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

D/A
A/D
Microcontroller

External Memory

Digital I/O ports

Radio Transceiver

Analog I/O Ports

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)

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

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..