Wireless Sensor Networks

Nuwan Gajaweera
Research Engineer

Outline
Motes & Wireless Sensor Networks WSN Applications TinyOS WSN research at the Dialog Lab

Motes & Wireless Sensor Networks

Mote
Analog I/O Ports

Sensor

Radio Transceiver

D/A A/D
Microcontroller

Digital I/O ports

Sensor

External Memory

A very low cost low power computer Monitors one or more sensors A Radio Link to the outside world Are the building blocks of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN)

Wireless Sensor Network

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a wireless network consisting of spatially distributed autonomous devices using sensors to cooperatively monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion or pollutants, at different locations. - Wikipedia

Wireless Sensor Networks

Formed by hundreds or thousands of motes that communicate with each other and pass data along from one to another Research done in this area focus mostly on energy aware computing and distributed computing
Links to Other networks or Similar Super Nodes

Super Node

Motes

WSN Applications
Environmental/Habitat monitoring Acoustic detection Seismic Detection Military surveillance Inventory tracking Medical monitoring Smart spaces Process Monitoring

Habitat Monitoring on Great Duck Island

http://www.greatduckisland.net/ Intel Research Laboratory at Berkeley initiated a collaboration with the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor and the University of California at Berkeley to deploy wireless sensor networks on Great Duck Island, Maine (in 2002) Monitor the microclimates in and around nesting burrows used by the Leach's Storm Petrel Goal : habitat monitoring kit for researchers worldwide

FireBug

Wildfire Instrumentation System Using Networked Sensors Allows predictive analysis of evolving fire behavior Firebugs: GPS-enabled, wireless thermal sensor motes based on TinyOS that self-organize into networks for collecting real time data in wild fire environments Software architecture: Several interacting layers (Sensors, Processing of sensor data, Command center) A project by University of California, Berkeley CA.

Preventive Maintenance on an Oil Tanker in the North Sea: The BP Experiment

Collaboration of Intel & BP

Use of sensor networks to support preventive maintenance on board an oil tanker in the North Sea. A sensor network deployment onboard the ship System gathered data reliably and recovered from errors when they occurred. The project was recognized by InfoWorld as one of the top 100 IT projects in 2004,

Cricket Mote
Basically a location-aware mote. Includes an Ultrasound transmitter and receiver. Uses the combination of RF and Ultrasound technologies to establish differential time of arrival and hence linear range estimates Based on Cricket Indoor Location System developed by a MIT researcher Nissanka Bodhi Priyantha

TinyOS
What is TinyOS
open-source operating system wireless embedded sensor networks component-based architecture

Developed at UCB in collaboration with Intel Research Current Stable Version is 1.1.15 TinyOS 2.0 (T2) released on 6/11 Main Ideas
Low complexity Conserve power sleep as frequently as possible

Written in nesC next generation C compiler

Different Targets
mica mica2 mica2dot micaz

telos

telosb

rene2

pc

Mica2
Extremely popular mote 8-bit AVR Controller FSK radio Data-logger flash

Our contributions to the WSN world

Mica2 Clone

Data Mule
DataMule a mobile entity present in the environment that will pick up data from the mote when in range, buffer it, and drop off the data at base station
ex: People, Vehicles, Livestock

Data Mule
Leaf Node

Base Station

Data Mule

Data Mule

Data Mule

Base Station

Data Mule - Applications

Collecting a data in a sparse sensor network Tracking movement of mobile elements
Vehicles Livestock Wild Animals

Data Mule

Base Station

Data Mule - Research undertaken

Development of a TDMA/CSMA hybrid MAC
TinyOS currently has a CSMA MAC Hope to improve throughput by employing TDMA Time is divided into transmission periods and contention periods Nodes will contend with each other to join the transmission group during the contention period. Nodes in the transmission group will be allocated a time-slot in the transmission period.

Development of data storage engine optimized for fast retrieval

Thank you..