Le 09/05/2018 par kdeschin :

Keywords: underground/underwater monitoring, wireless sensor networks, coverage, energy saving, QoS, combinatorial optimization.

Supervisors:
Karine Deschinkel (MCF HDR) & Mourad Hakem (MCF)
Laboratoire DISC, Institut FEMTO-ST - UMR CNRS, Universite? de Bourgogne Franche-Comte?, France
contact : Karine.Deschinkel@univ-fcomte.fr, Mourad.Hakem@univ-fcomte.fr

Funding : PhD scholarship from the University

Context: underground and underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSN) are widely used in diverse
fields of applications such as pipeline and seismic monitoring, oceanography, ecology, tactical surveillance,
and so on. They are constituted of many low cost and low powered sensor nodes that collaborate
with each other to monitor, gather, process, and forward information using wireless communications.
Nevertheless, UWSNs present a number of shortcomings that may have an impact on the quality of the
gathered data at the sink level, leading to imprecise diagnostics of the monitored targets. Indeed, each
sensor node is a small sized device with a limited energy supply which is non refillable by solar energy.
Moreover, unlike traditional terrestrial networks, the extreme environmental conditions of UWSNs make
the communications difficult and the reliabilities of sensor nodes are expected to decrease due to use and
wear-out effects. The nodes energy will be depleted at a much faster rate leading to decreased network’s
lifetime. Consequently, to improve the UWSN’s QoS, two main critical and related issues, namely the
energy consumption and coverage quality, need to be considered.
Objectives: in this thesis, we focus on underground/underwater monitoring under coverage and energy
related optimization objectives, which is an important matter due to its direct effect on the quality of
service of the deployed network. Both centralized and distributed approaches will be investigated to
orchestrate the trade-offs relationship between energy saving and coverage optimization. The algorithms
that will be designed should take into account the monitored area’s constraints and the inherent nature
of the UWSN.

Required skills: The applicant must have an engineering or master research degree with strong skills in
graph theory, operational research, programming and distributed algorithms. In addition, the applicant
must have fluent spoken and written English.

Research laboratory:
Team AND - Laboratory Femto-ST
http://www.femto-st.fr/en/Research-departments/DISC/Research-groups/AND/
I.U.T. Belfort
http://www.iut-bm.univ-fcomte.fr/en/index.html

To Apply ( before 1 June 2018):
Send CV, cover letter, recommendation letters and schoool results