Summary

        Wireless sensor networks are currently receiving huge attention as a basic tool to detect emergency events or monitor physical parameters of interest, such as radiation, pollution, temperatures, pressures, and so on.

         The key idea of WINSOC is the development of a totally innovative design methodology, mimicking biological systems, where the high accuracy and reliability of the whole sensor network is achieved through a proper interaction among nearby, low cost, sensors. This local interaction gives rise to distributed detection or estimation schemes, more accurate than that of each single sensor and capable of achieving globally optimal decisions, without the need to send all the collected data to a fusion center. The whole network is hierarchical and composed of two layers: a lower level, composed of the low cost sensors, responsible for gathering information from the environment and producing locally reliable decisions, and an upper level, composed of more sophisticated nodes, whose goal is to convey the information to the control centers.

         The key issue is the interaction among nearby, low cost, sensors in a way that increases the overall network reliability, decreases the probability of congestion around the sink nodes, provides scalability and tolerance against breakdown or stand-by of some sensors, and eliminate the necessity for battery recharge. Building on this idea, the consortium has put together expertise from large companies, academies, research centres, end-users and SME's, to create a strong synergism between the academic world, industries and end-users. The goal is, on one side, to develop a general purpose innovative wireless sensor network having distributed processing capabilities and, on the other side, to test applications on environmental risk management where heterogeneous networks, composed of nodes having various degree of complexity and capabilities, are made to work under realistic scenarios. More specifically, the project will address applications to small landslide detection, gas leakage detection and large scale temperature field monitoring.