Proceedings of the 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2006
Minitrack Summary: Wireless Sensor Networks Giuseppe Anastasi, University of Pisa,
[email protected] Edoardo Biagioni, University of Hawaii at M¯anoa,
[email protected] Stefan Olariu, Old Dominion University, Norfolk VA,
[email protected] Developments in computing and sensing hardware and in wireless communications have made it technologically feasible and economically viable to develop low-power sensor nodes that integrate general-purpose computing with multi-purpose sensing and wireless communications capabilities. Aggregating sensor nodes into sophisticated sensing, computational and communication infrastructures to form wireless sensor networks will have and is having a significant impact on a wide array of applications ranging from military, to scientific, to industrial, to health-care, to domestic, establishing ubiquitous computing that will pervade society redefining the way in which we live and work. The three sessions in this minitrack address distributed computation, energy efficiency, and the organization of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The first session is on distributed computations in WSNs, an active field of research widely considered essential to achieving the performance and effectiveness needed in an environment where both energy and overall bandwidth are severely restricted, yet substantial scaling is required for many applications. The papers in this session include routing algorithms, biologically-inspired distributed computations, and distributed target tracking with image sensors: - a paper by Gatani, Lo Re, and Ortolani on an efficient strategy for retransmitting lost packets by discovering alternative routes and using multiple paths as appropriate. - a paper (proposed for the best paper award) by Jones, Lodding, Olariu, Wilson and Xin which details an approach, inspired by biological systems and cellular automata, for implementing global computations using only local rules and local knowledge. - a paper by Ko and Berry describing a distributed computation to efficiently provide target tracking given a large network of image sensors. The second session is on energy efficiency in WSNs. Since wireless sensor networks are often deployed in locations where the electric grid is unavailable, energy efficiency has been from the very beginning one of the fundamental issues studied in WSNs. The papers in this session include algorithms for minimizing energy consumption as well as detailed measurements and analysis of the energy consumption of actual systems: - a paper by Yu and Ephremides developing an optimal sequential detection rule, and comparing the performance of this rule to non-sequential detection. a paper by Negri and Zanetti with a detailed study of the power consumption of Bluetooth-based WSNs and the tradeoff between power and performance. - a paper by Comeau, Robertson, Sivakumar, and Phillips which presents an algorithm for minimizing the energy consumed by a hierarchical WSN, analyzing both single-level and multi-level hierarchies. The final session is on more fundamental issues in WSN organization. WSNs present a number of issues that other technologies do not, including the processing and analysis of data, the possibility of intentional movement of the network sensors or at least the network components that receive (sink) the data, and the automatic formation of clusters within WSNs. This session includes: - a paper by Ilarri, Wolfson, Mena, Illarramendi, and Rishe with an approach to satisfying queries for process monitoring of data streams with prediction functions and under both window-join and value constraints. - a paper by Nickerson on heuristics for movement in sensor networks, with particular focus on the quality of service tradeoffs between additional mobility and better energy consumption, and on the movement of data sinks within the sensor network. • a paper by Uchida, Islam, Katayama, Chen, and Wada analyzing the construction and maintenance of a clusterbased (single-level hierarchical) WSN based on the elementary operations node-move-in and node-move-out, with either deterministic or randomized broadcasts. Altogether, the papers in this minitrack cover some of the more important emerging issues in the field of wireless sensor networks.
0-7695-2507-5/06/$20.00 (C) 2006 IEEE
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