Ralph Kling

The platforms enabling wireless sensor networks

All emphasize low-cost components operating on shoestring power budgets for years at a time in potentially hostile environments without hope of human intervention.

IMOTE2: Serious Computation at the Edge

While the majority of sensor network application research to date has focused on applications where the controlling processor need only be capable of handling simple communications and data primitives required for low rate sampling, comparatively few researchers have targeted the other end of the spectrum; applications where there is a significant advantage to performing data processing at the edge of the network. This paper describes Imote2, an advanced sensor network node that enables such usage models, and introduces several applications and scenarios where we have found such edge processing to be a significant advantage.

Intel Mote 2: an advanced platform for demanding sensor network applications

Intel Mote 2 is based on the PXA271 microprocessor featuring the Intel XScale® core. This multi-die package includes a high performance processor, 32 MB of flash and 32 MB of SDRAM. The processor integrates a DSP coprocessor, a security coprocessor and an expanded set of I/O interfaces (including UART, I2C, SPI, USB, CIF, I2S, and AC97) to ease sensor integration. The platform also provides an on-board 802.15.4 radio and the option to add other wireless interfaces via an SDIO interface. We have ported the TinyOS and Linux operating systems to this platform.

SENSOR NETWORKS FOR MONITORING WATER SUPPLY AND SEWER SYSTEMS: LESSONS FROM BOSTON

In recent years, research in wireless sensor networks (WSN) has been undergoing a quiet revolution, promising to have significant impact on a broad range of applications relating to environmental monitoring, structural health monitoring, security and water safety. The convergence of the Internet, telecommunications, and novel information technologies with techniques for miniaturisation now provides vast opportunities for the development and application of low-cost monitoring solutions which could drastically increase the spatial and temporal resolution of environmental data. The paper describes the development of a prototype monitoring system which bridges advances in wireless sensor networks with advances in hydraulic and water quality modeling. The prototype monitoring system was deployed at Boston Water and Sewer Commission (BWSC) in December 2004, and it has been successfully collecting and charting near-real time hydraulic and water quality data as well as data from combined sewer outflows (CSO). The remote monitoring system has unique functionalities in terms of sampling rates (up to 1000 S/s), time synchronization (up to 1 ms) and in-network processing. These features create novel opportunities for wirelessly collecting data for applications such as hydraulic pressure transients, remote acoustic leak detection together with low-duty cycle applications such as monitoring water quality parameters and water levels in CSOs. The trial with BWSC has been tremendously useful to prototype hardware and software tools, and to identify deployment and operational challenges in using sensor networks for monitoring and management of large scale water supply systems.

Metric-Based Scatternet Formation and Recovery Optimization for Intel Mote

The Intel Mote is a new sensor node platform with improved radio bandwidth and reliability due to the usage of Bluetooth radio. The connection-oriented nature of Bluetooth raises the issues of effective multi-hop network (scatternet) formation and maintenance that network and routing layer must address on top of the TinyOS abstractions. The hop distance and wireless link quality pose major challenges to multi-hop network performance, especially the connection-oriented networks such as Bluetooth scatternet. In this paper, we present a metric-based scatternet formation algorithm for the Intel Mote, which can optimize the Bluetooth network formation from the hop distance and link quality perspectives. In addition, a smart repair mechanism is proposed to deal with link/node failure and recover the network connectivity promptly with low overhead. The experiments with the Intel Mote platform demonstrate the effectiveness of the optimizations, which make the platform more powerful