Chi-Fu Huang

The coverage problem in a wireless sensor network

One of the fundamental issues in sensor networks is the coverage problem, which reflects how well a sensor network is monitored or tracked by sensors. In this paper, we formulate this problem as a decision problem, whose goal is to determine whether every point in the service area of the sensor network is covered by at least k sensors, where k is a given parameter. The sensing ranges of sensors can be unit disks or non-unit disks. We present polynomial-time algorithms, in terms of the number of sensors, that can be easily translated to distributed protocols. The result is a generalization of some earlier results where only k = 1 is assumed. Applications of the result include determining insufficiently covered areas in a sensor network, enhancing fault-tolerant capability in hostile regions, and conserving energies of redundant sensors in a randomly deployed network. Our solutions can be easily translated to distributed protocols to solve the coverage problem.

A Two-tier heterogeneous mobile ad hoc network architecture and its load-balance routing problem

The mobile ad hoc network (MANET) has attracted a lot of interest recently. However, most of the existing works have assumed a stand-alone MANET. In this paper, we propose a two-tier, heterogeneous MANET architecture which can support Internet access. The low tier of the network consists of a set of mobile hosts each equipped with a IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN card. In order to connect to the Internet and handle the network partitioning problem, we propose that the high tier is comprised of a subset of the mobile hosts, called gateways, which can access to cellular/infrastructure networks. The high tier is heterogeneous in the sense that the network interfaces in the gateway hosts could be IEEE 802.11 cards, PHS handsets, or GPRS handsets characterized by different bandwidths and latencies. Observing that the gateways could become the bottlenecks of the two-tier network, we propose a set of solutions, namely boundary-moving, host-partitioning, and probabilistic solutions, to solve the load-balance routing issue. Implementation issues/concerns of these schemes are discussed. Simulation results are presented to compare these load-balance routing schemes.

Design and Implementation of a Real Time Video Surveillance System with Wireless Sensor Networks

One important goal of surveillance systems is to collect information about the behavior and position of interested targets in the sensing environment. These systems can be applied to many applications, such as fire emergency, surveillance system, and smart home. Recently, surveillance systems combining wireless sensor networks with video cameras have become more and more popular. In traditional video surveillance systems, the system performance and cost is proportional to the number of deployed video camera. In this paper, we propose a real time video surveillance system consisting of many low cost sensors and a few wireless video cameras. The system allows a group of cooperating sensor devices to detect and track mobile objects and to report their positions to the sink node in the wireless sensor network. Then, the sink node uses the IP cameras deployed in the sensing area to record these events and display the present situations. We also propose a camera control scheme to initialize the coverage distribution of cameras and support the inter-task handoff operations between cameras. We have implemented the proposed system with 16 sensor nodes and two IP cameras, and evaluated the system performance. The result shows that our surveillance system is adaptable to variant environments and provides real time information of the monitored environment.

THE COVERAGE PROBLEM IN THREE-DIMENSIONAL WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

One of the fundamental issues in sensor networks is the coverage problem, which reflect-show well a sensor network is monitored or tracked by sensors. In this paper, we formulate this problem as a ...

Location tracking in a wireless sensor network by mobile agents and its data fusion strategies

The wireless sensor network is an emerging technology that may greatly facilitate human life by providing ubiquitous sensing, computing, and communication capability, through which people can more closely interact with the environment wherever he/she goes. To be context-aware, one of the central issues in sensor networks is location tracking, whose goal is to monitor the roaming path of a moving object. While similar to the location-update problem in PCS networks, this problem is more challenging in two senses: (1) there are no central control mechanism and backbone network in such environment, and (2) the wireless communication bandwidth is very limited. In this paper, we propose a novel protocol based on the mobile agent paradigm. Once a new object is detected, a mobile agent will be initiated to track the roaming path of the object. The agent is mobile since it will choose the sensor closest to the object to stay. The agent may invite some nearby slave sensors to cooperatively position the object and inhibit other irrelevant (i.e., farther) sensors from tracking the object.As a result, the communication and sensing overheads are greatly reduced. Our prototyping of the location-tracking mobile agent based on IEEE 802.11b NICs and our experimental experiences are also reported.

Increasing the throughput of multihop packet radio networks with power adjustment

The packet radio network (PRN) is an attractive architecture to support mobile and wireless communication. Although the code assignment problem has been studied extensively on PRN, we observe that the power control problem has been ignored by most works, but may have significant impact on performance. By power control, we mean that the transmission ranges of stations are tunable. We show, given a PRN in which each host already received a code, how to adjust the powers of stations to control/improve the topology of the PRN without violating the original code assignment. Several schemes are proposed. Through simulations, we demonstrate that although the code assignment problem is NP-complete and thus computationally very expensive, using our power adjustment schemes can easily improve the network performance by about 20% with polynomial costs.

A Load-Balanced Guiding Navigation Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the major applications of wireless sensor networks is guiding navigation service with its goal to assist moving objects in leaving a hazardous region safely and quickly. In this paper, we propose a distributed guiding navigation protocol that can guide moving objects to multiple exits with load balancing among multiple navigation paths to the exits. With the assistances of sensor nodes, moving objects are guided to different navigation paths so that they can move to exits as soon as possible without causing congestion. In some traditional navigation algorithms, a sensor may select a wrong guiding direction when an information- updating packet has not flooded through the whole network. Hence, the guiding direction of the sensor may oscillate in a short time and guided objects will confuse with this phenomenon, called direction oscillation problem. This problem will be eliminated in our proposed protocol. Simulation results indicate that our protocol can guide moving objects to exits in shorter time and solve the direction oscillation problem effectively.

Data Gathering by Mobile Mules in a Spatially Separated Wireless Sensor Network

While wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are typically targeted at large-scale deployment, due to many practical or inevitable reasons, a WSN may not always remain connected. In this paper, we consider the possibility that a WSN may be spatially separated into multiple subnetworks. Data gathering, which is a fundamental mission of WSN, thus may rely on a mobile mule (“mule” for short) to conduct data gathering by visiting each subnetwork. This leads to the problem of minimizing the path length traversed by the mobile mule. We show that minimizing the path length, which may reflect the data gathering latency and the energy consumption of the mule is a generalization of the traveling salesman problem and is NP-complete. Some heuristics based on geometrical properties of node deployment are proposed. Our simulation results show that these heuristics perform very close to optimal solutions in most practical cases.

A Wireless Human Motion Capturing System for Home Rehabilitation

Following the trend of miniature intelligent sensing, wearing small, integrated wireless sensor nodes, such as one with accelerometers and compasses, to capture human body motions may have many applications in medical care and computer animation. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of intelligent sensors to capture human motions for home rehabilitation. We design a game to help a patient to conduct his/her rehabilitation program. For each exercise, the patient is instructed to wear sensors on specified movable body parts. The system will then estimate the quality of the movements and give scores as if it is advised by a therapist. In this way, patients will no longer feel painful and boring as that in traditional rehabilitation, which is typically done in hospitals.

Design and implementation of two-tier mobile ad hoc networks with seamless roaming and load-balancing routing capability

Due to its flexibility, mobile ad hoc network (MANET) has attracted a lot of attention recently. Most existing works, however, limit a MANET as a stand-alone network. In this paper, we propose a two-tier MANET by extending the connectivity of the MANET to the Internet. Some hosts in the MANET are equipped with cellular interfaces and are called gateways, which can provide Internet connections. Such extension would greatly improve the connectivity of MANET. To maintain seamless connectivity, we modify the mobile IP to make traversing private networks (i.e., NAT) of cellular networks possible. We also propose a load-balancing routing protocol to utilize the cellular interfaces of gateways, which are likely to be bottlenecks to the Internet. A prototype is implemented and performance results obtained from the testbed is reported.