NEWS

Professor Wendi Heinzelman, MiLAN Project Leader, receives ONR YIP Grant: Balancing Resource Utilization in Wireless Sensor Networks.

Networks of wireless Sensors that will enable information to be gathered and relayed to anywhere in the world are critically important in a myriad of applications. Much of the work on wireless sensor networks has focused on the design and development of the individual sensor nodes and their communication ability, typically focusing on creating energy-efficient hardware and software for particular classes of sensor network applications, with much less attention being paid to balancing the use of available resources throughout the network. Thus, optimum strategies and protocols for balancing resource usage remain unknown. Our research focuses on designing techniques to balance the data load in wireless sensor networks to ensure uniform allocation of the resources available at each sensor. The primary goal of this research is to create a global model to find optimal solutions to the "hot spot" problem caused by the converge-cast traffic patterns in sensor networks, as well as to determine dynamic, local techniques for mitigating the problem. Techniques such as optimum transmission power distribution, non-uniform sensor deployment, in-network data aggregation and deployment of multiple/mobile sinks will all be explored in detail as ways to balance resource usage. This research includes a thorough exploration of the tradeoffs between balanced resource usage and minimum resource usage to find a good operating point.

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