Mandana Jafarian’s research while affiliated with Ryerson University and other places

Emergency situations in mines result in loss of precious human lives. In this paper we demonstrate the viability of the architecture of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) in underground mines to achieve mine safety. We propose Minimum Delay Maximum Lifetime (MDML) routing in the wireless sensor network to achieve reliable low-delay routing of emergency data traffic and increased lifetime of the network by employing energy efficient routing for periodic non-emergency regular traffic. Routing metrics proposed in MDML is specifically designed considering signal propagation characteristics in underground mines. We also suggest configuring priority queue in a sensor node giving higher priority to emergency traffic. Our simulation shows that zero loss and low delay can be achieved for emergency traffic. It also shows that MDML is effective in trading slight loss of network lifetime for achieving high reliability and low-delay.

A novel approach to event boundary detection is proposed, where autonomous agents are deployed in order to minimize the number of transmissions required to discover an event boundary. The goal of the algorithm is to localize node transmission along the event boundary, since the sensory data from nodes not along the boundary is not required for event boundary detection. Simulations demonstrate that the algorithm has a linear efficiency function when related to event radius of sufficient size and further demonstrates that the boundary of an event may be successfully mapped using agents.