From wireless networks to sensor networks and onward to networked embedded control
by P. R. Kumar

Abstract. We address the issue of organizing principles for three different types of emerging systems: wireless networks, sensor networks, and networked control. In wireless networks, there is no a priori notion of links: transmitting nodes simply radiate energy, and receiving nodes hear a superposition of all such transmissions. The wireless medium therefore offers many more possibilities for communicating information than just relaying packets from node to node. We address the question of what should be the architecture of wireless networks, as well as determining fundamental limits on their information carrying capacity. Sensor networks are comprised of nodes equipped with sensors for monitoring their environment, and also have computational and wireless communication capabilities. In addition to merely transmitting information, nodes can also combine, discard or process information. Thus, the entire network comprises a computational cum communication system. We address the issue of how information should be processed within such networks. Finally, we turn to the problem of networked control, where nodes can act on their environment, as well as sense. We propose an abstraction of virtual collocation for enabling the proliferation of such systems, and provide an overview of our efforts in this area in the Convergence Lab at the University of Illinois.

Biography. P. R. Kumar is an alumnus of Washington University who earned his M.S. and D.Sc. degrees in 1975 and 1977, from the Department of Systems Science and Mathematics. Before that, he received his B. Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras in 1973. He is now Franklin W. Woeltge Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illionis, Urbana-Champaign, and is a Research Professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a recipient of the Donald P. Eckman Award of the American Automatic Control Council, and of the IEEE Field Award for Control Systems. He has presented plenary lectures at many conferences including the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, the SIAM Conference on Optimization, ACM SenSys, and ALGOSENSORS. His current research interests are in network information theory, wireless network architecture and protocols, in-network information processing and algorithms for sensor networks, and abstractions, architecture, algorithms and control laws for networked embedded control. He has worked on problems in game theory, adaptive control, learning theory, simulated annealing, manufacturing systems, queueing networks, and scheduling of wafer fabrication plants.