Wireless Sensor Networks

Associate Prof. Wendi Heinzelman
Erskine Visitor

Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Rochester, NY, USA.

Fri May 09 15:10:00 NZST 2008 in Room 031, Erskine Building

Abstract

It is estimated that by the year 2010 more than 10 billion wireless sensors will be deployed for applications as diverse as environmental monitoring, agricultural monitoring, machine health monitoring, surveillance, and medical monitoring. These networks, which connect the physical world with the digital world, provide us with a richer understanding of our environment and with the ability to more accurately control our surroundings. However, there are many challenges that must be addressed before the full potential of these networks is realized.

In this talk, I will provide an overview of this exciting field of research, describing the current state-of-the-art in wireless sensor networking and the directions in which the field is headed. I will motivate the need for adaptive network management to best support dynamic application goals, and I will discuss our current research on application and network aware architectures and protocols that support adaptive network management. To provide perspective, I will also describe many of the numerous open research questions that will provide ample opportunities for innovation in the years to come.

Biography

Wendi B. Heinzelman is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and in the Computer Science Department at the University of Rochester, NY, USA. She is currently a Visiting Erskine Fellow in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Dr. Heinzelman received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 1995 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 1997 and 2000, respectively. Her current research interests lie in the areas of wireless communications and networking, mobile computing, and multimedia communication. Dr. Heinzelman received the NSF CAREER award in 2005 for her research on cross-layer architectures for wireless sensor networks, and she received the ONR Young Investigator Award in 2005 for her work on balancing resource utilization in wireless sensor networks. She is a member of Sigma Xi and the ACM and a senior member of the IEEE.