Projects

Projects that are intriguing to me deal both with finding good abstractions to ease programming in complex environments AND requiring supporting algorithmic/protocol development in order to make them feasible. My recent work spans complex, dynamic environments, such as sensor networks, large scale peer-to-peer networks, and mobile ad hoc networks.

Trident

Real-world deployments of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are notoriously difficult to get right, partly due to the fact that their low-power wireless communication is greatly affected by the characteristics of the target environment. An early in-field connectivity assessment of the latter provides fundamental input to the WSN development. TRIDENT is a tool, expressly designed to support in-field connectivity assessment by relying only on the WSN nodes, without additional infrastructure (e.g. USB cables). It is easy to use, enabling domain experts (instead of WSN experts) to directly configure connectivity assessment towards their specific needs, without requiring any coding.

ReinsMAC

Reins-MAC is a TDMA-based MAC for wireless sensor networks. While common TDMA solutions require each node to rigidly follow an agreed upon communication schedule, in Reins-MAC each individual defines its own slot inside the overall frame, in a fully-decentralized fashion. The protocol is implemented and ready to be used in TinyOS deployments.

TeenyLime

TeenyLIME is a tuple space model and middleware supporting wireless sensor network applications where sensing and acting devices themselves drive the network behavior. Tuple space operations are used both for data collection as well as to effect coordination among sensing and acting devices.

ACube: Ambient Aware Assistance

WSNs and other advanced sensing technologies have the potential to improve the quality of life for the elderly and disabled. Our goal is to exploit WSNs along side other sensing technologies such as audio, video and RFID to monitor areas of a rehabilitation center for Alzheimer patients. The WSN is used to detect the proximity of patients to hazards such as open exit doors and detect unusual movement patters such as falls or long-term immobility. Challenges include the energy efficient proximity detection algorithm and the integration of novel sensors for improving the detection accuracy. Our first test deployment used both stationary and mobile nodes and, in combination with the other sensing technologies recognizes events, situations, activities and behaviors in complex multi-person scenarios.

TRITon: Trentino Research & Innovation for Tunnel Monitoring

TRITon is a research and innovation project funded by the Autonomous Province of Trento (Provincia Autonoma di Trento, PAT) aimed at advancing the state of the art in the management of road tunnels, specifically to improve safety and reduce energy costs. We are participating in the exploitation of wireless sensor networks for, among other things, collecting information to allow dynamic adjustment of internal light levels.

Non-Uniform Information Data dissemination in mobile ad hoc sensor environments

We focus on a non-traditional use of wireless sensor networks in which mobile base stations collect and exploit information, concentrating on data gathered in their immediate vicinity and requiring less precise knowledge about data collected far away. This goal allows us to develop new protocol that require less less data, therefore providing a clear opportunity for increasing network lifetime without sacrificing the data quality requirements of the application.

TinyLime

TinyLIME is a middleware for wireless sensor networks (WSN) that departs from the traditional WSN setting where sensor data is collected by a central monitoring station, and enables instead multiple mobile monitoring stations to access the sensors in their proximity and share the collected data through wireless links.

Wakeup Scattering

This work grew out of experience with TinyLime, in which the response time to a base station query was highly dependent on the random initialization of the nodes. Wakeup Scattering is an approach to modify, in a decentralized fashion, the wake-up time the WSN nodes so that they are scattered as much as possible, improving application performance in TinyLime as well as other situations.

MiLAN: Middleware Linking Applications and Networks.

MiLAN is one of the first projects to propose middleware for sensor networks. Its goal is to match the quality requirements expressed by the application with the characteristics of the environment, then to maximize the lifetime of the system while still meeting the application's requirements.

LiME: Linda in a Mobile Environment

Lime (Linda in a Mobile Environment) is a model and middleware supporting the development of applications in mobile ad hoc networks. Lime presents application programmers with the notion of a transiently shared tuple space, whose contents changes according to connectivity.

Students (past and present)

As a student, I never wanted to do my homework because I felt that I was solving the same problem that hundreds, probably thousands of students had solved before me. Instead, I wanted to solve new problems, discover new solutions, do something new! To me, this is what being a research student is all about.

Graduate Students

Undergraduate Students