2006 ROSES Proposal

Amendment No. 36 to NASA Research Announcement "Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences" (NNH05ZDA001N) establishes a new program element in Appendix A.33 entitled "Advanced Information Systems Technology" (AIST). This new program element solicits proposals for development of selected key technologies to enable an evolution of distributed Earth system sensors and processing components into sensor webs. This AIST program solicitation will concentrate on the architecture (i.e., the design, structure, and behavior) and development of system building blocks leading to autonomous sensor webs. Scenarios are required to show the relevancy of the proposed technology to the objectives of NASA Earth science. During the course of the technology development, the awardees will be required to participate in ESTO-sponsored sensor web technology workshops to advance information sharing on components and concepts. Notices of Intent to propose are due January 17, 2006, and proposals are due March 17, 2006.

• Task 1:
• Task 2:
• Task 3:

Proposal Approach

Since each task is a separate proposal, we need to decide what team (if any) will pursue what task, and then split up into LOI and proposal writing teams...

Faculty Interest

Mani Chandy: most interested in smart sensing, specifically in model-based sensing where the sensing strategy is executed based on sets of models of the environment that is being sensed. This is Topic 1. The ideas are inter-related with Topics 2 and 3 because sensing strategies also depend on communication constraints (Topic 2) and model interactions (Topic 3). Since, however, each proposal has to identify ONE topic, mine is Topic 1.

John Doyle:

• Task 1: model based feedback control of active sensors. An issue I'd be interested in is whether there is a general theoretical framework that would allow a more principled approach to the design of protocols.
• Task 2: General design principles for top to bottom protocol stack design for evolvable and robust sensor networks... The idea would be to try to decouple through layering and decentralization as much as possible the hardware and applications levels, so that there could be massive reuse of physical resources for different scientific applications, and natural and transparent upgrade/evolution of capacity/capability.... The issue here is how to allow selected cross-layer interactions as demanded by Task 1, yet preserving the benefits of layered modularity. Sensor networks provide a particular nice challenge in this regard, that the wired Internet generally does not.

Tracy Ho: mostly interested in Task 2, particularly

• autonomous distributed transmission of sensor data*
• optimal cost, throughput and reliability trade-offs*
• distributed storage with latency considerations,

as well as Task 1 on smart sensing, particularly:

• on-demand sensor activity
• failure monitoring, diagnostics and recovery*,

Topics marked with '*' are most closely related to previous or current work.

Richard Murray