Plenary

Monday, May 23
8:00 am - 9:10 am
System-Theoretic Foundations for Wireless Sensor Networks

Venu Veeravalli
ECE Department and Coordinated Science Lab
University of Illinios at Urbana-Champaign

Networks of distributed wireless sensors capable of collecting, storing, and disseminating a variety of environmental data have the potential to enable the next revolution in information technology. Research to date on such sensor networks has largely been focused on techniques for building the sensors, and on self-configuring protocols for establishing communication between them. However, in order to fully exploit their potential, a core system-theoretic framework for the design, analysis and application of sensor networks is needed. This presentation will describe recent efforts towards the development of such system-theoretic foundations, and outline some open problems and challenges that lie ahead.

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Biography:
Venugopal V. Veeravalli received the Ph.D. degree in 1992 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and a Research Professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He served as a program director for communications research at the U.S. National Science Foundation in Arlington, VA from 2003 to 2005. His research interests include distributed sensor systems and networks, wireless communications, detection and estimation theory, and information theory. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and is currently on the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society. Among the awards he has received for research and teaching are the 1996 IEEE Browder J. Thompson Best Paper Award, the 1998 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and the 1998 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).