Periodic Report Summary - COOLNESS (Cooperative transmission and cross-layer techniques for secure wireless sensor networks)
During the last decade we have witnessed an intensive growth of digital wireless and mobile communications systems. Among the different wireless technologies, Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have emerged recently as a new networking environment that provides end users with intelligence and a better understanding and interaction with the environment. Because of their wide variety of applications we envision that, in the near future, wireless sensor networks will become an integral part of our lives. Foreseen WSN applications include home automation, smart environments, entity tracking, disaster recovery, environment monitoring, patient care and patient vital sign monitoring, among many others.
The healthcare domain is of special relevance for this project. For instance, a WSN of wearable wireless vital sign sensors (including electrocardiogram, blood pressure, etc.) and mobile wireless display devices (such as portable monitors and PDAs) can be employed to monitor patient health in an emergency hospital set up after a disaster. A number of medical wireless portable actuators (including respirators, infusion pumps, etc.) using the information of the vital sign sensors can be employed to care a patient in an intensive care unit.
WSNs represent a relatively new research field for European institutions, so the European research efforts on sensor networks generally lags a bit compared to United States. The European Commission funded two projects during the Fifth Framework Programme ('Energy efficient sensor networks' and 'Advance distributed architecture for telemonitoring services'), while some WSN projects approved in the Sixth Framework Programme. Sensation project explores a wide range of micro- and nano-sensor technologies, with the aim to achieve unobtrusive, cost-effective, real-time monitoring, detection and prediction of human physiological state in relation to wakefulness, fatigue and stress anytime, everywhere for everybody based on wireless sensors. e-SENSE project enables capturing of ambient intelligence for B3G mobile communications systems through WSN. Furthermore, two NOE deal with WSN: the project A of the Newcom and the Cruise.
The main objectives of the research project include:
- Define a protocol stack architecture able to accommodate a rich variety of sensor devices and applications.
- Propose cross-layer techniques that can be used in order to enhance the efficiency of WSN.
- Propose new efficient cooperative protocols network coding schemes for WSN.
- Propose effective, efficient and resilient security techniques to protect the cross-layer algorithms and cooperative protocols.
- Adapt the all the proposed protocols and algorithms to the requirements of healthcare applications.
- Develop a prototype for demonstrating and validate the feasibility of the proposed approaches.
- Dissemination of the project results contributing to technical journals and conferences in the course of the project lifetime.
The project has been progressing correctly, with no relevant deviations from the initial planning. Some scientific proposals have arisen from the project work and they are currently being studied in depth as planned in order to obtain performance evaluation results. In particular, the work packages 2, 3 and 4 have obtained the expected outcomes and they have provided relevant results that will be useful for the rest of the work packages. Moreover, the secondments and recruitments have been successfully carried out, just with minor changes in the dates with respect to the initially planned. The project has motivated several training activities related to the research work. Moreover, the research related to and carried out within the project has been published in 7 journal papers, 11 conference papers and 2 book chapters. In addition, two journals papers are under review.
The healthcare domain is of special relevance for this project. For instance, a WSN of wearable wireless vital sign sensors (including electrocardiogram, blood pressure, etc.) and mobile wireless display devices (such as portable monitors and PDAs) can be employed to monitor patient health in an emergency hospital set up after a disaster. A number of medical wireless portable actuators (including respirators, infusion pumps, etc.) using the information of the vital sign sensors can be employed to care a patient in an intensive care unit.
WSNs represent a relatively new research field for European institutions, so the European research efforts on sensor networks generally lags a bit compared to United States. The European Commission funded two projects during the Fifth Framework Programme ('Energy efficient sensor networks' and 'Advance distributed architecture for telemonitoring services'), while some WSN projects approved in the Sixth Framework Programme. Sensation project explores a wide range of micro- and nano-sensor technologies, with the aim to achieve unobtrusive, cost-effective, real-time monitoring, detection and prediction of human physiological state in relation to wakefulness, fatigue and stress anytime, everywhere for everybody based on wireless sensors. e-SENSE project enables capturing of ambient intelligence for B3G mobile communications systems through WSN. Furthermore, two NOE deal with WSN: the project A of the Newcom and the Cruise.
The main objectives of the research project include:
- Define a protocol stack architecture able to accommodate a rich variety of sensor devices and applications.
- Propose cross-layer techniques that can be used in order to enhance the efficiency of WSN.
- Propose new efficient cooperative protocols network coding schemes for WSN.
- Propose effective, efficient and resilient security techniques to protect the cross-layer algorithms and cooperative protocols.
- Adapt the all the proposed protocols and algorithms to the requirements of healthcare applications.
- Develop a prototype for demonstrating and validate the feasibility of the proposed approaches.
- Dissemination of the project results contributing to technical journals and conferences in the course of the project lifetime.
The project has been progressing correctly, with no relevant deviations from the initial planning. Some scientific proposals have arisen from the project work and they are currently being studied in depth as planned in order to obtain performance evaluation results. In particular, the work packages 2, 3 and 4 have obtained the expected outcomes and they have provided relevant results that will be useful for the rest of the work packages. Moreover, the secondments and recruitments have been successfully carried out, just with minor changes in the dates with respect to the initially planned. The project has motivated several training activities related to the research work. Moreover, the research related to and carried out within the project has been published in 7 journal papers, 11 conference papers and 2 book chapters. In addition, two journals papers are under review.