Title: Reliable localised event detection in a wireless distributed radio telescope

Authors: Suhail Yousaf; Rena Bakhshi; Maarten Van Steen

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, The VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands; The Network Institute, The Netherlands ' Department of Computer Science, The VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands; The Network Institute, The Netherlands ' Department of Computer Science, The VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands; The Network Institute, The Netherlands

Abstract: We consider a large wireless network constituting a radio telescope. Each of the anticipated 3000 nodes is triggered to collect data for further analysis at a rate of more than 200 Hz, mostly caused by noisy environmental sources. However, relevant cosmic rays occur only a few times a day. As every trigger has an associated 12.5 KB of data, and considering the size of the telescope in number of nodes and covered area, centralised processing is not an option. We propose a fully decentralised event detection algorithm based on collaborative local data analysis, effectively filtering out only those triggers that need further (centralised) processing. As we show through performance evaluations, the crux in the design is finding the right balance between accuracy and efficient use of resources such as the communication bandwidth in the unreliable communication environment.

Keywords: distributed event detection; large-scale distributed systems; in-network data processing; wireless networks; radio telescopes.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2013.057516

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2013 Vol.14 No.3, pp.155 - 167

Published online: 07 Nov 2013 *

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