Overview

Sensor networks will consist of a large collection of small nodes providing collaborative and distributed sensing ability in unpredictable environment. Given their unattended nature, it is important to have an infrastructure to provide indication of node failures, resource depletion, and other abnormality. Such information can provide early warning of system failure, and guidance for incremental deployment. It can also serve to self-test for known external stimuli, or discover unknown stimuli.

In general, the key challenge in monitoring sensor networks is to collect network health indications from within the sensor network in a manner that scales well with network size, is robust to node failures, and is energy efficient. The last constraint, in particular, cannot be over emphasized: Monitoring activity is inherently energy consuming, and we need to be especially careful in the design of mechanisms for collecting monitoring data.

Publications