While there have been many efficient point solutions to the in-network processing problems in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), there has been little effort to address the underlying root research problem of devising an in-network collaboration and coordination framework that can achieve standardization and integration of in-network processing protocols. The objective of this project is to design and implement such a framework.
This framework introduces a decentralized transactional model that enables a node to update the state of its singlehop neighborhood consistently and atomically. One of the key insights in this framework is to observe that singlehop wireless broadcast has many useful features for facilitating collaboration and coordination. By exploiting the atomicity and broadcast properties of singlehop wireless communication, the framework provides a simple/clean abstraction and yet manages to retain the efficiency of execution. Moreover, this project also investigates the practical uses of receiver-side collision detection in singlehop collaborative feedback collection in WSNs.
By addressing the communication and concurrent execution challenges under the hood of its simple abstractions, the framework will provide a platform for developing and deploying distributed control applications as well as WSN in-network processing protocols. As such, this framework will be useful for multi-robot cooperative control applications and WSN-robotics integration for distributed sensing. More specifically, the framework will be demonstrated by developing a distributed multiple-pursuer/multiple-evader tracking application in WSNs. The proposed career plan integrates research and education through interdisciplinary coursework development and dissemination of systems software.
While there have been many efficient point solutions to the in-network processing problems in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), there has been little effort to address the underlying root research problem of devising an in-network collaboration and coordination framework that can achieve standardization and integration of in-network processing protocols. This project aimed to design and implement such a framework. One of the key insights in this framework was to observe that singlehop wireless broadcast has many useful features for facilitating collaboration and coordination. By exploiting the atomicity and broadcast properties of singlehop wireless communication, the framework provided a simple/clean abstraction and yet managed to retain the efficiency of execution. Our framework introduced a decentralized transactional model that enables a node to update the state of its singlehop neighborhood consistently and atomically. This new model differs from the traditional read-write models in that, in contrast to being able to update only the local state, the new model enables a node to update the state of its neighborhood consistently and atomically. Moreover, this project was also the first time collision detection feedback is achieved and exploited in an extensive and practical manner for WSNs, which led to the design of more efficient protocols at several layers of the networking stack. Our project had impacts in the WSNs field, distributed control and robotics applications, ad hoc vehicular networks, and the cyber-physical systems domain. In the WSNs field, singlehop wireless broadcast has been identified as a narrow-waist suitable for standardization efforts for WSN protocols and services. Our work on developing efficient and lightweight singlehop collaboration and coordination primitives helped boost these standardization efforts. We have made our software for the Transact coordination primitive and RCD collaborative feedback collection available to the research community, and our work received many citations and stimulated new work on this topic. On a broader scale, our research provided a new paradigm in the development of distributed control programs for WSANs and cyber-physical systems. By enabling a node to update the state of its neighborhood consistently and atomically, this paradigm promises to simplify the design and deployment of distributed control applications, with great implications for the academia, industry, and society. This project supported training and education of three graduate students, and resulted in several highly-cited conference and journal publications. The project also resulted in course modules that are taught at graduate level courses on wireless communications and mobile computing.
