Project description

Last Updated (Wednesday, 20 June 2012 12:09) Written by Saverio Caminiti Monday, 07 June 2010 15:07

The GENESI project has the ambitious goal of bringing WSN technology to the level where it can provide the core of the next generation of systems for structural health monitoring that are long lasting, pervasive and totally distributed and autonomous. This goal requires embracing engineering and scientific challenges never successfully tackled before. Sensor nodes will be redesigned to overcome their current limitations, especially concerning energy storage and provisioning (we need devices with virtually infinite lifetime) and resilience to faults and interferences (for reliability and robustness). New software and protocols will be defined to fully take advantage of the new hardware, providing new paradigms for cross-layer interaction at all layers of the protocol stack and satisfying the requirements of a new concept of Quality of Service (QoS) that is application-driven, truly reflecting the end user perspective and expectations.

A factsheet can be downloaded here.

Objectives

Last Updated (Tuesday, 15 June 2010 11:43) Written by Saverio Caminiti Monday, 07 June 2010 15:07

GENESI will:

Develop long lasting sensor nodes by combining cutting edge technologies for energy generation from the environment (energy harvesting) and green energy supply (small factor fuel cells).

Achieve robustness and energy efficiency through the integration of low power radio front ends, radio triggering circuit, and energy-efficient, fault tolerant, robust to interference, adaptive protocols and algorithms.

• Define models for energy harvesting, energy conservation in super-capacitors and energy availability through fuel cells.
• Design new algorithms and protocols for dynamic allocation of sensing and communication tasks to the sensors.
• Design communication protocols for large scale heterogeneous wireless sensor/actuator networks with energy-harvesting capabilities.
• Define distributed mechanisms for context assessment and situation awareness enabling a node to collaboratively determine the status of the environment in its particular region of the network and whether something new and important for the application has happened.
• Develop light machine learning-based mechanisms for predicting environmental behaviour and its possible changes, triggering adaptation in the system behaviour.

These objectives will be achieved bringing the end users into the research cycle from the get go. Gather requirements from their experience, receive continuous feedback through all the research phases and assist them on the exploitation of the developed monitoring systems is the methodology followed by GENESI.

Expected Results

Last Updated (Tuesday, 15 June 2010 11:45) Written by Saverio Caminiti Monday, 07 June 2010 15:07

• A new generation of GENESI wireless sensor nodes including multi-source energy harvesters, small factor fuel cells, and energy efficient RF front end with radio triggering capability.
• Protocols and algorithms exploiting the new HW features, performing HW/SW joint optimizations to maximize user perceived satisfaction and to meet application driven QoS requirements.

Partners and their roles

Last Updated (Tuesday, 15 June 2010 11:44) Written by Saverio Caminiti Monday, 07 June 2010 15:07

University of Rome La Sapienza: project coordinator, leader of WP4 on “Collaborative and Reliable Networking”

University of Twente: leader of WP5 on “Collaborative in-network data processing and reasoning”

University of Bologna: leader of WP3 on “Green Sensor Platforms”

ST Microelectronics: leader of WP7 on “Dissemination and Exploitation”

Tyndall: leader of WP2 on  “System architecture and requirements”

Solexperts: leader of WP6 on “Integration, deployment, and validation”

Treesse: end user