Peter Rothenpieler

A wireless sensor network for border surveillance

We will demonstrate a wireless sensor network system for the surveillance of critical areas and properties -- e.g. borders. The system consists of up to 10 sensor nodes that monitor a small border area. The protocols we show focus on detecting trespassers across a predefined area and reporting the detection to a gateway node securely. There, the trespassers path will be graphically diplayed on a border map. The demonstration features secure protocols for the detection of trespassers, node failure and network partitioning, along with a duty cycle protocol to ensure network longevity. All information pertaining to relevant events in the network or border area will be graphically displayed on a gateway computer.

Privacy Concerns in a Remote Monitoring and Social Networking Platform for Assisted Living

In this paper, we present an online platform for the field of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) which is designed to support a self- determined and safe life for elderly people in their own homes instead of admission to a nursing home. This goal is achieved through in-home monitoring of the clients using wireless sensor networks in combination with a social networking approach based on personal Patrons. The platform further acts as a marketplace for third party service providers which can extend the functionality of the platform, supplying the users with individual made-to-measure assistive services. This paper provides an overview of the concept behind this platform with special focus on privacy issues.

Towards Distributed Protocol Stacks for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose a model that uses remote procedure call (RPC) techniques to overcome the code size constraints of existing protocol stacks for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this model, neighboring nodes share one or more layers of their communications stack with each other in a cooperative fashion. In this way, the use of the protocol stack on each node without the need to include the stacks full programming logic on every node is enabled. At the same time, transparent interconnectivity is preserved by forming a Distributed Protocol Stack (DPS). This allows the use of an existing stack on more resource-constrained nodes or the integration of additional layers from different hard- or software platforms. We give an overview on the concept behind DPS and on the preliminary protocol specification. Furthermore, we describe our prototypical implementation on the iSense WSN platform. This implementation lets nodes with more memory share their IPv6 layer with more resource constrained neighboring nodes, allowing the seamless exchange of IP packets between all nodes in the network. We evaluate our implementation against a native IPv6 implementation with respect to code size, memory usage, round-trip time and UDP goodput.

SmartAssist: Open Infrastructure and Platform for AAL Services

In this paper we present the open health monitoring platform SmartAssist, which combines flexible in-home and mobile sensing features with a comprehensive social network that is designed to enhance communication between caretakers, caregivers and the community. SmartAssist supports the integration of new sensor types, algorithms, and mobile components through an integrated platform, which consists of an in-home sensor network; a web based service portal; and an extensible infrastructure for mobile devices. Through the adoption of open standards Android, OSGi, OpenSocial, etc., the system addresses issues of data protection and privacy, while simultaneously providing support for third-party extensions and context-aware services. In this paper, we will present the individual building blocks of the SmartAssist Platform as well as some illustrative example services.

Reliability Extensions and Multi-hop Evaluation of Distributed Protocol Stacks

Standardized protocols such as IPv6 and 6LoWPAN allow the operation of heterogeneous wireless sensor network (WSN). However, many existing IPv6 implementations increase the code size requirements to an extent, which makes the deployment of these applications on more constrained devices impossible. To solve this problem, we proposed the concept of Distributed Protocol Stacks (DPS) in an earlier publication, which allows the sharing of protocol implementations between neighbouring nodes. In this paper, we describe and evaluate several extensions to this concept, which enable the use of DPS in large WSN deployments with changing network topologies. This includes mechanisms for the dynamic establishment of DPS connections at runtime in which nodes select their communication partners based on selected node properties (such as power source or duty cycle) and the monitoring and re-establishment of these connections. We evaluate the performance of the proposed extensions using a real world deployment of the DPS protocol using 43 nodes from the Wise bed test bed.

Security in Border Control and Area Monitoring

Abstract Area monitoring is one of the most popular application scenarios for wireless sensor networks. The pure task of distributed object tracking has often been investigated, but little attention has been given to secure object tracking. This article contains a security analysis and an attacker model for the scenario of secure border surveillance and describes security mechanisms and protocols as well as a realization of such a system. Zusammenfassung Ein weitverbreitetes Einsatzgebiet für drahtlose Sensornetze ist die Grenz- und Liegenschaftsüberwachung. Es existieren verschiedene Arbeiten zur Detektion und Lokalisierung von Eindringlingen, jedoch wurden in bisherigen Arbeiten Aspekte der Informationssicherheit nur wenig untersucht. Dieser Artikel beinhaltet eine Sicherheitsanalyse und eine Angreiferbeschreibung für diesen Anwendungsbereich und stellt Sicherheitsmechanismen und Protokolle sowie die Realisierung eines solchen Systems vor.