Sensor Management — Overview

The key features of a managed sensor system are that it senses the environment and chooses an appropriate waveform, beam-pattern, pulse repetition interval (PRI), etc (collectively called the sensor mode) to best extract the required information. Any such system must have, at least, the following components in addition to the basic sensor and ancillary components  

SM-1) A method of estimating the current (that is at the time of transmission of next pulse) state of the environment. This is done on the basis of prior measurements together with some model of the dynamics of the environment. It may be important to estimate not only the scatterers of interest (targets) but also those that are not of interest (clutter), since knowledge of the latter may be useful for determination of an optimal radar mode. 

SM-2) A measure of effectiveness of each potential sensor mode. This should be a function of both the mode (as defined above) and of the environment, or at least the estimate of it mentioned in 

Most importantly, it should be based on the operational problem at hand. 

SM-3) A library of modes from which the optimal mode is chosen. This might be just a finite library, but also might be an infinite parameterized family of, say, waveforms. 

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Essentially all electronics systems in use - be it for engine management, in safety systems, or as convenience features - need one or more sensors as input to their signal processing. An overview by Fleming [2] counted 107 different sensor applications in the car a luxury car typically contains 100 or more sensors. Therefore the automotive sensor market has grown at least as well as the electronics market over the past two decades and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. 

Limited research has been reported in the literature regarding secure communications in WBANs utilizing biometric information. Venkatasubramanian et al. provided an overview of security solutions in pervasive health care systems, where biomedical information was utihzed for securing data collected by medical sensors, and for controUing access to health information managed by pervasive health care systems. Cherukuri et al. proposed a biometrics-based key distribution scheme to secure the... 

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