DISTRIBUTED ESTIMATION USING WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Prof. G. B. Giannakis
IEEE SP Society Distinguished Lecturer
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Univ. of Minnesota

GTRI Cobb County Facility (Smyrna), Building 1, Room 104
Lecture 11 AM to 12 PM with lunch provided immediately after

Abstract: Envisioned applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) include surveillance, monitoring and tracking tasks. These motivate well decentralized estimation and smoothing of deterministic and (non)stationary random signals using (possibly correlated) observations collected across distributed sensors. In this talk we present state-of-the-art algorithms for consensus-based distributed estimation using ad hoc WSNs where sensors communicate over single-hop noisy links. The novel framework reformulates basic estimation criteria such as least-squares, maximum-likelihood, maximum a posteriori, and linear mean-square error, as decomposable, constrained, convex optimization problems that are amenable to distributed solutions. The resultant distributed estimators are provably convergent to their centralized counterparts and robust to communication noise. Besides stationary, the framework encompasses adaptive filtering and smoothing of non-stationary signals through distributed LMS and Kalman filtering.

Biography: G. B. Giannakis (Fellow'97) received his Diploma in Electrical Engr. from the Ntl. Tech. Univ. of Athens, Greece, 1981. From 1982 to 1986, he was with the Univ. of Southern California (USC), where he received his MSc. in Electrical Engineering, 1983, MSc. in Mathematics, 1986, and Ph.D. in Electrical Engr., 1986. Since 1999 he has been a professor with the ECE Department at the Univ. of Minnesota, where he now holds an ADC Chair in Wireless Telecommunications and serves as the Director of the Digital Technology Research Center. Current research focuses on complex-field and network coding, multicarrier, cooperative wireless communications, cognitive radios, cross-layer designs, mobile ad hoc networks and wireless sensor networks.

G. B. Giannakis is the (co-) recipient of six paper awards from the IEEE Signal Processing (SP) and Communications Societies including the G. Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications. He also received Technical Achievement Awards from the SP Society (2000), from EURASIP (2005), a Young Faculty Teaching Award and the G. W. Taylor Award for Distinguished Research from the University of Minnesota. He has served the IEEE in a number of posts, and is currently a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE-SP Society.

Directions: From I-75 go west on Windy Hill Road for 3 miles until you reach Dixie Road (before railroad bridge). Turn right onto Dixie Road, which becomes George McMillan Drive, and go 1.5 miles, until you reach the stop sign at the Naval Air Station (NAS) entrance, point A. Continue straight through the stop onto Richardson Road. Take the first right into the GTRI entrance, point B. Building 1 (next to flag pole) will be on your left; walk up the stairs to Building 1, and register with the guard.

Information: Contact Ryan Holman at ryan.holman@gtri.gatech.edu or 404.407.7785.