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..