This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The project will develop efficient mechanisms for deploying and managing wireless self-organizing networks (WSONs). These networks are able to manage themselves with little or no human intervention and consequently can be deployed in remote, difficult-to-access areas, under adverse conditions, and/or when users have little or no network administration skills. As such, WSONs can have significant societal and scientific impact as key enablers of numerous applications, including emergency response, disaster relief, community networking, environmental monitoring, and surveillance.
Intellectual Merit: This work will develop theoretical foundations for efficient WSON node placement and trajectory control based on geometric computation and optimization. The technical approach explores the synergy among a variety of disciplines, including wireless communications, facility location, geometric and distributed optimization, and systems and control theory. The project will (i) explore, develop, and evaluate novel geometric computing strategies for WSON placement, management, and control in order to optimize system performance for a range of applications, and (ii) deploy the proposed strategies in real-world environments motivated by our ongoing collaborations with biologists and oceanographers.
Broader Impact: The WSON deployment and management strategies developed in this work will be key enabling technology for a variety of applications with considerable societal and scientific significance. The project also includes an important educational component. It will produce exciting MSc and PhD theses, incorporate results into graduate classes, and engage undergraduate students via field experiments, senior design projects and summer REUs.
