Energy and Delay: Network Optimization in Cyber Physical Human Sensing Systems

Abstract:

Wireless body area sensing networks (WBANs) have the potential to revolutionize health care in the near term and enhance other application domains including sports, entertainment, military and emergency situations. These WBANs represent a novel cyber-physical system that unites engineering systems, the natural world and human individuals. The coupling of bio-sensors with a wireless infrastructure enables the real-time monitoring of an individual’s health, environment and related behaviors continuously, as well as the provision of real-time feedback with nimble, adaptive, and personalized interventions. Our prior work has shown that WBAN systems present new challenges due to the following features: (a) sensors and sensed data are heterogeneous in fidelity, informativeness and costs; (b) the fusion center, in addition to the sensors, has energy limitations; and (c) the communication channel and the utility of sensors are dependent on individual’s state. Our research objective is to investigate the complex interactions and interdependencies among sensing, communication and control in WBANs and leverage them to optimize resource utilization and system performance for enhanced health care monitoring. Our main focus will be to investigate energy and delay sensitive sensing, communication, decision- making and control in the context of WBANs. In these systems, sensors with varying accuracy observe heterogeneous source signals that must be processed, communicated and used for inference and decision-making purposes. All of these operations must be carried out in the presence of constraints on energy resources at the sensors, limited communication and computational abilities and with low end-to-end delay between the sensing of information to its eventual utilization.

Informed by these features, we will pursue three research directions:

(i) Active sensing: strategic utilization of different sensing modalities,
(ii) Information adaptive communication:  adaptive resource allocation for communication as a function of “information quality,”
(iii) Delay constrained and real-time communication: joint source-channel coding under delay constraints.

Building on the work in these directions, we will adopt a global (end-to end) perspective to improve the information quality and enhance the lifetime of the network by joint optimization of sensors’ resource utilization, sensing and communication strategies and real-time encoding and decoding methods. This global approach can potentially contribute to many cyber-physical systems of interest including environmental monitoring systems, surveillance systems, smart-infrastructure and smart grid in addition to the WBAN application of our main interest.