| Main | Research | Interests | Bio |
Ben is currently working on the RollCall project at Winlab - an active tracking system designed for long lifetime and high reliability. Our group is attempting to build an advanced type of asset tracking system, which we call a fail-safe presence assurance system (Fail-safe PAS).
Ben designed the system's current lower-power protocols and wrote analysis software that takes advantage of the aforementioned protocols to achieve high performance, as measured by lifetime, false alarm rate, and scalability. In more readable words, he has been programming small radios controlled by 8051 microcontrollers to serve as transmitters and receivers and has created a program that runs on a PC that analyzes packets in real time as they arrive. The software identifies when a transmitter has stopped working as quickly as possible while guaranteeing a low false alarm rate.
Ben currently has two active research areas. The first is to increase the scalability of the system to thousands of transmitters in a small area. The second area is to design, implement, quantitatively test and evaluate mobility detection algorithms for Wi-Fi transmitters (such as those in a laptop) and the transmitters we use in the tracking system (which run at 902MHz). He is actively researching the channel models involved in mobility detection.
Firner, B.; Jadhav, P.; Zhang, Y.; Howard, R.; Trappe, W.; Fenson, E.
Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks, 2009. SECON '09. 6th Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on , vol., no., pp.1-9, 22-26 June 2009
URL: IEEEXplore link
Firner, B.; Jadhav, P.; Zhang, Y.; Howard, R.; Trappe, W.
Information Processing in Sensor Networks, 2009. IPSN 2009. International Conference on , vol., no., pp.417-418, 13-16 April 2009
URL: IEEEXplore link
Firner, B.; Shweta, M.; Zhang, Y.; Howard, R.; Trappe, W.; Wolniansky, P.; Fenson, E
The Fifth Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors, HotEmNetS 2008. 2 June 2008