A Survey on Boundary Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "A Survey on Boundary Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks"

Mr. Jiliang Wang


Abstract:

Wireless sensor networks(WSNs) have been developing rapidly in recent 
years and a large number of applications, such as environmental 
surveillance, structure monitoring, object tracking, navigation in 
emergency and the like have emerged as a consequence. In such 
applications, WSNs are usually treated as the interface from which 
applications can obtain information of the underlying world. Different 
applications rely on different features of the WSNs, for example, an 
environmental surveillance network may need the locations to indicate the 
events in the network. Among all the features, geometric properties and 
topological information are two significant ones. A typical example of the 
topological features is the boundary and hole information, which 
characterizes the perimeter and the void areas of a WSN. It plays as a 
fundamental element and indispensable input of WSN applications in various 
phases and aspects, such as deployment, sensing coverage, event detection, 
geographical routing, navigation, and application-level functionalities. 
Boundary detection is thus a crucial issue but challenging as well, due to 
the distributed infrastructure and resource-constrained nature of WSNs.

In this survey, we investigate the existing algorithms of boundary 
detection in WSNs, and classify them with a novel taxonomy. According to 
the types of information and techniques used in the process of boundary 
detection, the existing algorithms can be classified into four categories: 
location based, statistics based, local structure based and global 
infrastructure based. We analyze the advantages and disadvantages of each 
category. Our comparisons show that each algorithm has its own merits and 
application background and no particular one can beat others in all 
aspects. Thus there is still plenty of design space in this area. To 
enhance the efficiency and applicability of boundary detection algorithms, 
we point out potential research directions, including boundary detection 
algorithms applicable to network with irregular radio, algorithms 
applicable to a network with asymmetric radio links, and so on.


Date:     		Wednesday, 11 February 2009

Time:                   2:00p.m.-4:00p.m.

Venue:                  Room 4483
 			lifts 25-26

Committee Members:      Dr. Yunhao Liu (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Mounir Hamdi (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Lin Gu
 			Dr. Ke Yi


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