Abstract
This paper gives a detailed technical overview of some of the activities carried out in the context of the “Wireless Sensor networks for city-Wide Ambient Intelligence (WISE-WAI)” project, funded by the Cassa di Risparmio di Padova e Rovigo Foundation, Italy. The main aim of the project is to demonstrate the feasibility of large-scale wireless sensor network deployments, whereby tiny objects integrating one or more environmental sensors (humidity, temperature, light intensity), a microcontroller and a wireless transceiver are deployed over a large area, which in this case involves the buildings of the Department of Information Engineering at the University of Padova. We will describe how the network is organized to provide full-scale automated functions, and which services and applications it is configured to provide. These applications include long-term environmental monitoring, alarm event detection and propagation, single-sensor interrogation, localization and tracking of objects, assisted navigation, as well as fast data dissemination services to be used, e.g., to rapidly re-program all sensors over-the-air. The organization of such a large testbed requires notable efforts in terms of communication protocols and strategies, whose design must pursue scalability, energy efficiency (while sensors are connected through USB cables for logging and debugging purposes, most of them will be battery-operated), as well as the capability to support applications with diverse requirements. These efforts, the description of a subset of the results obtained so far, and of the final objectives to be met are the scope of the present paper.
Highlights
Introduction and Project ObjectivesCurrently, one of the major research efforts in the field of network architecture and communication is devoted to the development of the so called ad hoc networks, which are characterized by the ability to communicate and coordinate without the need for a centralized base station to undertake these tasks
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are a very specific class of ad hoc networks, composed by a number of devices spread throughout a given area, and capable of collecting information about the surrounding environment, of processing this information, and of circulating it through the network via a wireless communication channel
Without delving too much into the specific details of our approach, suffice it to say that we had to design encoding distributions able to work with small program and packet sizes and which retain the good properties of the longer codes proposed in the literature [45, 46]
Summary
One of the major research efforts in the field of network architecture and communication is devoted to the development of the so called ad hoc networks, which are characterized by the ability to communicate and coordinate without the need for a centralized base station to undertake these tasks. In order to implement the above concepts, and provide a flexible and reconfigurable platform for testing algorithms and solutions for WSNs, we set up a large testbed including wireless nodes as well as networking devices that allow fast communication with the sensors (e.g., for reprogramming purposes). The USB backbone provides a cheap and fast way to log data for debugging, of performing general management and of programming nodes as well; because the object of the project is to design and experiment wireless sensor networking on a large scale, efficient algorithms for reprogramming nodes wirelessly will be deployed and tested, see Section 3. Section 4. will detail the localization and tracking applications, as well as the related problem of identifying the radio channel parameters, in order to provide good ranging performance
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