TITEL

Wireless sensor networks... under water?!

SPREKER

Paul Havinga, hoogleraar Pervasive Systems, UT

ABSTRACT

Wireless sensor networks are here, and already penetrate into many aspects of our lives. They are now used in many industrial and civilian application areas, including industrial process monitoring and control, machine health monitoring, environment and habitat monitoring, healthcare applications, home automation, and traffic control.

The idea of applying sensor networks into underwater environments (i.e., forming underwater sensor networks) has received increasing interest. Despite all odds, today’s technology is very close to opening up new ways of tackling submarine surveillance challenges and of monitoring, learning and understanding the complexity of submarine life. The key missing ingredient for turning the vision of continuous fine-grained monitoring and control of shallow/deep water into reality is the availability of an effective and cooperative underwater sensing, reasoning and communication platform, which enables sensing and actuating devices to exchange data, network together, and collaboratively and locally asses their observation environment and act upon it.

In this presentation an overview of the specific challenges of underwater sensor networks will be given, and our approach to tackle this.

BIO

Paul Havinga is full professor and chair of the Pervasive Systems research group at the Computer Science department at the University of Twente and CTO of Ambient Systems in Enschede. His research themes have focussed on wireless sensor networks, large-scale distributed systems, and energy-efficient systems. Research questions cover architectures, protocols, programming paradigms, algorithms, and applications.

In 2001 he initiated the first European project on wireless sensor networks, and many national and international projects evolved from this. In 2004 he founded the company Ambient Systems, partly based on the results of that project. In May 2007 he received the ICT Innovation Award for the successful transfer of knowledge from university to industrial use. In 2008 he co-founded the company Inertia Technology that develops activity recognition solutions with body area networks, based on completely wireless inertial sensing systems.

TAAL

Engels