Workshop Location: University of Washington

A two-day workshop on Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks: Estimation, Security and Robustness is being organized under the sponsorship of Army Research Office (ARO). It will take place June 13-14, 2005 at the University of Washington, Seattle and is hosted by the Department of Electrical Engineering.

Workshop Objective:

The workshop in intended to bring together a panel of experts to present state of art research in the area of wireless sensor localization, and to discuss roadmap for future research and priorities for research investment of ARO.

Localization is a critical process in mobile ad hoc networks that will be forming dynamic coalitions for critical missions of the future armed forces. Since the mobile soldiers will be equipped with multiple sensors that will provide location based data, it becomes significantly important that each sensor node knows its location or its relative location with respect to the rest of the coalition members. However, due to wireless communication, the dynamic coalition is highly vulnerable to attacks and the relative localization process itself is vulnerable. Hence, one must develop robust techniques that provide accurate position estimates even in the presence of attackers. The localization in the urban area as well as the caves and forest is known to be hard due to the lack of GPS information, and is its infancy at this point. Hence, the problem of secure localization must jointly consider the estimation accuracy as well as the robustness against attacks. Further more, due to the untrustworthy nature of the environment, providing mechanisms such as key management for secure localization become important. Hence, security, robustness and accuracy are three systemic parameters that must be achieved. Apart from these, due to the resource-constrained nature of the sensor devices, the solutions to be obtained must also be resource-efficient. In the case of sensor, the battery power becomes one of the critical resources that need to be conserved and optimized. The battery power is expended by communication and computing operations performed by a sensor node. Studies have shown that the computing in general can be optimized while the communication cost is a function of the physical medium. Hence, in order to develop energy-efficient solutions, the physical layer information must be jointly considered with the application layer operations, thus requiring a cross-layer approach towards this problem. Such much needed solution approaches do not exist in the current literature. ARO and Army in general will benefit greatly from the research and understanding in this area.
 

The presentations of the attendees are supposed to be tutorial in nature including (but not limited to) the following items:

1.      Area and problem background

2.      Existing results in the area

3.      On-going research and problems

4.      Critical challenges that were ignored in past work

5.      Future challenges and why they are important

6.      New tools need for addressing future challenges

 

How to attend, and what to submit:

Participation in this workshop is by invitation only. If you are interested in attending and presenting, please send your name, contact information, title of the talk and an abstract not to exceed one page, indicating the relevance and your background, to the following e-mail addresses: radha@ee.washington.edu, rkrishna@ee.washington.edu.


 

Administrative Contact:

Kathryn Burch

kathy@its.washington.edu

(206) 616-1763

 

Technical Contact:

Dr. Radha Poovendran

radha@ee.washington.edu

 

 

Last Updated: May 18, 2005