Description: Recent advances in wireless communications and electronics have enabled the development of low-cost, low-power, multifunctional sensor nodes that are small in size and communicate untethered in short distances. These tiny sensor nodes which consist of sensing, data processing, and communicating components, leverage the idea of sensor networks. A sensor network is composed of a large number of sensor nodes that are densely deployed either inside the phenomenon or very close to it. They have a wide variety of applications including military sensing, infrastructure security, environment and habitat monitoring, industrial sensing, building and structures monitoring and traffic control.

The long term goals for this project will be to develop a sensor network for Cyprus that traces contaminant transport to source both in air and under water. With proper design the sensor network can be used to rapidly respond to a chemical, biological or radiological event giving people and the proper authorities the necessary information to deal with such crisis situations within minutes of the event. The short term goals that will be achieved throughout this project will be the training of the new scientists in the emerging technologies of sensor networks and the development of algorithms and techniques that will lead towards the long term goals. More specifically:

1. We plan to use data fusion Bayesian and Dempster-Shafer theories and use hidden Markov Methods algorithms to find the location of the contaminant source based on the sensor readings.
2. We will use directed diffusion and data aggregation principles to develop algorithms that efficiently route this information back to the sink.
3. We will use the sensor nodes received at UCY to build an elementary sensor network and investigate the characteristics of the sensor nodes with respect to sensing, communication, processing, location and power.
4. We will use the sensor network we built in the previous step together with simulation tools to test the performance of our algorithms developed in steps 1 and 2.
5. Throughout the project great emphasis will be given in training the new scientists in the areas of communication, intelligent systems and control where the general knowledge obtained can be applied to solve specific problems in the sensor networks area.