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WINSOC A Wireless Sensor Networks with Self-Organization Capabilities for Critical and Emergency Applications
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Datum
2006
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Shaker Verlag
Zusammenfassung
Sensor networks are currently receiving a huge attention as a basic tool to detect emergency events or monitor physical parameters of interest, like radiation, pollution, temperatures, pressures, and so on. One of the main problems in designing sensor networks, especially in cases where the network is placed in areas difficult to reach, is, on one hand, the high reliability required to the whole system and, on the other hand, the potential unreliability of the single sensor. Many technological constraints make in fact the single sensor potentially inaccurate and unreliable, because of the need for battery recharge, small complexity, low cost, etc. The other major critical issues are congestion around the sink or control nodes and scalability. The most common approach available today consists in adapting the protocol stack of communication networks to sensor networks, taking into account the specificities of the application and focusing on energy-aware design. However, requirements and constraints of sensor networks are so different from communication networks that, in many cases, it is better to devise innovative design methodologies which are not necessarily bounded to the old protocols. The key idea of WINSOC is precisely the development of a totally innovative design methodology, where the high accuracy and reliability of the whole network is achieved by introducing a suitable coupling among adjacent, low cost, sensors that gives rise to a distributed detection or estimation more accurate than that of each single sensor, without the need for sending all the data to a fusion centres. The whole network is hierarchical and composed of two layers: a lower level, composed of the low cost sensors described above, responsible for gathering information from the environment and producing locally reliable decisions, and an upper level, composed of more sophisticated nodes, whose goal is to convey the information to the control centres. The key point is the interaction among the low cost sensors that increases the overall reliability; it provides scalability and tolerance against breakdown or stand-by of some sensors, necessary for battery recharge. Thanks to its distributed processing capabilities, the risk of having a congestion around the control nodes is strongly reduced. The goal is, on one side, to develop a general purpose innovative sensor network having the distributed processing capabilities described above and, on the other side, to test applications on environmental risk management where heterogeneous networks, composed of nodes having various degree of complexity and capabilities, are made to work under realistic scenarios. More specifically, WINSOC project will address applications to small landslides detection, gas leakage detection and large scale temperature field monitoring.