INESC TEC researchers win “Fumio Harashima Best Paper Award in Factory Automation”

Paulo Portugal and Francisco Vasques, researchers at INESC TEC’s Telecommunications and Multimedia Unit (UTM), won the “Fumio Harashima Best Paper Award in Factory Automation”, with their paper titled “GLHOVE: A Framework for Uniform Coverage Monitoring using Cluster-Tree Wireless Sensor Networks”.

The paper proposes a scheme that guarantees a compromise between maximising network coverage, while reducing energy consumption in the nodes. In this specific case, and taking typical applications into account, the goal is for the network to cover geographical areas as uniformly as possible, also guaranteeing that the coordinator receives a minimum number of messages without compromising the network’s life cycle.

This work is innovative because it uses a mechanism to schedule the superframes linked to the different clusters in order to minimise latency in communications, to reduce the probability of collisions and to standardise the amount of messages exchanged in each cluster. This paper was co-written with Mitchel Felske, Carlos Montez and Alex Pinto of the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil.

The researchers received the “Fumio Harashima Best Paper Award in Factory Automation” as part of the 18th IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies & Factory Automation, which took place between 10 and 13 September, in Italy. This is the most important IEEE conference for the area of Factory Automation, and one of the most relevant events of the Industrial Electronics Society.

The INESC TEC researcher mentioned in this article is associated with the following partner institution: INESC Porto and FEUP.