Nirupama Bulusu

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Portland State University

Current anti-counterfeiting supply chains rely on a centralized authority to combat counterfeit products. This architecture results in issues such as single point processing, storage, and failure. Blockchain technology has emerged to provide a promising solution for such issues. In this paper, we propose the block-supply chain, a new decentralized...

Infrastructure-based Indoor Positioning Systems (IIPS) have emerged as critical components of wireless deployments for many enterprises so as to track mobile devices without additional device-side applications or computation. To provide transformative location-based services, it is important that IIPS compute accurate locations over a long period o...

Networked drones have the potential to transform various application domains; yet their adoption particularly in indoor and forest environments has been stymied by the lack of accurate maps and autonomous navigation abilities in the absence of GPS, the lack of highly reliable, energy-efficient wireless communications, and the challenges of visually...

Abstract—By June 3, 2021, the US alone experienced over 33 million total cases of Covid-19, surpassing 592,000 deaths. In response, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advised masking, social distancing and avoidance of mass gatherings. In this work, we seek to automatically identify physical mass gathering events including dates a...

Networked drones have the potential to transform various applica- tions domains; yet their adoption particularly in indoor and forest environments has been stymied by the lack of accurate maps and autonomous navigation abilities in the absence of GPS, the lack of highly reliable, energy-efficient wireless communications, and the challenges of visua...

Wildfires and other emergencies disrupt critical communication infrastructure when needed most. In this paper, we propose a decentralized alternative to the current Wireless Emergency Alerts protocol, that allows for alert notifications to be broadcast even when traditional infrastructure is disrupted, enabling greater reach. CCS CONCEPTS • Network...

Zoom is a map-based approach for tasking sensor networks where sensing tasks are encoded into 2D task maps. The location of a pixel in the map corresponds to a physical location. The pixel value encodes information necessary for a node to discover and perform its corresponding sensing tasks. Although Zoom is very intuitive and scalable with the num...

The growth of counterfeit goods has plagued the international community for decades. Nowadays, the battle against counterfeiting remains a significant challenge. Most of the current anti‐counterfeiting systems are centralized. Motivated by the evolution of blockchain technology, we propose (Block‐Supply), a decentralized anti‐counterfeiting supply...

With the rapid growth of modern cities, public transportation systems require smart planning to provide effec- tive and competitive services to the daily commuters. Due to the presence of Wireless LAN Network (WLAN), Wi-Fi access is available to commuters during their daily commute. The overar- ching goal of this work is to leverage infrastructure-...

One of the fundamental characteristics of blockchain technology is the consensus protocol. Most of the current consensus protocols are PoW (Proof of Work) based, or fixed-validators based. Nevertheless, PoW requires massive computational effort, which results in high energy and computing resources consumption. Alternatively, fixed- validators proto...

Passive indoor positioning systems (PIPS) enable non-invasive tracking of mobile users using enterprise network infrastructure. PIPS-generated location estimates tend to be noisy, infrequent, and trail actual locations. Timely discernment of user intent, such as which hallway a user is walking on, or when the user made a turn requires online map ma...

Passive indoor positioning systems (PIPS) have been enabling non-invasive tracking mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, Wi- Fi tags) from infrastructure sides. The tracking ability helps fulfill the desire of many enterprise buildings such as airports and retailers that seek to improve their resource allocation and provide location-based services to...

Passive indoor positioning systems (PIPS) enable non-invasive tracking of mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, Wi-Fi tags) using enterprise network infrastructure. This empowers operators of large airports and retail facilities to optimize cost-intensive resource allocation as well as to provide location-based services to their customers such as geo-...

Most current product anti-counterfeiting approaches can detect tag modification and tag cloning attacks, but cannot detect tag reapplication attacks, in which a counterfeiter removes a legitimate tag from a genuine product and reapplies it to a counterfeit or expired product. Reapplying a legitimate tag to a counterfeit product can result in major...

Many retailers and government enterprises can greatly streamline their operations management and expenditures if they can accurately predict the anticipated number of peo- ple at various zones within their premises at any given time [1, 2]. For example, a large retailer like Wal-mart can opti- mize personnel costs given accurate predictions of clie...

New Beginnings Talk

Crowd-sourced mobile embedded systems allow people to contribute sensor data, for critical ap- plications, including transportation, emergency response and eHealth. Data integrity becomes imperative as malicious participants can launch software and Sybil attacks modifying the sensing platform and data. To address these attacks, we develop (i) a Tru...

We propose a new method to localize in three dimensions the camera-equipped nodes in a smart camera network. Our method has both lower costs and fewer deployment constraints than a commonly used computer vision-based approach, which is to opportunistically determine feature points in the overlapping view of pairs of cameras, compute the essential m...

In economics, price dispersion refers to the price difference of a homogeneous good across different vendors. According to Baye et al, “The empirical evidence suggests that price dispersion in both online and offline markets is sizable, pervasive, and persistent.” Not surprisingly, there exist several popular web commerce sites such as Froogle that...

A noise map facilitates the monitoring of environmental noise pollution in urban areas. However, state-of-the-art techniques for rendering noise maps in urban areas are expensive and rarely updated, as they rely on population and traffic models rather than on real data. Smart phone based urban sensing can be leveraged to create an open and inexpens...

The rapid proliferation of smartphones has led to the emergence of mobile social sensing applications, spanning sharing of health data, location-based encounters, and transportation. A major concern for such applications is selective sharing, i.e., how does a user publish a sensor data stream confidentially to only authorized members in his/her soc...

We propose RIDA, a novel robust information-driven data compression architecture for distributed wireless sensor networks. The key idea is to determine the data correlation among a group of sensors based on the data values to significantly improve compression performance rather than relying solely on spatial data correlation. A logical mapping appr...

Zoom [1] is a map-based approach for tasking sensor networks where sensing tasks are encoded into 2D task maps. The location of a pixel in the map corresponds to a physical location. The pixel value encodes information necessary for a node to discover and perform its corresponding sensing tasks. Although Zoom is very intuitive and scalable with the...

Crowd-sourced sensing systems allow people to voluntarily contribute sensor data from mobile devices. They enable numerous applications, including weather and traffic moni-toring. However, their proliferation is at risk if the problems of data integrity and privacy persist. People will be reluc-tant to contribute sensitive information if they canno...

Current sensor networks have limited use after deploy- ment due to the lack of ability to dynamically update sensing tasks to the networks. Assigning multiple tasks to multiple sensor groups in a sensor network deployed over a large geo- graphical region at fine granularity becomes problematic be- cause the sensors are heterogeneous, potentially mo...

Crowd-sourced sensing systems facilitate unprecedented in-sight into our local environments by leveraging voluntarily contributed data from the impressive array of smartphone sensors (GPS, audio, im-age, accelerometer, etc.). However, user participation in crowd-sourced sensing will be inhibited if people cannot trust the system to maintain their p...

In this paper, we provide a basic solution for online compression of data streams using error-bounded piecewise- linear approximation (PLA). We compare this method to the optimal (but offline) solution. Our current work in progress is developing an online PLA method that meets the same optimality constraints as the offline method. Also, the vertice...

As sensor networking technologies continue to develop, the notion of adding large-scale mobility into sensor networks is becoming feasible by crowd-sourcing data collection to personal mobile devices. However, tasking such networks at fine granularity becomes problematic because the sensors are heterogeneous and owned by users instead of network op...

As sensor networking technologies continue to develop, the notion of adding large-scale mobility into sensor networks is becoming feasible by crowd-sourcing data collection to personal mobile devices. However, tasking such networks at fine granularity becomes problematic because the sensors are heterogeneous and owned by users instead of network op...

The paradox of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is that the low-power, miniaturized sensors that can be deeply embedded in the physical world, are too resource-constrained to capture high frequency phenomena. In this paper, we propose RHA, a robust hybrid architecture for information processing to extend sensing capacity while conserving energy, sto...

Crowd-sourced sensing systems allow people to voluntarily contribute sensor data from mobile devices. They enable numerous applications, including weather and traffic moni- toring. However, their proliferation is at risk if the problems of data integrity and privacy persist. People will be reluc- tant to contribute sensitive information if they can...

For distributed smart camera networks to perform vision-based tasks such as subject recognition and tracking, every camera's position and orientation relative to a single 3-D coordinate frame must be accurately determined. In this paper, we present a new camera network localization solution that requires successively showing a 3-D feature point-ric...

This chapter describes our experiences developing wireless, acoustic sensor network systems for a high rate sensing application: monitoring amphibian populations in northern Australia. Our goal was to use automatic recognition of animal vocalizations to census the populations of native frogs and an invasive introduced species, the Cane Toad. This a...

Current feature tracking frameworks in sensor networks ex- ploit advantages of either mobility, where mobile sensors can provide micro scale information of a small sensing area or numerical models that can provide macro scale information about the environment but not both. With the continual development of underwater sensor networks, mobility becom...

For many applications in mobile wireless ad hoc networks (MANETs), forming an end-to-end data path is not always necessary; instead, the primary routing goal is often data collection or dissemination where only a data source is known. Routing algorithms must be carefully chosen in order to suit the needs of applications employing them. Our focus is...

Current feature tracking frameworks in sensor networks exploit advantages of either mobility, where mobile sensors can provide micro scale information of a small sensing area or numerical models that can provide macro scale information about the environment but not both. With the continual development of sensor networks, mobility becomes an importa...

A noise map facilitates monitoring of environmental noise pollution in urban areas. It can raise citizen awareness of noise pollution levels, and aid in the development of mitigation strategies to cope with the adverse effects. However, state-of-the-art techniques for rendering noise maps in urban areas are expensive and rarely updated (months or e...

Localization of small wireless sensor devices, with the de- ployment of the minimal infrastructure or hardware, has been the topic of significant research over the past few years. We have developed the Robust Extended Kalman Filter (REKF) localization system(1), which enables a mobile, data gathering robot to localize static sensor devices, by comb...

A noise map facilitates monitoring of environmental noise pollution in urban areas. It can raise citizen awareness of noise pollution levels, and aid in the development of mitigation strategies to cope with the adverse effects. However, state-of-the-art techniques for rendering noise maps in urban areas are expensive and rarely updated (months or e...

Wireless sensor networks are revolutionizing the instrumentation of the physical world, across scientific, industrial and military applications. In this paper, we describe our efforts developing and classroom-testing hands-on materials for use in undergraduate- accessible courses on sensor networks. In Winter 2008 at Portland State University, we i...

Ensuring that every sensor node has the same code version is challenging in dynamic, unreliable multi-hop sensor networks. When nodes have different code versions, the network may not behave as in- tended, wasting time and energy. We propose and evaluate DHV, an ef- ficient code consistency maintenance protocol to ensure that every node in a networ...

Noise map can provide useful information to control noise pollution. We propose a people-centric noise collection system called the Ear-Phone. Due to the voluntary participation of people, the number and location of samples cannot be guaranteed. We propose and study two methods, based on compressive sensing, to reconstruct the missing samples.

Participatory sensing is an exciting new paradigm where people voluntarily sense their local environment and share this data using mobile phones and the Internet. It can revolutionize applications such as intelligent transportation, public health and social networking. However, a major concern is the amount of trust that can be placed in the shared...

Grassroots Participatory Sensing empowers people to collect and share sensor data using mobile devices across many applications, spanning intelligent transportation, air quality monitoring and social networking. In this pa-per, we argue that the very openness of such a system makes it vulnerable to abuse by malicious users who may poison the inform...

We propose a light weight algorithm to classify cane-toads, a non-native invasive amphibian species in Australia as well as other native frog species, based on their vocalizations using sharply resource-constrained acoustic sensors. The goal is to enable fast in-network frog classification at the resource-constrained sensors so as to minimize energ...

Two of the fundamental challenges associated with data gathering in sensor networks are data classification and data aggregation. This paper provides a solution to classify and aggregate sensor readings. We leverage our previous experience and use Competitive Learning Neural Network (CLNN) as the data classification mechanism. We then propose and e...

Smart camera network applications such as video surveillance, target tracking, traffic monitoring, and 3D scene reconstruction and analysis either require or are greatly improved by accurate 3D localization of the cameras in the network. Smart camera localization using the projection matrix provides an efficient and scalable method to determine eac...

In 2003, the MIT Technology review magazine listed wireless sensor networks as one of "Ten Emerging Technologies That Will Change the World" [2]. Five years later, are wireless sensor networks ready for the undergraduate classroom? Our goal is to develop lab exercises that are suitable for activity-driven teaching of undergraduate students. We here...

It is an undeniable fact that people want information. Unfortunately, even in today’s highly automated society, a lot of the information we desire is still manually collected. An example is fuel prices where websites providing fuel price information either send their workers out to manually collect the prices or depend on volunteers manually relayi...

This demonstration shows a powerful high-level, heterogeneous sensor networking framework, Cascades. We intend to demonstrate how, with this framework, application designers have great control over implementation designs without the requirement of in-depth development. Several key components and example applications will be demonstrated, along with...

In economics, price dispersion refers to the price difference of a homogeneous good across different vendors. According to [1] "The empirical evidence suggests that price dispersion in both online and offline markets is sizeable, pervasive, and persistent." Not surprisingly, there exist several popular web commerce sites such as Froogle that enable...

The Columbia River (CoRie) Observation Network includes an extensive array of fixed stations monitoring the Columbia River estuary and nearby coastal ocean. At each station, variable combinations of in-situ sensors measure one or more physical properties of water or atmosphere. Using a multi-scale data assimilation model, the CORIE modeling system...

CORIE is a pilot environmental observation and forecasting system (EOFS) for the Columbia River. The goal of CORIE is to characterize and predict complex circulation and mixing processes in a system encompassing the lower river, the estuary, and the near-ocean using a multi-scale data assimilation model. The challenge for scientists is to maintain...

In this paper, we propose and evaluate RIDA, a novel information- driven architecture for distributed data compression in a sensor network, allowing it to conserve energy and bandwidth and potentially enabling high-rate data sampling. The key idea is to determine the data corre- lation among a group of sensors based on the value of the data itself...

This paper describes the design and implementation of a multi-modal, multimedia capable sensor networking framework called SenseTK. SenseTK allows application writers to easily construct multi-modal, multimedia sensor networks that include both traditional scalar-based sensors as well as sensors capable of recording sound and video. The distinguish...

We present a novel scheme for node localization in a Delay-Tolerant Sensor Network (DTN). In a DTN, sensor devices are often organized in network clusters that may be mutually disconnected. Some mobile-robots may be used for data collection from the network clusters. The key idea in our scheme is to use this robot to perform location estimation for...

In this paper, we describe SpeedNet, a GSM network variant which resembles an ad hoc wireless mobile network where base stations keep track of the velocities of mobile users (cars). SpeedNet is intended to track mobile users and their speed passively for both speed policing and control of traffic. The speed of the vehicle is controlled in a speed c...

Ad hoc wireless sensor networks derive much of their promise from their potential for autonomously monitoring remote or physically inaccessible locations. As we begin to deploy sensor networks in real world applications, concerns are being raised about the fidelity and integrity of the sensor network data. In this paper, we motivate and propose an...

This paper describes the design and implementation of Cascades, a scalable, flexible and composable middleware platform for multi-modal sensor networking applications. The middleware is designed to provide a way for application writers to use pre-packaged routines as well as incorporate their own application-tailored code when necessary. As sensor...

This demonstration shows a powerful high-level, heterogeneous sensor networking framework, Cascades. We intend to demonstrate how, with this framework, application designers have great control over implementation designs without the requirement of in-depth development. Several key components and example applications will be demonstrated, along with...

This paper describes the design and implementation of Cascades, a scalable, flexible and composable middleware platform for multi-modal sensor networking applications. The middleware is designed to provide a way for application writers to use pre-packaged routines as well as incorporate their own application-tailored code when necessary. As sensor...

For widespread adoption of sensor technology, we must ensure that sensor networks are robust in the event of abnormal behavior such as a network intrusion or failure of components or nodes. Current research on robust and resilient sensor networking is focused on low-level security primitives such as secure broadcast or localization for small groups...

This first-of-its-kind resource offers you an in-depth understanding of wireless sensor networks from a systems perspective. The book describes and categorizes the technological trends, leading applications, state-of-the-art platform developments, future trends, and challenges of sensor networks. You find critical coverage of network protocols and...

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are one of the first real-world examples of pervasive computing, the notion that small, smart, and cheap sensing and computing devices will eventually permeate the environment. Sensor networks combine distributed sensing, computation, and wireless communication. Sensor networks are touted as being as disruptive and e...

Once deployed in the physical world, even factory-calibrated sensors are prone to numerous faults that corrupt sensor data. For example, as part of an environmental observation and forecasting system, sensors deployed in the Columbia River Estuary (CORIE) gather information on physical dynamics and changes in estuary habitat. Of these, salinity sen...

Localization is a mechanism for autonomously discovering and establishing spatial relationships among objects; autonomous localization of sensor devices is a crucial systems building block for embedded sensor applications. Because embedded sensor-network applications are coupled to the physical world, localization measures and gives a context to th...

In large WSNs, multihop communication optimizes energy consumption and enables reuse of the spectrum. WSNs require scalable, energy-efficient routing protocols to (1) disseminate network wide queries and code updates, (2) enable robust data collection from the sensor network, and (3) enable distributed coordination among sensor nodes. Wireless comm...

For widespread adoption of sensor technology, robustness in the event of abnormal behavior such as a network intrusion, or failures of components or nodes is critical. Current research on robust and resilient sensor networking is focused on specific tasks – secure broadcast, secure aggregation, secure localization or fault-tolerant feature extracti...

We present a novel scheme for node localization in a delay-tolerant sensor network (DTN). In a DTN, sensor devices are often organized in network clusters that may be mutually disconnected. Some mobile robots may be used to collect data from the network clusters. The key idea in our scheme is to use this robot to perform location estimation for the...

This paper investigates a wireless, acoustic sensor network application-monitoring amphibian populations in the monsoonal woodlands of northern Australia. Our goal is to use automatic recognition of animal vocalizations to census the populations of native frogs and the invasive introduced species, the cane toad. This is a challenging application be...

As wireless sensor networks become widely used, the need to provide fault-tolerant, user-friendly middleware for detecting sensed events increases. Our contribution is the motivation, design, implementation and evaluation of Res TAG, which provides fault-tolerant aggregate queries in the popular, user-friendly TinyDB middleware. If a sensor becomes...

This paper investigates an anycast communication service for a hybrid sensor/actuator network, consisting of both resource-rich and resource-impoverished devices. The key idea is to exploit the capabilities of resource-rich devices (called micro-servers) to reduce the communication burden on smaller, energy, bandwidth and memory constrained sensor...

Complex heterogeneous sensor networks that include both traditional scalar and richer video data are becoming possible. With such technologies comes the task of making them useful to the applications that rely on them. Unfortunately, such applications are extremely diverse in the interaction requirements of the system components. This paper argues...

This demonstration shows a wireless, acoustic sensor network application--- monitoring amphibian populations in the monsoonal woodlands of northern Australia. Our system uses automatic recognition of animal vocalizations to census the populations of native frogs and the invasive introduced species, the Cane Toad (see Fig. 1). This is a challenging...

This article investigates a wireless acoustic sensor network application—monitoring amphibian populations in the monsoonal woodlands of northern Australia. Our goal is to use automatic recognition of animal vocalizations to census the populations of native frogs and the invasive introduced species, the cane toad. This is a challenging application b...

This paper proposes CSMAC (CDMA Sensor MAC), a novel self-organizing, location-aware media-access control (MAC) protocol for DS-CDMA sensor networks to support applications that feature high bandwidth traffic and stringent latency requirements. Previously proposed MAC protocols for sensor networks such as SMAC (W. Ye et al, IEEE Proc. Infocom, pp....

The paper investigates an anycast communication paradigm for a hybrid sensor/actuator network, consisting of both resource-rich and resource-impoverished devices. The key idea is to exploit the capabilities of resource-rich devices (called micro-servers) to reduce the communication burden on smaller sensor nodes which are energy, bandwidth and memo...

In this paper, we consider the problem of network deployment in hybrid sensor networks, consisting of both resource-rich and resource-impoverished sensor devices. The resource-rich devices, called micro-servers, are more expensive but have significantly greater bandwidth and energy capabilities compared to the low-cost, low-powered sensors. Such hy...

Location management refers to the problem of updating and searching the current locations of mobile nodes in a wireless network. To make it efficient, the sum of update/lookup costs of a location database must be minimized. Previous work relying on fixed location databases is unable to fully exploit the knowledge of user mobility patients in the sy...

This paper considers the problem of monitoring cane toads in Kakadu National Park using a large scale wireless sen-sor network deployment. Cane toads were mistakenly intro-duced in Australia in 1935. Their uncanny ability to survive in diverse climates and lack of natural predators in the Aus-tralian ecosystem have promoted unhindered growth of can...

Embedded networked sensors promise to revolutionize the way we interact with our physical environment and require scalable, ad hoc deployable and energy-efficient node localization/positioning.This paper describes the motivation, design, implementation, and experimental evaluation (on sharply resource-constrained devices) of a self-configuring loca...

Localization of small wireless sensor devices, with the deployment of the minimal infrastructure or hardware, has been the topic of significant research over the past few years. We have developed the Robust Extended Kalman Filter (REKF) localization system [1], which enables a mobile, data gathering robot to localize static sensor devices, by combi...

This paper reports on the results of a simulation comparison made by an independent researcher using the ns-2.26 simulator for the WSN protocols: directed diffusion (DD), two-tier data dissemination (TTDD), and gradient broadcast (GRAB). Our performance study provides useful insights for the network designer - such as which protocols (and design ch...

This paper proposes CSMAC (CDMA sensor MAC), a novel self-organizing, location-aware media-access control (MAC) protocol for DS-CDMA based sensor networks for applications such as battlefield surveillance that feature higher traffic and stringent latency requirements. Previously proposed MAC protocols for sensor networks such as S-MAC [W. Ye et al....

This paper investigates an anycast communication service for a hybrid sensor/actuator network, consisting of both resource-rich and resource-impoverished devices. The key idea is to exploit the capabil- ities of resource-rich devices (called micro-servers) to reduce the com- munication burden on smaller, energy, bandwidth and memory con- strained s...