Dr. Ashay Dhamdere
Department of Electronic Engineering & Telecommunications
University of New South Wales, Australia

Recent advances in sensing and communication technologies are enabling new low-cost wireless devices that are truly body wearable and allow the measurement and remote monitoring of an individual’s vital physiological signs. These technologies have enabled exciting applications such as real-time monitoring of athletes during field sports, which have the potential to maximize performance and prevent injury, while also allowing for services such as enhanced television broadcasts. A major challenge is the extraction of physiological data in real time, since the radio range of body-worn sensor devices is limited, necessitating multi-hop routing. In turn, very little is known about the highly dynamic operating conditions under which the communication protocols need to operate.

In this work we conduct field experiments wherein we outfit soccer players with sensor devices and record interconnectivity during a real game. Our first contribution profiles the key properties of the dynamic wireless topologies arising in this environment. In particular, we point out the correlations arising from coordinated movements of players, which can be potentially exploited by routing. Next, we develop a model for generating synthetic topologies which can be used for simulation studies of routing mechanisms. Again, the novelty lies in explicitly capturing the underlying autocorrelation and cross-correlation properties of the links. Our study is an important first step in understanding and modeling dynamic topologies around body-area sensor networks and paves the way for designing real-time routing algorithms in such settings.

Ashay Dhamdhere received his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mumbai in 1998, and his MS and PhD from the University of California, San Diego in 2001 and 2004 respectively. He has held positions in academia, defense and industry, including the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, the Swedish Defense Research Agency, and Airbus Industrie, Hamburg. He is currently lecturing in Telecommunications at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney. His research interests include Body-Area Wireless Sensor Networks, Smart Grids and Traffic Networks.