Geometric Approaches to Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks: Full Report of the 2006 NSF Workshop

Embedded networked sensing devices are becoming ubiquitous across many activities that are important to our economy and life, from manufacturing and industrial sensing, to agriculture and environmental monitoring, to hospital operations and patient observation, to battlefield awareness and other military applications. In each such deployment modest to large numbers of simple devices that possess sensing and processing capabilities are networked together to form a sensor network. The fact that nodes in these networks are embedded in the physical world and their sensed data is highly correlated with their physical locations imparts a uniquely geometric character to these systems. The geometry and topology of both the sensor field layout, as well as that of the signal landscapes studied, greatly affects issues such as routing, data aggregation and information brokerage, outlier detection and other statistical processing, and so on. This report brings the key findings about the opportunities presented by the exploitation of geometric methods in ad hoc and sensor networks, based on a two-day NSF-sponsored workshop held at the University of California at Santa Barbara during June 12-13, 2006.