Fundamental Concepts for Information Gathering in Sensor Networks



Description:

Wireless networks of sensors will be widely deployed in the future because they greatly extend our ability to monitor and control the physical environment from remote locations. One of the most important communication primitives that has to be provided by sensor networks is information gathering: information from the sensors has to be forwarded to a single point for evaluation. Since sensors will exist with the ratio of (hundreds of) thousands of nodes per user, it is impossible to pay attention to any individual node. Hence, it is important to use communication methods in sensor networks that are extremely simple -- to allow a verification of their correct implementation -- and self-reconfiguring -- to allow automatic adjustments to changes in the sensor network or sensing tasks. Furthermore, since sensors are simple devices with limited processing power, storage capacity, and energy, it is important to develop routing strategies that can support information gathering as efficiently as possible. Whereas many heuristics have already been suggested for resource-efficient information gathering in sensor networks, almost no rigorous theoretical work has been performed in this area yet.

Therefore, the goal of this project is to explore fundamental concepts for self-reconfigurable and resource-efficient information gathering in wireless sensor networks.



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Christian Scheideler
Last modified: Thu April 22 2004