ERHE

Very Distributed Sensor and Actuator Networks

Sensor networks have lately become an extensively researched area worldwide. The vision of many research projects is the world of millions of wireless, intercommunicating, embedded sensors gathering information from the environment. This vision raises several research problems ranging from telecommunications and power management of nodes to information processing problems.

The main objectives of the project are

• wireless communications,
• distributed data fusion algorithms and
• distributed control principles.

In wireless communications the main emphasis is on the radio resource management development. This includes the selection of the transmission rate and solving the routing problem. We also consider the security issues and how to connect the wireless sensor networks with the wired networks.

Distributed data fusion is an extremely important task in sensor networks, where the amount of data is huge. Data fusion algorithms require a lot of signaling between the nodes, and this limits the lifetime of nodes. To avoid unnecessary traffic in the network, it is worthy of studying clustered data fusion methods.

In addition to these, the ERHE project considers control aspects, i.e. how to design well performing controllers in systems where sensor networks gather the measurements. The problems faced here are related to the noisy and gapped measurements with asynchronic delays. Actuator networks that consist of numerous controlled devices acting on the process are also researched, and control algorithms for distributed MIMO systems are developed.

We cooperate internationally with UCLA, UC Berkeley and Yale University in the USA. In 2004-2005 our researchers spent altogether 24 man months in these units as visiting researchers. Our local research parties are University of Vaasa and TKK/Communications Laboratory. The research is financed by Tekes.

• Keywords: sensor network, actuator network, distribution, coordination, radio resource management, routing, data fusion, asynchronic delays
• Duration: 2003-2005
• Research areas: Wireless Automation, Operations & Maintenance, Process Control
• Related projects: DADA, RARE, WiSA
• Publications (total: 22)

Activities

• ERHE and RARE Workshop at TKK, 7.11.2003
• Seminar on Sensor Networks at TKK, 28.5.2004

Staff

• Heikki Koivo (person in charge)
• Lasse Eriksson (project manager)
• Riku Jäntti
• Vesa Hasu
• Reino Virrankoski
• Mikael Pohjola
• Pekka Komulainen
• Mohammed Elmusrati
• Karina Gribanova
• Gul Waqar Khan
• Deze Zhao

Theses

Doctoral dissertations

• Mohammed S Elmusrati: Radio resource scheduling and smart antennas in cellular CDMA communication systems (2004)

Licentiate Theses

• Deze Zhao: Channel adaptive radio resource management in cellular radio networks (2005)

Master's Theses

• Mikael Pohjola: PID Controller Design in Networked Control Systems (2006)
• Gul Waqar Khan: Maximum Parallel Links based routing scheme with Power Control for Ad Hoc Wireless Sensors Networks (2005)
• Tibor Digana: Kalman Filter Signal Fusion In Sensors (2004)
• Karina Gribanova: Packet Scheduling for Video Streaming Data in the HDR system, TKK Department of Computer Science and Engineering (2004)
• Eva Blomqvist: Security in sensor networks (2003)
• Hakan Cuzdan: Performance Comparisons of Battery Aware Routing Algorithms in Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks (2003)
• Anna Reijonen: Tuning of PID controller for varying time-delay systems (2003)