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

This project aims to investigate energy and delay sensitive sensing, communication, decision-making and control in the context of cyber physical systems. We particularly focus on systems where sensors with varying accuracy observe heterogeneous source signals that must be processed and communicated and used for inference and decision-making purposes. All of these operations must be carried out in the presence of constraints on power and 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. Our focus is on optimal use of sensor resources such as energy, new sensing and communication paradigms that balance information quality and energy expenditure and real-time encoding and decoding methods that provide strict delay guarantees on information delivery. Motivated by the PI’s prior work in wireless body area networks (WBANs), we investigate (i) estimation of a discrete-time, finite-state Markov chain representing the states of the monitored individual using active sensing, (b) minimax estimation of an uncertain process with the goal of keeping the worst possible estimation error small at all time instants, (c) communication and coordination strategies under strict delay constraints; (d) decentralized scheduling and estimation for limited-energy sensors sharing a communication channel.