This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Numerous interesting applications have been enabled by embedded sensing technologies and significant research progress on wireless sensor networks. To further ensure a wider adoption of this emerging technology, seamless integration of wireless sensor networks with other existing networks such as WiFi and the Internet is a must. In order to address challenges that arise from such an integrated infrastructure, this project builds HeteroNet, a heterogeneous networking infrastructure, by augmenting an existing flat and homogeneous sensor network test bed. HeteroNet integrates resource constrained sensor nodes and more powerful sensing devices, stationary nodes, mobile nodes, and resource sufficient servers. These nodes communicate in wireless or wired fashion. This test bed establishes an experimental infrastructure to serve as a platform for development, testing, validation, and evaluation of the investigator's current research on middleware services for emerging applications on hybrid networks.
Research benefiting from HeteroNet includes: integration of interoperable sensor networks to the Internet, amorphous event monitoring in sensor networks, and system status monitoring for QoS-aware mobile applications. HeteroNet enables research that is not possible via simulation or current small homogeneous sensor network test bed. The findings from the research enabled by HeteroNet have a profound impact on pushing the state-of-the-art of next-generation distributed systems and networks. The development of HeteroNet also benefits educational activities at the graduate and undergraduate levels. HeteroNet is used to facilitate and improve courses on networking, distributed systems, multimedia systems, and computer architectures at the graduate and undergraduate levels. The test bed is open to other research groups on campus to enable many as yet unforeseen CISE-relevant projects, stimulating more fruitful interactions among different researchers.
