Category: Tutorial, One-day Program
Organizer: Dr. Elena Gaura, Reader in Pervasive Computing
Director of Cogent Computing Applied Research Centre, Coventry University,
Faculty of Engineering and Computing, Tel: +44-(0)24-76888909, e.gaura@coventry.ac.uk
Co-tutors: Dr. James Brusey, Senior Lecturer, Cogent Computing Applied Research Centre, Coventry University,
Faculty of Engineering and Computing, Tel: +44-(0)24-76887687, j.brusey@coventry.ac.uk
Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) offer immense potential for performing detailed spatio-temporal multi-parameter measurements in a variety of applications. When coupled with actuation, this technology could become even more powerful.
Although initially motivated by military applications like battlefield surveillance and enemy tracking, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have expanded, over the past decade, into a number of civilian domains. The high profile that WSNs are currently receiving in the popular and academic press is due to a variety of reasons, amongst which timing, maturity of contributing technologies (micro sensing and actuation, wireless communication and embedded microprocessors technologies), the first “out-of-the-lab” working prototypes, and an ever increasing pool of “dream applications” are some.
Both research and commercialization of networked sensing systems have flourished recently, with predicted commercial markets for the WSN technology of $50 billion by 2014. The foreseen applications (some boasting deployed prototypes) span a wide range of economical sectors, such as Preventive and Emergency Care, Environment Monitoring, Civil Constructions structural monitoring and Disaster Management and Space Exploration to name a few. Of these sectors, Industrial Plant and Process monitoring probably offer the most suitable (and presently feasible) opportunities for deployment of WSNs, when one considers the present level of WSN technological development and robustness of such systems. Here, WSNs are aimed to contribute to improvement of process efficiency, accurate sensing and actuation for process control, energy savings and operating conditions monitoring for both humans and machines.
The tutorial would be of interest to control systems designers, sensor technologists/designers/developers, specialists working at system level in sensors and sensor networks, and application developers considering the use of networked sensing and actuation as part of high-level intelligent systems. In the end, we will all need to understand the opportunities and constraints brought by the opening of the WSN arena.
Atendees will hopefully gain the perspective and context of the WSN field in order to make design decisions in their respective areas of work which optimally utilize or serve current and forthcoming developments in wireless sensing and actuation networks.
The audience does not need to be well-versed in the domain of wireless sensing.
The tutorial will present, in a systematic fashion, the state of the art in wireless sensor networks from a technology adoption perspective. System design principles together with selected applications are brought forward. A case is made for embedding such large scale distributed systems into control architectures through the addition of actuation to sensing. Exemplification of design techniques and design choices will be supported through a “real-life” deployment example of WSN sensing and actuation from within the area of Embedded Body Sensor Networks.
Generally, theoretical WSN designs found in the literature are inherently complex and sophisticated. When they form the basis for practical deployments, these designs have to be considerably stripped down for two main reasons:
It is clear that the approach of stripping down complex systems to achieve practical deployment is both expensive and lengthy. Application led designs rarely need the amount of complexity available at a theoretical level. Instead, concerns for robustness, data integrity, ease of use, long-life, reliability, and maintainability take over as primary design concerns. Practical deployment design processes can be considerably sped up by starting with simpler systems that are more focused on smaller sets of target applications. The design concerns specific to that application set will naturally lead the design process in terms of selecting what off-the-shelf hardware and software can be used, and what bespoke components need to be developed to satisfy the application as a whole.
The reasoning above is supported by the following topics:
INTRODUCTION TO THE DOMAIN AND TUTORIAL OVERVIEW (1 hr)
UNDERPINNING WSN TECHNOLOGY WSN (1 hr)
DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGES FOR LARGE SCALE SENSING (1 hr)
HARDWARE SUPPORT FOR WSN (1 hr)
SOFTWARE SUPPORT FOR LARGE SCALE SENSING SYSTEMS (1 hr)
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER (1h)