| We consider a sensor network involving sensors that are placed in specific locations. A point phenomenon is being detected and tracked by the activated sensors. The latter collect data characterizing parameters of the phenomenon; possibly compress it and transport it to a central node. The central node processes the received data to derive an estimate of the phenomenon’s parameters. It is essential that the estimate reproduced at the center reflects the parameters characterizing the phenomenon at a sufficiently high fidelity level. Our sensing stochastic process models account for distance dependent observation noise perturbations as well as location dependent correlations between observation noise components, and assume sample mean estimates to be employed at the processing center. As such, they are distinctly different than corresponding models presented in the literature. We develop computationally efficient algorithms for determining the specific set of sensors to be activated, so that a sufficiently low reproduction distortion level can be attained. Corresponding algorithms are also derived for a system that operates under communications capacity constraints. For those sensor selection problems that are NP-hard, we introduce computationally efficient heuristic algorithms. We use our algorithms to present illustrative system performance results. We demonstrate that the activation of sensors that belong to a critical set of sensors can provide a distinct reduction in the distortion measure, while the activation of additional sensors outside such a set may not lead to further distinct estimate fidelity improvements. |
| Izhak Rubin received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the Technion, Israel, and the Ph.D. degree from Princeton University, all in Electrical Engineering. Since 1970, he has been on the faculty of the UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Science where he is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department. During 1979-1980, he served as Acting Chief Scientist of the Xerox Telecommunications Network. He served as co-chairman of the 1981 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory and as program chairman for the 1987 IEEE INFOCOM conference. Dr. Rubin is a Fellow of IEEE. He has served as editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications, and of the journals: Wireless Networks, Optical Networks magazine, Photonic Network Communications and Communications Systems. Over the last several years, he has been responsible for developing ad hoc wireless networking and management architectures and protocols for unmanned-vehicle aided ad hoc multi-tier wireless networks.
Xiaolong Huang received his Bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering at Peking University (PKU), China, in 1999. He received his Master degree in Electrical Engineering at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong, in 2001. Currently, Xiaolong is a Ph.D. student in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), California, USA. Xiaolong Huang’s research areas include telecommunications and computer communications systems and networks, MAC, routing and energy efficient protocols of mobile wireless networks and wireless sensor networks, network simulations and performance analysis analysis. |