CISTER’s new PhD member: Nuno Pereira

Assuming a world where hundreds or even thousands of inexpensive computing nodes are densely deployed, each one with sensing and wireless communication capabilities, the problem of efficiently dealing with the massive amount of information generated emerges as a major challenge.

To address this challenge, the starting hypothesis of Nuno’s PhD work was: “Is it possible to compute aggregate quantities with a time-complexity that is independent of the number of sensor nodes?”

Obtaining scalable and efficient aggregate quantities in large-scale dense networked sensor systems requires tight integration between the data aggregation techniques and communication mechanisms. This is a key observation underlying this research work, where the approach to obtain scalable and efficient aggregate quantities in large-scale dense networked sensor systems is co-designing (i) distributed algorithms to obtain aggregate quantities and (ii) the underlying communication services. The developments described in this thesis constitute an attractive set of solutions for emerging computing systems were the physical world, computation and communication are very tightly coupled.

The PhD thesis was successfully presented on September 10, at the University of Minho, being Prof.  Tarek F. Abdelzaher, from the University of Illinois, USA, the main opponent in the evaluation committee.

More details: Efficient Aggregate Computations in Large-Scale Dense Wireless Sensor Networks