Matthias Heinkenschloss - Research

COllaborative Multiscale Processing and Architecture for SensorNetworkS

COMPASS is a new sensor network architecture that supports collaborative, multiscale data processing.

In a battery-powered sensor network, energy and communication bandwidth are both limited. Moreover, processing a sensor measurement locally often requires orders of magnitude less energy than communicating it to a distant node, yielding an interesting communication/computation tradeoff: whenever possible, the network should reduce the need for global communication at the expense of increased local processing and communication. A promising approach for reducing global communication is to perform signal processing to extract key information inside the sensor network in a distributed fashion, thus dramatically reducing global communication requirements without losing fidelity.

The COMPASS project is developing a new sensor network architecture whose communications hierarchy is aligned with the information flow of its computations. In particular, our research involves developing (1) a multioverlay sensor network architecture that supports both multiscale and proximity communication and computation; (2) new multiscale sensor data representations based on wavelet transforms; and (3) network services for sychronization and localization of network nodes. The research includes analysis, simulation, and a small-scale testbed of sensor nodes on the Rice University campus.

The COMPASS project is based at Rice University and features an interdisciplinary team from the Departments of Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Applied Mathematics.

COMPASS is supported by a grant from the NeTS program of the National Science Foundation.

For more details see the COMPASS Project page.