Resource efficient information integration in cyber-physical systems

The proliferation of increasingly capable and affordable sensing devices that pervade every corner of the world has given rise to the fast development and wide deployment of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Hosting a whole spectrum of civilian and military applications, cyber-physical systems have fundamentally changed people's ways of everyday living, working, and interactions with the physical world in general. Despite their tremendous benefits, cyber-physical systems pose great new research challenges, of which, this thesis targets on one important facet, that is, to understand and optimize the tradeoff between the quality of information (QoI) provided by the sensor nodes and the consumption of system resources. On one hand, individual sensors are not reliable, due to various possible reasons including incomplete observations, environment and circuit board noise, poor sensor quality, lack of sensor calibration, or even intent to deceive. To address this sensor reliability problem, one common approach is to integrate information from multiple sensors that observe the same events, as this will likely cancel out the errors of individual sensors and improve the quality of information. On the other hand, cyber-physical systems usually have limited resources (e.g., energy, bandwidth, storage, time, space, money, devices or even the human labor). Therefore, it is usually prohibitive to collect data from a large number of sensors due to the potential excessive resource consumption. Targeting on the above challenge, in this thesis we present a suite of resource-efficient information integration tools that can intelligently integrate information from distributed sensors so that the highest quality of information can be achieved, under the constraint of system resources. The proposed information integration toolkit bears superior generalizability and flexibility, and thus can be applied to a full spectrum of application domains.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• Su, Lu

Contributors dc:contributor

• Abdelzaher, Tarek F.
• Han, Jiawei
• Nahrstedt, Klara
• Liu, Xue

• Cyber-Physical Systems
• Wireless Sensor Networks
• Information Integration
• Data Aggregation
• Decision Aggregation
• Quality of Information
• System Resources

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2013 Lu Su

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/46685

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/46685