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Guest Editorial Special Issue on Cognitive Sensor Networks ENSOR networks are penetrating different aspects of daily life and a variety of new applications are being envisaged everyday. Conventional sensor networks are generally static and send all the information generated by individual nodes in the network for fusion irrespective of changing requirements and relevance of information; They focus mainly on maximizing the amount of data gathered by the network at increasingly finer scale. This naturally is not the best utilization of scarce resources such as communication bandwidth and battery. Cognitive sensor networks adapt the network communication and information configuration according to the perceived situation or event of interest. The emphasis from a cognitive perspective is on efficiently manipulating and presenting context relevant data to the users. The basic premise for cognitive sensor networks is that they are capable of adjusting not only to the communication limitations but also to the information requirements. Research and developments in cognitive sensor networks is driven by trends in information fusion, intelligent sensors, sensing grids, communication protocols, wireless communications, and complex event processing architectures. Often applications involve a large number of sensors of different physical types, possibly spanning several sensing modalities. Sensors measure the objects of interest in different orientations and resolutions and, in general, the sensor information arrives in different formats, at different levels, and is potentially incomplete or noisy. Understanding of dynamic situations requires complex cognitive modeling of situations and continuous sensing, collection, and fusion of signal and human intelligence events and reports. The objective of this Special Issue is to bring together state-of-the-art research in sensors, information processing, and communication in the context of cognitive sensor networks. The contributed papers have specifically addressed issues related to information centric sensor networks, regarding them as a multicomponent system consisting of sensors, platforms, models, communication infrastructures, that can collectively behave as a single dynamic adaptive system. Context aware sensing and communication has given rise to additional challenges. Addition of new nodes and the demand for network scalability given a limited communication bandwidth warrant the need for adaptive and optimal spectrum sharing protocols.
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Information relevance cannot be established without evaluating the sensor data against network objectives, therefore resulting in the need for in-network information processing. The data centric nature of such networks leads to the need to simultaneously manage information and network topology through the cross layer design of the sensor network. The growing use and ubiquitous nature of sensor networks pose issues when networks deployed for multiple applications need to exchange information at the network level or need to be combined for higher-level objectives. This Special Issue has focused on the cognitive aspects of sensing technology, i.e., robust and adaptive methods for data association-registration, communication cross-layer protocol design, probabilistic spectrum sensing, intelligent information processing, data fusion, ontology, goal evaluation, and integration of novel and high-performance sensors. While future interest in this field is ensured by the constant supply of emerging modalities, techniques and engineering solutions, many of the basic concepts and strategies have already matured and now offer opportunities, which the area of cognitive sensor networks can build upon. This Special Issue of the IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL on Cognitive Sensor Networks generated significant interest among the researchers. A total of 136 papers were submitted. After a thorough review process, a collection of 34 papers have been selected for publication. The papers are devoted to design, theoretical analysis, fabrication, characterization, and experimentation of different cognitive sensors and sensing systems in various areas of engineering applications. We sincerely hope this collection of papers offers a glimpse of the kind of research that is being carried out in the area of cognitive sensor networks for various applications. We are happy to have such a diverse Special Issue both in terms of its topical coverage and geographic representation. We do hope that the readers would find it interesting, thought provocative, and useful in their research and practical engineering work. We would like to thank all the authors who have contributed their work to this Special Issue. Our sincere thanks go also to all the reviewers from across the world who devoted their valuable time to review the submitted manuscripts. Finally, we are grateful to Eileen Murray at the IEEE Headquarters for making sure that the Special Issue was actually published.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSEN.2010.2089382
1530-437X/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE
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IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 11, NO. 3, MARCH 2011
SUBHAS CHANDRA MUKHOPADHYAY, Guest Editor Massey University (Manawatu) School of Engineering and Advanced Technology Palmerston North, New Zealand
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PRAMOD KUMAR VARSHNEY, Guest Editor Syracuse University The Center for Advanced Systems and Engineering Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Syracuse, NY 13244 USA
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HENRY Leung, Guest Editor University of Calgary Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Calgary, ABT2N 1N4 Canada
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ROBERT SCHOBER, Guest Editor The University of British Columbia Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Vancouver, BCV6T 1Z4 Canada
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Subhas Chandra Mukhopadhyay (SM’02–F’11) graduated from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Jadavpur University, Calcutta, India, with a Gold Medal and received the Master of Electrical Engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and the Ph.D. (Eng.) degree from Jadavpur University, and the Doctor of Engineering degree from Kanazawa University, Kanazawa, Japan. Currently, he is working as an Associate Professor with the School of Engineering and Advanced Technology, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand. He has over 20 years of teaching and research experiences. His fields of interest include sensors and sensing technology, electromagnetics, control, electrical machines, and numerical field calculation, etc. He has authored/coauthored over 240 papers in different international journals, conferences, and book chapters. He has edited nine conference proceedings. He has also edited six special issues of international journals as lead guest editor and seven books out of which five are with Springer-Verlag. Dr. Mukhopadhyay was awarded numerous awards throughout his career and attracted over NZ $3.5 M on different research projects. He is a Fellow of IET (U.K.) and an Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENTS. He is on the Editorial Board of the e-Journal on Non-Destructive Testing, Sensors and Transducers, the Transactions on Systems, Signals and Devices (TSSD), Journal on the Patents on Electrical Engineering, and the Journal of Sensors. He is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal on Smart Sensing and Intelligent Systems (www. s2is.org). He is on the Technical Program Committee of the IEEE Sensors Conference, the IEEE IMTC Conference, the IEEE DELTA Conference, and numerous other conferences. He was the Technical Program Chair of ICARA 2004, ICARA 2006, and ICARA 2009. He was the General Chair/Co-Chair of ICST 2005, ICST 2007, IEEE ROSE 2007, IEEE EPSA 2008, ICST 2008, IEEE Sensors 2008, and ICST 2010. He has organized the IEEE Sensors Conference 2009 at Christchurch, New Zealand, during October 25 to 28, 2009, as General Chair. He is the Chair of the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society New Zealand Chapter. He is a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Sensors Council.
Henry Leung received the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada. He is now a Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada. Before that he was with the Defence Research Establishment Ottawa, Canada, where he was involved in the design of automated systems for air and maritime multisensor surveillance. His research interests include chaos, computational intelligence, data mining, information fusion, nonlinear signal processing, multimedia, sensor networks, and wireless communications.
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Pramod K. Varshney (F’97) was born in Allahabad, India, on July 1, 1952. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering and computer science (with highest honors), and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, in 1972, 1974, and 1976, respectively. During 1972–1976, he held teaching and research assistantships at the University of Illinois. Since 1976, he has been with Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, where he is currently a Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Director of CASE: Center for Advanced Systems and Engineering. He served as the Associate Chair of the department during 1993–1996. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Radiology at Upstate Medical University, Syracuse. He is the author of Distributed Detection and Data Fusion, published by Springer-Verlag in 1997. He has published extensively. He has served as a consultant to several major companies. His current research interests are in distributed sensor networks and data fusion, detection and estimation theory, wireless communications, image processing, radar signal processing, and remote sensing. Dr. Varshney is the recipient of the 1981 ASEE Dow Outstanding Young Faculty Award. In 2000, he received the Third Millennium Medal from the IEEE and Chancellor’s Citation for exceptional academic achievement at Syracuse University. While at the University of Illinois, he was a James Scholar, a Bronze Tablet Senior, and a Fellow. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi. He was elected to the grade of Fellow of the IEEE in 1997 for his contributions in the area of distributed detection and data fusion. He was the Guest Editor of the Special Issue on Data Fusion of the Proceedings of the IEEE, January 1997. He serves as a Distinguished Lecturer for the AES Society of the IEEE. He is on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks and the Journal on Advances in Information Fusion. He was the President of International Society of Information Fusion during 2001.
Robert Schober (S’98–M’01–SM’08–F’10) was born in Neuendettelsau, Germany, in 1971. He received the Diplom (Univ.) and the Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Erlangen-Nuermberg, Germany, in 1997 and 2000, respectively. From May 2001 to April 2002, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada, sponsored by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Since May 2002, he has been with the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada, where he is now a Full Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Wireless Communications. His research interests fall into the broad areas of Communication Theory, Wireless Communications, and Statistical Signal Processing. Dr. Schober received the 2002 Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Award of the German Science Foundation (DFG), the 2004 Innovations Award of the Vodafone Foundation for Research in Mobile Communications, the 2006 UBC Killam Research Prize, the 2007 Wilhelm Friedrich Bessel Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the 2008 Charles McDowell Award for Excellence in Research from UBC. In addition, he received best paper awards from the German Information Technology Society (ITG), the European Association for Signal, Speech and Image Processing (EURASIP), IEEE ICUWB 2006, the International Zurich Seminar on Broadband Communications, and European Wireless 2000. He is the Area Editor for Modulation and Signal Design for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS and an Associate Editor for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VEHICULAR TECHNOLOGY. He was also the Lead TPC Co-Chair for the Wireless Communication Symposium at Globecom 2009.
