Netted Sensors has the potential to radically change how we view difficult sensing problems. About five years ago, people within the academic and commercial communities began to embrace the notion that small sensors with on-board processing and communications infrastructure could be used to support a network of distributed nodes for applications ranging from environmental monitoring and proximity detection to industrial-based remote sensing. From MITRE's perspective, this technology has important ramifications for the way the military and other government agencies address their sensing needs. Imagine using low-cost sensors on the US borders or sprinkling these sensors on a battlefield to monitor troop movements or provide real-time surveillance updates. In an urban environment, they could be used to establish communications connectivity back to a working telephone exchange or a microwave relay tower, something that was needed in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina blew through.
This talk briefly introduces the concept of netted sensing to the broader research community and highlights some of the difficult technical challenges in this area. For example, there is a lot of talk about networking thousands of sensors together to form a pervasive surveillance grid. However, the reality is that applications today are rather simplistic. This is due in part to the fact that netted sensors represents a convergence of several technologies - sensor platforms, resource management, distributed computing and processing, networks and communications, and information management.
MITRE has been actively involved in this area through our corporate-funded Netted Sensors Initiative. This has led to the development of some innovative distributed signal processing approaches in the areas of detection, classification, sensor localization, resource management, and tracking. This talk will highlight some of this work and demonstrate its application in fielded demonstrations on the MITRE campus applied to proximity detection and border monitoring.