Swarun Kumar

This webpage tracks the current progress of our funded project with the NSF. Our sincere thanks to the National Science Foundation for supporting our research.

This project aims to design an energy-centric solution that actively schedules communication and computation to minimize energy waste in energy harvesting contexts for animal sensing and agricultural applications more broadly. The proposed sensor node will monitor biometrics, acceleration, and location of animals and is powered by solar energy. The proposal further builds a physical and medium-access communication layer that is actively aware of the energy-mismatch between the low-energy sensors and the more capable LoRa (Long Range) gateways. The adoption of wireless technologies introduces cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and hence, cybersecurity is another major design objective of the proposed system by leveraging belief models and deep learning techniques while maintaining high quality monitoring services. The proposed sensor network will be tested at Virginia Tech’s farm testbeds, which have been designed to test and showcase such technologies for pastured livestock. The research will also be beneficial to the fields of semiconductor devices, embedded systems, Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, wireless communications including 5G and beyond, robust machine/deep learning, cybersecurity, statistical signal detection, and agricultural production. The project will pioneer transformative research to increase productivity of animal agriculture and allow for real-world testing of advancements.