[CSEE-colloq] talk: Addressing Failures in Wireless Sensor Networks, 1pm Wed 3/28, ITE325v, UMBC

[Tim Finin]

          Addressing Failures in Wireless Sensor Networks

                       Krasimira Kapitanova
                      University of Virginia

                  1:00pm Wednesday, 28 March 2012
                          ITE 325b, UMBC

Wireless sensor networks are now being used for a growing number
of applications, from mission critical applications, including
fire-fighting, emergency response, infrastructure monitoring, and
medical application, to smart home applications, such as home
automation, energy efficiency, and home security. These
applications must operate reliably and continuously due to the
high costs associated with system failure and maintenance.
However, continuous and reliable operation of sensor networks is
notoriously difficult to guarantee due to hardware degradation
and environmental changes, which can cause operating conditions
that were impossible for the original system designers to
foresee. Recent studies have found that low-cost sensors suffer
from many types of faults. Inexpensive nodes can break and
battery-powered nodes lose power. Furthermore, sensor network
installations suffer from a large number of non-fail-stop faults
in which the sensor does not completely fail. Instead, it
continues to report values, but the meaning of the values changes
or becomes invalid. This talk will discuss a number of new
run-time techniques that use application-level semantics to
detect, assess, and adapt to sensor node failures.

Krasimira Kapitanova (http://cs.virginia.edu/~kkk5z) is a PhD
candidate of Computer Science at the University of Virginia. Her
research focuses on wireless sensor network, in particular using
formal approaches for event description and detection. She is
also interested in how testing and machine learning techniques
can be used to improve the reliability of sensor network
applications.

Host: Tim Finin
See http://csee.umbc.edu/talks for more information