The Embedded WiSeNts Project has released a detailed report that presents an in-depth critical survey of a number of advanced research platforms for wireless sensor networks. Autored by experienced developers on each of the respective solutions, the document reviews some operating systems, hardware and simulators used today.
It’s a worth reading.
You can register and download the report here
A paper on the use of WSN for fire detection won the Best Paper Award at MobiSys 2006. A system based on MOS was deployed during August/September 2005 in the Bitterroot National Forest in Idaho, as part of a collaboration with the University of Montana. A hybrid network consisting of three MOS wireless sensor networks supported by an 802.11 backbone was deployed in the presence of active wildfires over mountainous forested terrain to monitor weather conditions. The paper reports that MOS operated well in this extremely rugged test of its kernel, networking, duty cycling, and application support capabilities.
The paper is available here.
IBM master inventor currently working on pervasive messaging apps explains his vision on the potential of WSN use and comments about the emergence of blogjects – effectively a blog generated automatically by sensors. Leading to a device or an object that will create its own blog about its life.
The article can be read here
BT has developed a system of remote sensor networks based in buoys to survey coastal erosion and which could help to predict floods and tsunamis.
The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) is backing the project, which is intended to improve the way the Environment Agency (EA) and other bodies monitor environmental changes.
The self-organising collegiate sensor (Secoas) network technology combines low-level artificial intelligence, electronic sensors and wireless radio. Networked buoys decide when and how to transmit the data they compile.
The complete story here.
Communications in wireless sensor networks are data-centric, with the objective of delivering collected data in a timely fashion. Also, such networks are resource-constrained, in terms of sensor nodes’ processing power, bandwidth communication, storage space and energy. This gives rise to new challenges in information processing and data management in wireless sensor networks. In many applications, users may frequently query information in the network. The tradeoff between updates and queries needs to be addressed. In-network data processing techniques, from simple reporting to more complicated collective communications, such as data aggregation, broadcast, multicast and gossip should be developed. On the other hand, data collected by sensors can intrinsically be viewed as signals. By exploiting signal processing techniques, collective communications can be done in more energy-efficient ways. Moreover, distributed data management schemes are necessary to be devised when sensed data is collected from different sources at different rates.
The Call for Papers is available here.
