Sensor Networks

Workload:
5 ECTS
 

Prerequisites:
Basic Programming skills and basic skills in computer networks


Description:
This course covers the basics and principles in sensor networks, with an emphasis on building an own sensor node using a 32 bit micro-controller and developing selected software to collect and communicate multimedia and context data in the network. In the past, the typical low-cost sensor nodes have been regarded to be not suitable for processing multimedia, such as speech or images. The course will give an introduction in recent low-complexity techniques, which compress the data with the support of flash memory, thus allowing for efficient multimedia communication. The concepts will be applied on the own sensor nodes.


Topics covered include:

  • Hardware platforms for sensor nodes
  • Medium Access Protocols
  • Addressing
  • Routing Protocols
  • Gateways (WLAN, Internet, and mobile devices)
  • Fixed-point Arithmetic
  • Low complexity multimedia data processing (pictures and speech)
  • Applications (context detection, phone conferencing)

Texts:
Please visit our web page for possible text books and further information: http://mobiledevices.kom.aau.dk


Lecturers:

Stephan A. Rein studied electrical and telecommunications engineering at RWTH Aachen University and Technical University (TU) Berlin, where he received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in December 2003 and the Ph.D. degree in January 2010. He was a research scholar at Arizona University in 2003, where he conducted research on voice quality evaluation and developed an audio content search machine. From February 2004 to March 2009 he was with the Wavelet Application Group at TU Berlin developing text and image compression algorithms for mobile phones and sensor networks. In July 2009 he joined the Telecommunication Networks Group at TU Berlin, where he was working on multimedia delivery to mobile devices within the European project "COAST". Since August 2011 he is a Post-Doc with the Mobile Device Group at Aalborg University working in the Danish "Green Mobile Clouds" project on applied network coding.

 

 

Achuthan Paramanathan received his B.Sc. in computer engineering from Aalborg University in 2007, and his M.Sc. in Network Communication and Distributed Systems in 2009. His education has mainly been focusing on applying solutions to distributed systems and network communications, such as the development and implementation of cooperative wireless protocols and reliable data recovery on distributed sensor networks.
From 2010 to 2011, he worked as embedded software developer at Intel Mobile Communication, where he developed embedded software applied to leading edge smart phones. In 2011 he joined the Mobile Device Group at Aalborg University as a research assistant, where he conducted research and measurements on applied network coding. In December 2011 he has started his Ph.D. program under the “Green Mobile Clouds” project.

 

 

Frank H. P. Fitzek is an Associate Professor in the department of Electronic Systems, University of Aalborg, Denmark heading the Mobile Device group. He received his diploma (Dipl.-Ing.) degree in electrical engineering from

the University of Technology - Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH) - Aachen, Germany, in 1997 and his Ph.D. (Dr.-Ing.) in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University Berlin, Germany in 2002 and became Adjunct Professor at the University of Ferrara, Italy.

He co-founded the start-up company acticom GmbH in Berlin in 1999. He has visited various research institutes including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), VTT, and Arizona State University. In 2005 he won the YRP award for the work on MIMO MDC and received the Young Elite Researcher Award of Denmark. He was selected to receive the NOKIA Champion Award in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010. In 2008 he was awarded the Nokia Achievement Award for his work on cooperative networks. His current research interests are in the areas of wireless and mobile communication networks, mobile phone programming, cross layer as well as energy efficient protocol design and cooperative networking

 

Ben Krøyer is the designer of the new OpenSensor II platform which is employed throughout the course. More information about Ben Krøyer is available here.