This project, developing middleware for building highly heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (WSNs), proposes creation of mechanisms to help formulate, communicate, and coordinate complex tasks in WSN. Constructed with both resource-lean and resource-rich sensors/actuators, the facility enables the following applications: Environmental Monitoring for Countering Agro-Terrorism, Surveillance for Homeland Security, and Patient Monitoring for Improved Healthcare. Since WSNs are highly heterogeneous in nature, the middleware will be developed in an integrated fashion, supporting the development, maintenance, and deployment, and execution of sensing-based applications. The work includes mechanisms for formulating complex sensing tasks, communicating tasks to individual sensor nodes, merging and processing low-level sensor readings from the individual sensors nodes to obtain desired high-level results, reporting results back to the user, designing energy-efficient distributed compression and transmission techniques, and developing network-friendly media security solutions. At present, two categories of sensing devices exist: one characterized as resource-lean (low-cost, low-power) sensing devices such as motes and smart dust developed in UC Berkeley, and the other represented by resource-rich multimedia sensors such as video camera and microphone. The infrastructure will allow the co-existence of various types of sensors and the use of multiple sensing modalities to achieve coordinates system capabilities and performance. The project includes the following activities: Middleware Development for Wireless Sensor Networks, Adaptive Optimization as Middleware Services for WSNs, Optimizing Multimedia Delivery over WSNs, Ultra-wideband (UWB) for Wireless Patient Monitoring (WPM), and WSN Applications for Homeland Security and Healthcare.
Broader Impact: This work enhances collaborative research, development and educational capabilities. The platform should be able to support a broad range of WSN applications of potential importance to national security. Expected impact could be felt in US agriculture, economy, defense, homeland security, and healthcare.
