Wireless sensor networks, composed of a large number of distributed, connected, and coordinated nodes, have revealed vast potential in a plethora of applications. Our research in this area aims at providing the theoretical underpinnings and design principles for secure, energy efficient, quality assured information gathering and dissemination.

SunSPOT Projects@CReWMaN This group of projects entail work that is being done on the Sun Small Programmable Object Technology (SunSPOT) devices at CReWMaN.

Energy Efficient Routing: By exploring data correlation and employing in-network processing, fusion driven routing algorithms are aimed at jointly exploring the data structure and network topology to provide the optimal strategies for data gathering. Our research focuses not only on the transmission cost, but also fusion costs that can be significant for vectorial sensing data. Towards this end, we have designed a series of routing strategies that optimize over both fusion and transmissions costs. Theoretically and experimentally, we have shown that the proposed algorithms significantly outperform existing ones, including MST, SPT, and SLT.

In Network Data Representation and Processing: The potentially large amounts of sensed data dictate that in-network processing is essential in bandwidth limited wireless sensor networks. We are investigating data representation, compression, and processing methods for efficient information routing and dissemination in resource constrained environments. Specific areas include wavelet based signal processing and application-specific, hierarchical metadata design.

Intrusion Detection and Defense: Node compromise and malicious node infiltration are common threats for wireless sensor networks in unattended and hostile environments. By exploring a set of rich and powerful mathematical tools spanning epidemic theory, cooperative game theory, belief and reputation model, and information theory, we are designing efficient, effective, and distributed methods for detecting and defending against various levels of intrusions in wireless sensor networks.

Application Specific QoS Provisioning: We investigate methodologies that can tailor network operations to provide only application/user specific quality of service requirements exemplified by network coverage, connectivity and data resolution. By adaptively and effectively powering off unnecessary components, our ultimate objective is to extend the network lifetime while satisfying the application requirements.

RFID based Tracking Architecture: Using Globeranger's iMotion software for developing a mobility management framework for objects tagged with RFID labels, we intend to design a protocol for handling the movement of objects between organizations and extend this to a generic object tracking framework in conjunction with sensors.

     

Secure Wireless Sensor Network Testbed

Description: A Sensor Network Testbed for

1. Key establishment and management: how to develop an efficient mechanism to deploy keys to all the sensors with desirable scalability under the stringent resource limitation with a goal to achieve how to design effective security protocols to distribute, establish and maintain the keys among the sensors.

2. Secure routing: considering routing in sensor networks with a goal to achieve how to prevent the malicious nodes from launching attacks that either tries to change the topology (routing information) of the network or deplete the resource of legal nodes.

3. Information security: after secure communication setup via key information, once some nodes get compromised, that is, keys are known by the adversary with a goal to achieve how to detect the compromised nodes and minimize the damage caused by them