EEL 5937-001 Sensor Networks (Spring 2004)

Faculty:           Dr. Damla Turgut
Office:             ENGR 450
Phone:             (407) 823-6171
Email:             turgut@cs.ucf.edu

Class Time:    Tuesday and Thursday 9:00 AM - 10:10 AM
Classroom:     ENGR 427
Office Hours: Tuesday and Thursday 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Web site:        http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~turgut/COURSES/EEL5937_SensorNet_Spr04/
Class Mailing List:
                        TBD

TA:                  Majid Ali Khan
Office:             ENGR 265
Phone:             (407) 823-6365
Office Hours: Monday 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM and Friday 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Email:             khan@bond.cs.ucf.edu

Pre-requisite: EEL 6785 (Computer Network Design) and/or
EEL 4781 (Computer Networks)

Textbook(s):
There is no required textbook for this course. However, reference book(s) are given below.

Reference Books:
1. Agrawal and Zang, "Introduction to Wireless and Mobile Systems", Thomson Brooks/Cole, 2003.
2. Nicopolitidis, Obaidat, Papadimitriou, and Pomportsis, "Wireless Networks", Wiley, 2003.
3. Thurwachter, "Wireless Networking", Prentice Hall, 2002.
4. Stojmenovic, "Handbook of Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing", Wiley, 2002.
5. Selected research papers from journals, conferences and technical reports.

Course Motivation:
Wireless sensor networks are the new class of networks that are consisting of a collection of small in
size, lightweight, low-power devices. These self-configurable wireless networks are capable of
monitoring their external environments and converting the sensed data into a form understandable by a
user. The applications of these networks are tremendous such as home, office, hospital, and military.
The sensor networks need various protocols that are application specific, data centric, energy efficient,
and capable of aggregating and disseminating data. This course will look into these challenges and try
to design and build innovative solutions to these problems.

Course Objectives:
The course is designed mainly for graduate students; however, interested and qualified undergraduate
students are also encouraged. The course objectives are to provide the students with an:

understanding of current sensor networks theory and practice
opportunity to work on projects related to applications of sensor networks
experience on reading and writing research papers

Course Description:
This course will be a survey of the state of the art in sensor networks, and will cover various topics
including protocols for clustering, service discovery and self organizing routing,
energy/power conservation, distributed database processing, data dissemination and aggregation,
adaptive topology management, MAC, security, new sensor network applications and so on

Grading Scheme:
The semester grade will be based on the following:
individual or group project (55%), exam (25%), assignments (15%), and attendance (5%)

Class Project:
The class projects require

design and simulation of a chosen research topic
usage of one of the recommended network simulator packages for the simulation of the proposed algorithm and/or protocol
verification of the simulation results with analytical analysis
written report including the research project findings and
initial and final presentations

The class project can be individual or may include maximum of 2 students per group.

Paper Reviews:
Written reviews (hard copies) for each paper to be discussed in class for the coming week are
due at the beginning of Thursdays class period of the previous week. The soft copies of the
reviews should be sent to the TA's email account at the same time

For each paper, students should write a review answering each of the following questions:
   1.What problems (with prior work or the lack thereof) were addressed or surveyed by the authors?
   2.What solutions were proposed or surveyed by the authors?
   3.What are the technical strengths and main contributions of the paper's proposed solutions?
   4.What are the technical weaknesses of the paper's proposed solutions?
   5.What suggestions do you have to improve upon the paper's ideas?