Asst. Prof. Dr. Demirbas awarded NSF Career Award!

An In-network Collaboration and Coordination Framework for Wireless Sensor Actor Networks

While there have been many efficient point solutions to the in-network processing problems in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), there has been little effort to address the underlying root research problem of devising an in-network collaboration and coordination framework that can achieve standardization and integration of in-network processing protocols. The objective of this project is to design and implement such a framework.

This framework introduces a decentralized transactional model that enables a node to update the state of its singlehop neighborhood consistently and atomically. One of the key insights in this framework is to observe that singlehop wireless broadcast has many useful features for facilitating collaboration and coordination. By exploiting the atomicity and broadcast properties of singlehop wireless communication, the framework provides a simple/clean abstraction and yet manages to retain the efficiency of execution. Moreover, this project also investigates the practical uses of receiver-side collision detection in singlehop collaborative feedback collection in WSNs.

By addressing the communication and concurrent execution challenges under the hood of its simple abstractions, the framework will provide a platform for developing and deploying distributed control applications as well as WSN in-network processing protocols. As such, this framework will be useful for multi-robot cooperative control applications and WSN-robotics integration for distributed sensing. More specifically, the framework will be demonstrated by developing a distributed multiple-pursuer/multiple-evader tracking application in WSNs. The proposed career plan integrates research and education through interdisciplinary coursework development, and dissemination of systems software.