSNs, but at the same time, it also provides opportunities that can be 
explored for performance enhancement. In practice, sensor network systems are 
highly application driven and their applicability are closely related to 
different application environments.

We first formulate and study the delay-constrained information coverage problem 
in both single hop case and relay assisted case. In single hop case, our 
formulation takes advantage of the sensor mobility for sensing information 
collection, which takes place when a sensor moves into the proximity of 
stationary sink nodes. While in relay assisted case, by taking full advantage 
of sensor mobility and rendezvous during senor node encounter, messages can be 
delivered to a sink node either directly or through relays by other sensor 
nodes. Motivated by real application needs, we propose an optimal placement of 
sink nodes, and a practical message relay and replacement algorithm for 
maximizing the sensing information collection.

Prior works in static sensor environments show that constructing sensor 
barriers with random sensor deployment can be effective for intrusion 
detection. In our second application, we study the intrusion detection problem 
in MSNs, where it is believed that mobile sensors can improve the barrier 
coverage. Specifically, we focus on providing the k-barrier coverage against 
moving intruders. The inherent relationship between the barrier coverage 
performance and a set of crucial system parameters including sensor density, 
sensing range, sensor and intruder mobility is derived. We show that the 
coverage performance can be improved by an order of magnitude with the same 
number of sensors when compared with that of the static sensor environment.

Finally, we investigate the problem of tracking moving targets in MSNs, in 
which spatial and temporal resolutions for localizing a target's trajectory are 
two important performance metrics. Spatial resolution refers to how accurate a 
target's position can be measured by sensors, while the temporal resolution 
refers to how frequently a target's position can be measured. We derive the 
minimum number of mobile sensors that are required to maintain the resolutions 
for target tracking in an MSN, and demonstrate that sensor mobility can be 
exploited to improve both spatial and temporal resolutions.


Date:			Tuesday, 25 January 2011

Time:			11:00am – 1:00pm

Venue:			Room 3501
 			Lifts 25/26

Chairman:		Prof. Yeou Koung Tung (CIVL)

Committee Members:	Prof. Bo Li (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Qian Zhang (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Lei Chen
 			Prof. Lin Gu
                         Prof. Michael Wong (PHYS)
                         Prof. Xiaohua Jia (Comp. Sci., CityU.)


**** ALL are Welcome ****