PI	Ortega, Antonio	Org	University of Southern California
Award #	AIST-05-0081	Managing Center	JPL	Status	Open
Title	Efficient Sensor Web Communication Strategies Based on Jointly Optimized Distributed Wavelet Transform and Routing

Sensor webs performing fine-grained spatiotemporal monitoring of environments have the potential to completely change many existing Earth Science tasks as well as enable new ones. Because power consumption is often a fundamental limitation faced by sensor web nodes, a key challenge in realizing the potential of a sensor web is to enable energy-efficient, high-fidelity transfer of information captured by the sensors. Researchers have noted that energy efficiency can be achieved by a tight coupling of routing and data compression strategies, but much of this work has been theoretical. We propose to develop practical algorithms for joint compression and routing based on distributed wavelet transform techniques. Wavelets are known to be an excellent tool for representation and compression of correlated data. Here we develop compression tools and routing techniques that are optimized for a distributed implementation in a wireless sensor web. Substantial reductions in energy consumption can be achieved with respect to systems that do not use an intra-network wavelet transform. This also leads to improved data fidelity or increased system lifetime for a given energy constraint. Our team brings together expertise in data compression, digital communications and wireless sensor networks. Our work leverages substantial ongoing work (TRL 2) at USC, which has already demonstrated the benefits of the proposed methods. By taking advantage of existing state-of-the-art wireless sensor network facilities at USC we will advance the technology to TRL 5 after the third year. Our deliverables include a demonstration of our proposed techniques in realistic testbed settings.