We provide an in-depth study of applying wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to real-world habitat monitoring. A set of system design requirements were developed that cover the hardware design of the nodes, the sensor network software, protective enclosures, and system architecture to meet the requirements of biologists. In the summer of 2002, 43 nodes were deployed on a small island off the coast of Maine streaming useful live data onto the web. Although researchers anticipate some challenges arising in real-world deployments of WSNs, many problems can only be discovered through experience. We present a set of experiences from a four month long deployment on a remote island. We analyze the environmental and node health data to evaluate system performance. The close integration of WSNs with their environment provides environmental data at densities previously impossible. We show that the sensor data is also useful for predicting system operation and network failures. Based on over one million 2 Polastre et. al. data readings, we analyze the node and network design and develop network reliability profiles and failure models.

Habitat and environmental monitoring is a driving application for wireless sensor networks. We present an analysis of data from a second generation sensor networks deployed during the summer and autumn of 2003. During a 4 month deployment, these networks, consisting of 150 devices, produced unique datasets for both systems and biological analysis. This paper focuses on nodal and network performance, with an emphasis on lifetime, reliability, and the the static and dynamic aspects of single and multi-hop networks. We compare the results collected to expectations set during the design phase: we were able to accurately predict lifetime of the single-hop network, but we underestimated the impact of multihop traffic overhearing and the nuances of power source selection. While initial packet loss data was commensurate with lab experiments, over the duration of the deployment, reliability of the backend infrastructure and the transit network had a dominant impact on overall network performance. Finally, we evaluate the physical design of the sensor node based on deployment experience and a post mortem analysis. The results shed light on a number of design issues from network deployment, through selection of power sources to optimizations of routing decisions.

OF THE DISSERTATION University of California, Los Angeles, 2003 Professor Deborah L. Estrin, Chair active research in large-scale networks of small, wireless, low-power sensors and actuators. Time synchronization is a critical piece of infrastructure in any dis- tributed system, but wireless sensor networks make particularly extensive use physical world. However, while the clock accuracy and precision requirements are often stricter in sensor networks than in traditional distributed systems, energy and channel constraints limit the resources available to meet these goals.

Habitat monitoring is an important driving application for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Although researchers anticipate some challenges arising in the real-world deployments of sensor networks, a number of problems can be discovered only through experience. This paper evaluates a sensor network system described in an earlier work and presents a set of experiences from a four month long deployment on a remote island o# the coast of Maine. We present an in-depth analysis of the environmental and node health data. The close integration of WSNs with their environment provides biological data at densities previous impossible; however, we show that the sensor data is also useful for predicting system operation and network failures. Based on over one million data and health readings, we analyze the node and network design and develop network reliability profiles and failure models.

Recent work in wireless embedded networked systems has followed heterogeneous designs, incorporating a mixture of elements from extremely constrained 8- or 16-bit “Motes ” to less resourceconstrained 32-bit embedded “Microservers.” Emstar is a software environment for developing and deploying complex applications on such heterogeneous networks. Emstar is designed to leverage the additional resources of Microservers by trading off some performance for system robustness in sensor network applications. It enables fault isolation, fault tolerance, system visiblity, in-field debugging, and resource sharing across multiple applications. In order to accomplish these objectives, Emstar is designed to run as a multiprocess system and consists of libraries that implement message-passing IPC primitives, services that support networking, sensing, and time synchronization, and tools that support simulation, emulation, and visualization of live systems, both real and simulated. We evaluate this work by discussing the Acoustic ENSBox, a platform for distributed acoustic sensing that we built using Emstar. We show that by leveraging existing Emstar services, we are able to significantly reduce development time This work was made possible with support from The Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) under the NSF Cooperative Agreement CCR-0120778, and the UC MICRO program (grant

Sensor Positioning is a fundamental and crucial issue for sensor network operation and management. In the paper, we first study some situations where most existing sensor positioning methods tend to fail to perform well, an example being when the topology of a sensor network is anisotropic. Then, we explore the idea of using dimensionality reduction techniques to estimate sensors coordinates in two (or three) dimensional space, and we propose a distributed sensor positioning method based on multidimensional scaling technique to deal with these challenging conditions. Multidimensional scaling and coordinate alignment techniques are applied to recover positions of adjacent sensors. The estimated positions of the anchors are compared with their true physical positions and corrected, The positions of other sensors are corrected accordingly. With iterative adjustment, our method can overcome adverse network and terrain conditions, and generate accurate sensor position. We also propose an on demand sensor positioning method based on the above method.

Wireless sensor networks have attracted attention from a diverse set of researchers, due to the unique combination of distributed, resource and data processing constraints. However, until now, the lack of real sensor network deployments have resulted in ad-hoc assumptions on a wide range of issues including topology characteristics and data distribution. As deployments of sensor networks become more widespread [1, 2], many of these assumptions need to be revisited. This paper

In this paper, we introduce the Shared Wireless Infostation Model (SWIM), which extends the Infostation model by incorporating information replication, storage, and diffusion into a mobile ad hoc network architecture with intermittent connectivity. SWIM is able to reduce the delay of packet delivery at the expense of increased storage at the network nodes. Furthermore, SWIM improves the overall capacity–delay tradeoff by only moderately increasing the storage requirements. This tradeoff is examined here in the context of a practical application—acquisition of telemetry data from radio-tagged whales. To reduce the storage requirements, without affecting the network delay, we propose and study a number of schemes for deletion of obsolete information from the network nodes. In particular, through the use of Markov chains, we compare the performance of five such storage deletion schemes, which, by increasing the computational complexity of the routing algorithm, mitigate the storage requirements. The results of our study will allow a network designer to implement such a system and to tune its performance in a delay-tolerant environment with intermittent connectivity, as to ensure with some chosen level of confidence that the information is successfully carried through the mobile network and delivered within some time period.

Abstract — Wireless sensors and wireless sensor networks have come to the forefront of the scientific community recently. This is the consequence of engineering increasingly smaller sized devices, which enable many applications. The use of these sensors and the possibility of organizing them into networks have revealed many research issues and have highlighted new ways to cope with certain problems. In this paper, different applications areas where the use of such sensor networks has been proposed are surveyed. R I.

In the past few years, many wireless sensor networks had been deployed, these applica-tions serve to explore the requirements, constraints and guidelines for general sensor network architecture design. In this paper,we present a snapshot of the recent deployed sensor network applications and identify the research challenges associated with such applications. 1