5th International Conference on AD-HOC
Networks & Wireless
Mani B. Srivastava, Professor, EE
Department, UCLA, USA and Editor-in-Chief, ACM Sigmobile
Mobile Computing and Communications Review
Sensor Networks: From
Smart Dust to Multi-scale, Multi-modal, Multi-user Observing Systems
Internet and wireless technologies have flattened the world by
revolutionizing the exchange of information among individuals and
organizations at a global scale over the past decade. Similar
technological forces have led to the emergence of embedded networked
sensing systems, or sensor networks, that are bringing about the next
revolution. This new local revolution is making the world "transparent"
by enabling observation of physical, biological, chemical, enterprise,
urban, social, and personal processes up close, and at spatial and
temporal details that are simply impossible otherwise. Already this
technology has led to new science resulting from observation of new
phenomena in areas ranging from the investigation of critical
microclimate on the scale of a mountain canyon, to distribution of
contaminants and their introduction into ground water supplies, to the
fine-scale properties of alpine plants. The considerable progress in
the past few years have also led to the realization that the early view
of sensor networks as "smart dust" - a large and ad hoc but flat and
homogeneous single-purpose long-lived collection of static
resource-constrained devices - needs to be considerably expanded to a
view of these systems as multi-scale, multi-modal, multi-user
rapidly-deployable actuated observing systems. The talk will describe
how the early technical challenges such as autonomous
self-configuration, energy-aware protocols, and efficient embedded
software are now giving way to new challenges involving system and data
integrity, safety and robustness, software re-configuration, and active
sensing. Moreover, as the embedded sensing technology moves from
scientific, engineering, defense, and industrial contexts to the wider
personal, social and urban contexts, a new class of applications are
emerging which draw on sensed information about people, objects, and
physical spaces, and integrate with the global Internet and cellular
infrastructure. The talk will discuss the privacy and data sharing
requirement of these applications, and speculate on their implications
on the Internet and cellular network fabric and services.