Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering, University of Toledo, 2012, College of Engineering

This dissertation research proposes embedding artificial neural networks into wireless sensor networks in parallel and distributed processing framework to implant intelligence for in-network processing, wireless protocol or application support, and infusion of adaptation capabilities. The goal is to develop in-network "intelligent computation" and "adaptation" capability for wireless sensor networks to improve their functionality, utility and survival aspects. The characteristics of wireless sensor networks bring many challenges, such as the ultra large number of sensor nodes, complex dynamics of network operation, changing topology structure, and the most importantly, the limited resources including power, computation, storage, and communication capability. All these require the applications and protocols running on wireless sensor network to be not only energy-efficient, scalable and robust, but also "adapt" to changing environment or context, and application scope and focus among others, and demonstrate intelligent behavior. The expectation from the research endeavor is to introduce computational intelligence capability for the wireless sensor networks to become adaptive to changes within a variety of operational contexts and to exhibit intelligent behavior. The proposed novel approach entails embedding a wireless sensor network with an artificial neural network algorithm while preserving the parallelism and distributed nature of computations associated with the neural network algorithm. The procedure of embedding an artificial neural network, which may be configured for a problem either at wireless protocol or application levels, into the wireless sensor network hardware platform, which is a parallel and distributed processing system that is composed of a network of motes, is defined. This procedure is demonstrated for a case study with a Hopfield neural network and a minimum weakly connected dominating set problem as the model of wireless sensor network backbon (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Gursel Serpen (Committee Chair); Junghwan Kim (Committee Member); Mohsin Jamali (Committee Member); Jackson Carvalho (Committee Member); Eddie Chou (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Science; Electrical Engineering