Security via Surveillance and Monitoring

Abstract

We consider a class of surveillance and monitoring wireless sensor networks, where sensors are highly energy constrained. The goal is to explore the design space of energy-efficient/conserving communication mechanisms and protocols for this class of applications, and to gain a better understanding of the resulting performance implications and trade-offs. Firstly, we focus on a generic security surveillance and monitoring sensor network and examine how energy efficiency might be achieved via topology control or duty-cycling of the sensor nodes. This approach aims at prolonging the network lifetime by turning sensors on and off periodically and by utilizing the redundancy in the network. Secondly, we study a specific task scenario, i.e., the selfmonitoring of a surveillance sensor network. This may be viewed as a case study where we investigate the energy-efficient design of specific networking algorithms as well as the design trade-offs involved for given performance requirements.