Energy Efficient Resource Management for Wireless Sensor Networks

Recent advances in wireless communications and microelectronic devices have enabled the development of low-cost, low-power, multifunctional sensor nodes that are small in size and communicate in short distances. Of course, these tiny sensor nodes, which consist of sensing, data processing, and wireless communication components, leverage the idea of wireless sensor networks. They represent a significant improvement over traditional sensors and can be used for various applications such as military, transportation, health care, disaster recovery, warfare, homeland security.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are fast emerging as a new sensing paradigm based on the collaborative effort of large number of sensors deployed close to or inside the phenomenon to be observed, and have the potential of providing diverse services to numerous applications. The realization of these WSNs requires intensive technical research efforts especially in energy aware scalable wireless ad hoc communications protocols due to their unusual application requirements and unique constraints such as (a) placement of the sensor nodes (b) limited computation and storage capacity and (c) lifetime of the wireless sensor network due to battery.

The major research objective of this project is to develop advanced management strategy for Smart Sensor nodes that are able to self-organize and utilize the resources through media access control (MAC) protocols for a dynamic changing topology and under different environment. An Intelligent firmware stack will be developed to support the energy efficient resource management.

Principal Investigator: Assoc Professor Soong Boon Hee

Team Members:
Mr. Lau Chun Hau, Project Officer
Mr. Adnan Nasir, Ph.D student