Networking and application interface technology for wireless sensor network surveillance and monitoring

Distributed unattended ground sensor (UGS) networks are commonly deployed to support wide area battlefield surveillance and monitoring missions. The information they generate has proven to be valuable in providing a necessary tactical information advantage for command and control, intelligence and reconnaissance field planning. Until recently, however, there has been greater emphasis within the defence research community for UGS networks to fulfil their mission objectives successfully, with minimal user interaction. For a distributed UGS scenario, this implies a network centric capability, where deployed UGS networks can self-manage their behaviour in response to dynamic environmental changes. In this thesis, we consider both the application interface and networking technologies required to achieve a network centric capability, within a distributed UGS surveillance setting. Three main areas of work are addressed towards achieving this. The first area of work focuses on a capability to support autonomous UGS network management for distributed surveillance operations. The network management aspect is framed in terms of how distributed sensors can collaborate to achieve their common mission objectives and at the same time, conserve their limited network resources. A situation awareness methodology is used, in order to enable sensors which have similar understanding towards a common objective to be utilised, for collaboration and to allow sensor resources to be managed as a direct relationship according to, the dynamics of a monitored threat. The second area of work focuses on the use of geographic routing to support distributed surveillance operations. Here we envisage the joint operation of unmanned air vehicles and UGS networks, working together to verify airborne threat observations. Aerial observations made in this way are typically restricted to a specific identified geographic area. Information queries sent to inquire about these observations can also be routed and restricted to using this geographic information. In this section, we present our bio-inspired geographic routing strategy, with an integrated topology control function to facilitate this. The third area of work focuses on channel aware packet forwarding. Distributed UGS networks typically operate in wireless environments, which can be unreliable for packet forwarding purposes. In this section, we develop a capability for UGS nodes to decide which packet forwarding links are reliable, in order to reduce packet transmission failures and improve overall distributed networking performance