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
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)
External Memory
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Radio Transceiver
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Microcontroller
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Sensor
Sensor
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
Super Node
Links to Other networks or
Similar Super Nodes
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,

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
Cricket Mote
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
Data Mule
Base Station
Leaf Node
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..