COLLOQUIUM
         Computer Science Department, Boston University

Speaker: Prof. Wendi Heizelmann
	 Assistant Professor
	 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
	 University of Rochester

Title: Cross-layer Techniques for Sensor Management in Wireless Sensor Networks

Date:  November 10, 2004
Time:  11am
Place: MCS 135 (for directions, see www.cs.bu.edu/colloquium)

Abstract:

It is estimated that by the year 2010 more than 10 billion wireless
sensors will be deployed for use in applications as diverse as
environmental monitoring, machine health monitoring, surveillance, and
medical monitoring.  For these sensor networks to last for months or
years unattended, it is vital to make them as energy-efficient as
possible.  As the sensor nodes are provided solely to support the sensor
network application, each sensor's limited energy should be used in such
a way to best support the application.  In this talk, I will describe
work we are doing to design sensor management protocols that extend the
lifetime of sensor networks while enabling application quality of
service (QoS) to be met.  Sensor management essentially involves
determining what roles, such as sensing, routing, fusing, or control
points, sensors should play in the network over time.  I will motivate
why sensor management is important, from both an energy efficiency
standpoint and a congestion standpoint, and then discuss both
centralized (optimal) and distributed solutions to managing sensors.  I
will show that a cross-layer approach, where the roles of sensors are
chosen simultaneously, is better suited to sensor networks than a
traditional layered design, and I will discuss the need to incorporate
all the sensors' resources into role selection decisions. 

Short biography: 

Wendi B. Heinzelman is an assistant professor in the Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Rochester.  She
received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University
in 1995 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science from MIT in 1997 and 2000, respectively.  Her current
research interests lie in the areas of wireless communications and
networking, mobile computing, and multimedia communication.  Dr.
Heinzelman is co-chair of the 1st Workshop on Broadband Advanced Sensor
Networks (BaseNets '04), an elected member of the Design and
Implementation of Signal Processing Systems (DISPS) Technical Committee
of the Signal Processing Society, and a member of Sigma Xi, the IEEE,
and the ACM.