Mobile Communication / Wireless Sensors And Actuator Networks

 

Wireless sensor and actuator networks (WS&AN) have become an important area of research in recent years. Deployed everywhere and wirelessly interconnected, WS&AN are able to provide an environment where real world physical phenomena are electronically sampled and influenced, and are at the fingertips of applications and humans alike, thus linking the physical world with the digital world. By providing the required online sensor and actuator dimension to the Future Internet, WS&AN eventually enable the realization of the vision of Ambient Intelligence.

The increasingly growing importance of WS&AN will lead to a situation where sensor and actuator nodes will account for the majority of connected nodes in a Future Internet environment. The numbers of those nodes will be orders of magnitude higher than the currently connected nodes and will undeniably have a huge impact on the required mechanisms and architecture of the Future Internet.

Many of these devices will be gradually deployed as heterogeneous WS&AN island solutions, be it Environmental Sensor Networks (ESN), Object Sensor Networks (OSN) or Body Sensor Network (BSN) and operate a variety of different protocols for the specific application environment. The networking of these devices needs to consider both existing and future technologies for connecting to the global infrastructure. This means that scalability, interoperability and trust are important issues to solve, as are naming and addressing related to these devices, in order to achieve seamless integration into the Future Internet.

The Wireless Sensor Network Research Lab is part of the Mobile Research Group and investigates issues arising from the integration of WS&AN into the Future Internet. The efficient integration of WS&AN into the Future Internet will have implications on the design of the architecture and protocols for both WS&AN and Future Internet worlds. The following is a list of current research activities of the research lab

• Architecture principles for WS&AN systems and the Future Internet
• Network and management protocols for WS&AN
• Integration of WS&AN into IMS based service platforms
• Services and applications using sensor based context information and actuation