An Optimal Design and Deployment of Wireless and Optical Sensor Networks

• Applicant: Professorin Dr.-Ing. Anke Schmeink
• Subject Area: Electronic Semiconductors, Components and Circuits, Integrated Systems, Sensor Technology, Theoretical Electrical Engineering
• Term: from 2016 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 325573538

A WSN consists of many densely deployed sensor nodes that are often randomly distributed in an area. The sensor nodes are small in size with low computational capacity and limited power. Due to their wide range of applications in surveillance, military, habitat monitoring,etc., they have received considerable attention in research in the last decade. The purpose of a WSN is to collect data about a phenomenon by many sensor nodes and forward them to the sinknode or a fusion center for further processing, which could be conducted through multi-hop relays. The sensors can be either optical sensors, which operate on the optical frequency regions, or Radio frequency sensors. In a WSN, the sensor deployment strategy has ahuge impact on the network’s performance as well as its effective lifetime. In this proposal, we first investigate the optimal sensor deployment problem in three dimensions. The objective is to find convenient closed form solutions for such deployment schemes that are often modeled by non-convex optimization problems. The results of this part are of substantial importance for the real world applications and are extendable to non-WSN fields, such as optimaltransmitter and receiver positioning in cellular communication systems. Second, we aim at minimizing the detection time in a WSN where all sensors operate on the same frequency band and transmit data at the same time. The results here are important for instant multitargetdetection techniques in extremely delay and frequency critical applications. In other words, using our proposed technique, the multiple target detection in the network is instant, whereas the frequency division multiplexing is not involved. It is worth mentioning that our proposed approach is also different from the conventional code division multiplexing scheme. The practicability of our approaches will be verified by experimental validation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants