Building Sensor Network Surveillance Systems: On the Applicability

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


PhD Thesis Defence


Title: "Building Sensor Network Surveillance Systems: On the Applicability"

By

Mr. Mo Li


Abstract

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a self-organized wireless network composed 
of a large number of sensor nodes deployed in the physical world. The 
ubiquitous deployment of a huge number of tiny embedded sensors enables a 
smarter space that better serves people by automatically monitoring and 
interacting with the physical world. To enable the pervasive usage of WSN 
systems in practice, an essential issue is to improve the applicability of such 
distributed, large-scale, remotely working and usually resource constraint 
systems. Indeed, the sensor network system is highly application driven and its 
applicability is closely related to the application environment. This 
dissertation research focuses on developing techniques that makes the sensor 
network systems more applicable in practical applications. We have been working 
on a real world project of deploying a sensor network system for underground 
coal mine surveillance. Throughout the real world project, we address several 
key problems that emerge from the practice and limit the system applicability, 
including constructing a structure-aware self-adaptive sensor network framework 
against the dynamic geological structures in the underground coal mine, 
designing customized localization and navigation approaches for the WSN 
systems, introducing a non-threshold based event detection approach that is 
capable of detecting sophisticated events, and etc. We develop theoretical 
principles and design practical protocols for implementing our ideas. Through 
intensive trace-driven simulations and real-world implementations, we evaluate 
these approaches and the results validate their effectiveness and efficiency. 
The proposed approaches can be further replanted to other application areas, 
and we believe widely employing the proposed techniques will significantly 
improve the applicability of sensor network systems in their practical usage.


Date:			Wednesday, 7 October 2009

Time:			10:00am – 12:00noon

Venue:			Room 4480
 			Lifts 25-26

Chairman:		Prof. David Hui (CBME)

Committee Members:	Prof. Yunhao Liu (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Lin Gu
 			Prof. Lionel Ni
 			Prof. Susheng Wang (ECON)
 			Prof. Jiannong Cao (Computing, PolyU)


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