Geometric
structures for designing sensor network middleware services
Unlike
traditional networks where topologies are logical and are treated as arbitrary
graphs, wireless sensor networks exhibit certain spatial characteristics that
are suitable for geometric modeling. We exploit the geometry of wireless sensor
networks to design middleware services for querying, tracking, clustering and even object classification.
In
Glance,
we have used geometric ideas to design a lightweight querying service for
static events in sensor networks that can be appropriately tuned to be
efficient under different publishing and querying rates. We have used
properties of logarithmic spirals to design Trail, a network tracking
service for mobile objects. In order to be scalable, it is important that
algorithms for querying and tracking in large scale sensor networks are
distributed and local. Queries should not have to be answered by one or more
centralized locations. At the same time events and tracks should not be
published network-wide either. Even the faults in the network should be handled
in a local manner. In both Glance and Trail, we have designed querying and
publishing strategies by which the locality properties are satisfied.
By exploiting
the double-band nature of the wireless radio model, FLOC is a fast and local
clustering service that partitions a
multi-hop wireless network into non-overlapping and approximately equal-sized
clusters in O(1) time. By using FLOC as a
building block, we have designed an efficient snapshot service for wireless sensor networks in which a
global state snapshot of the system is delivered to potentially all nodes with
latency, frequency and error that decrease linearly with distance.
We have also used network based estimation of the spatial
characteristics of the sensing region [influence
field] in order to classify objects monitored by a wireless sensor
network.
Publications
1. V. Kulathumani,
M. Demirbas, A. Arora, M. Sridharan, Trail: A Distance Sensitive Network Protocol for
Distributed Object Tracking , EWSN 2007, ACM TOSN 5(2) 2009
1-40
2. M. Demirbas, A. Arora and V. Kulathumani, Glance: A lightweight
querying service for Wireless Sensor Networks, Elsevier Theoretical computer
science 410 (2009) 500-513
3. V. Kulathumani
and A. Arora, Distance Sensitive
Snapshots in Wireless Sensor Networks, International
Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS), 2007
4. M. Demirbas,
A. Arora, V. Mittal, and V.
Kulathumani, A Fault Local Self-Stabilizing Clustering Service for
Wireless Adhoc Networks,
5.
Anish Arora, Prabal Dutta, Sandip
Bapat, Vinodkrishnan Kulathumani et al. A line in the sand: A Wireless Sensor Network for Target
Detection, Classification, and Tracking. Computer Networks, Special Issue on Military
Communications Systems and Technologies, 46(5), July 2004