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Cristina Comaniciu, an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology, has been awarded an Office of Naval Research (ONR) Grant for Cross-Layer Cooperation for Energy Efficiency in Wireless Sensor Networks: Game Theoretic Solutions. The $279,000 grant will be awarded to Comaniciu, the project's principal investigator, over a three-year period.

This project addresses the problem of efficient design for energy-sensitive sensor networks in military applications, said Comaniciu. I propose a cooperative design in which distributed protocols are implemented in the network by enforcing cooperation in a two-dimensional plane: horizontally among different sensor units, and vertically, among various layers of the protocol stack.

The proposed design solutions are based on game theoretic models, in which players individually act to maximize their own utility metric, which in the context of sensor networks is a measure related to the energy consumption for transmitting useful information bits across the network.