MEMS-Based Reconfigurable and Evolvable Sensor Networks

Over the last decade wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have attracted much attention from both research and industries. The idea of wireless sensor network has significantly impacted on the traditional sensing systems due to its reliability, robustness, flexibility and redundancy. A wireless sensor network may consist of a large number of sensor nodes to aggregate and transmit data in Ad hoc networking. The autonomous, adaptable, and distributed nature of reconfigurable sensor networks will allow the sensor nodes to be deployed in a wide range of applications. However, most of wireless sensor networks are designed for terrestrial applications, such as environmental monitoring, surveillance, reconnaissance, targeting, tracking, risk assessment, and building automation, etc.

In future’s space missions the autonomous, miniaturized, intelligent and massively distributed networked systems will play important roles. Due to the flexibility, reliability, and low cost, the networked constellations with hundreds-to-thousands of very small satellites could eventually replace the functionality of traditional larger satellites. Thus, there has been an increasing need to develop flexible, reconfigurable, and intelligent space-based sensor networks to support this developmental trend. Technical advancements in Ad hoc networking, wireless communications, MEMS devices, low-power electronics, adaptive and reconfigurable hardware, micro-spacecraft, and micro-sensors will directly facilitate the development of such highly integrated space networking systems. The ESPACENET1 project is targeting the design of evolvable and reconfigurable sensor networks and distributed reconfigurable System-On-Chip (SoC) sensor nodes for aerospacebased monitoring and diagnostics. In designing such a space-based sensor network, multiple objectives or measures of performance are involved. These objectives are often essentially competing or in conflict with each other. For an Ad-hoc WSN, the performance is unavoidably related with its working environment and missions. So the decision variables for the whole networking system should be online determined at different levels and scales under multiple objectives. Thus, multiobjective optimal design is a particularly challenging issue. Multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) have received considerable attention in many engineering optimization problems. In recent years MOEAs have also been applied to the area of WSNs. It is highly desirable for MOEAs to provide enough automation and flexibility for an engineering system. However, in comparison to other applications, power constraints, hierarchical topology, hardware adaptability, and fault-tolerance requirements as well as other specific constraints pertinent to the aerospace domain make the multiobjective design with MOEAs even more challenging in the ESPACENET project. The main objective of this post is to present the multiobjective optimal design of MEMS-based reconfigurable and evolvable sensor networks.