UAF faculty to research sensors

Submitted by Sonja Bickford
Phone: (907) 590-8150
08/23/04

The University of Alaska Fairbanks Office of Electronic Miniaturization has announced that a research collaboration led by Dejan Raskovic has received a National Science Foundation grant to conduct research on Distributed Sensor Networks. Co-investigators include Aleksandar Milenkovic and Emil Jovanov of the University of Alabama Huntsville and Denise Thorsen of UAF.

This is the first grant which leverages OEM’s capacities recently transferred to and built at UAF through cooperative agreements with the Defense Microelectronics Activity. Raskovic was hired less than a year ago with partial funding from DMEA.

Raskovic’s NSF project is to establish an energy-profiling laboratory for the evaluation of the energy efficiency and performance of reconfigurable hierarchical sensor networks, and to create a system of support for delivery of hardware and software components in distributed reconfigurable sensor networks.

Investigators will use some resources available within the OEM, and also build a laboratory for energy profiling of sensor nodes and distributed sensor networks. Collaborative efforts between Raskovic’s research team and OEM will be focused in the areas of hardware and software decomposition, code mobility implementation in distributed sensor networks, hardware miniaturization and hardware packaging.

The proposed solutions for energy consumption, hardware and software reconfigurability as well as hardware miniaturization and packaging solutions have direct applicability to similar research efforts underway by the measurement and signature intelligence program of the U.S. Department of Defense.

The findings from this research are projected to lead to the development of enhanced, efficient and intelligent surveillance sensor networks with the possibility of extension of the basic principles to everyday applications of distributed sensor networks such as medical or environmental monitoring.

Contact: Sonja Bickford at (907) 590-8150 or s.bickford@uaf.edu.