Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Summer of Projects

Unlike previous summers that we were encouraged to produce academic related results, this summer we are encouraged to get some work done: the RESL is undertaking around 10 different projects to be distributed among our lab members and SNR workers. The aim of the projects are very various although all of them are, of course, are related with Wireless Sensor Networks, that is what we are doing in the laboratory. Unfortunately there is a certain secrecy about the development of those projects, so what I can tell here about them is rather limited. But I'll try to give some general description about few of them that at least allows to make an idea what they are about.
Two of our laboratory members have a military background and entered RESL to help us with the increasing interest of the Korean military on the WSN technology. We have already had previous projects and research involving military applications, such as detecting moving troops, send unmanned vehicles to enemy territory, etc. One of the current projects, codenamed u-Army, involves similar work with sensor networks such as borderline intrusion detection and others.
If something Korea has as a nation is a thirst to invest in new technologies to show the world they are at the crest of the IT wave. For this purpose, they don't just poor money into research institutions to build their projects on the labs, but generally they require pilot deployments to prove that the things work as promised. For this reason, most of our projects require such deployments of WSN into the real world. For example, the School Zone project aims to distribute sensor nodes around school areas to prevent car over-speeding and illegal parking. In the Bulkuk Temple project, we must deploy a ring of wireless sensor nodes around an ancient Korean temple to detect fires and prevent the wooden building to burn down. In another project, we will install sensors in a couple of islands to measure tide levels and river flooding.
Other projects aim to test the capabilities of the new technologies rather than providing an specific deployment scenario. For example, although sensor nodes have been used before for localization, they use techniques like ultrasound that are only usable on the lab but that can not realistically be implemented in the real world. To this regard, RESL is also investigating localization techniques using only several aspects of the RF signal, measurement values that are not affected by line-of-sigh restrictions and the like. Finally, on the RFID side of our research, this summer we will implement a prototype of the EPC Sensor Network for merging the RFID EPC Network Infrastructure with sensor data.

No comments: