The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Department of Computer Science and Engineering


PhD Thesis Defence


"Low-Power Event Detection and Wakeup Scheduling in Wireless Sensor
Networks"

By

Mr. Yanmin Zhu


Abstract

The wireless sensor network technology has attracted increasing attention
from both industry and academia due to its great potential as a low-cost
solution to a wide spectrum of real-world challenges. Event detection is a
very compelling class of applications of sensor networks, whose major task
is to detect vital physical events such as fire and gas leakage. It has
been a grand challenge to design energy-efficient sensor networks for
event detection. In this thesis, we present our systematic research on
low-power distributed event detection using embedded sensor networks.

We propose a novel approach for energy-efficient event detection using low
duty-cycled sensors. With this advantageous approach, a number of
fundamental problems should be addressed. First, we precisely
characterize, by mathematical analysis, the intrinsic tradeoff between
event detection performance and system lifetime. Second, it is highly
imperative to maximize the detection performance of the whole sensor
system, given the energy budget. We design CAS, a completely distributed
algorithm that allows each sensor to determine its wakeup time
cooperatively with its neighboring sensors. This algorithm significantly
improves event detection performance with minimal computational and
communication overhead. Third, we thoroughly explore the paramount QoS
provision issue of event detection. It is highly desirable for many
real-world applications to support network-wide QoS of event detection. To
this end, we design PAD, a fully distributed protocol which dynamically
maintains the guaranteed QoS while consuming minimal energy.


Date:			Tuesday, 3 July 2007

Time:			3:00p.m.-5:00p.m.

Venue:			Room 3501
			Lifts 25-26

Chairman:		Prof. Nancy Ip (BICH)

Committee Members:	Prof. Lionel Ni (Supervisor)
			Prof. Mounir Hamdi
			Prof. Qian Zhang
			Prof. Chung-Yee Lee (IELM)
			Prof. Chung-Ta King (Comp. Sci., National Tsing Hua U,
					     Taiwan)
			Prof. Francis Lau (Comp. Sci., HKU)


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