Monitoring and Control for the Internet-of-Things: Resource and Security Challenges

Emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications include multi-device systems whose sensing, processing, and actuation capabilities are joined by the availability of low-cost wireless connectivity. Beyond their traditional cyber-domain, these connected communities of devices are in close interaction with the physical world, as they collect and process signals from sensors, they coordinate, and actuate back physical inputs in an autonomous closed-loop fashion. Application domains include monitoring and control of smart infrastructures, process automation, military operations, and connected autonomous vehicles. A major challenge in such systems is resource-efficiency, i.e., the ability of sensors with limited communication resources to communicate over uncertain channels shared by multiple devices. In this talk I will emphasize that allocation of resources and closed loop control performance of such systems is a fundamental co-design problem. Namely, resources become indispensable when the system that is monitored or controlled is deviating from nominal behavior, but otherwise they can be tuned to the state of the system. I will develop principles for optimal transmit power allocation and sharing of wireless channels, illustrating the importance of adaptation to both control performance needs and wireless communication opportunities. Furthermore, vulnerabilities in wirelessly connected sensors and actuators call for additional design perspectives towards security and privacy. I will illustrate this with recent work on secure state estimation in the presence of eavesdroppers. I will conclude with ongoing and future research drives in monitoring and control of connected autonomous systems.
Konstantinos Gatsis is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He received the Diploma degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Patras, Patras, Greece in 2010, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia in 2016. His research interests include control theory, optimization, and cyber-physical systems, as well as security and resource allocation problems arising in them. Dr. Gatsis received the Joseph, D’16, and Rosaline Wolf Award for Best Doctoral Dissertation from the department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He also received the 2014 O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award, the Student Best Paper Award at the 2013 American Control Conference, and was a Best Paper Award Finalist at the 2014 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems.