Some twenty lecture on Wireless Sensor Networks by Prof.Christian Schindelhauer are available online. You can download both the slides and the video with the explanation. Topic covered are, among the others:

- WSN versus MANET
- Basics of computer networks, single node architecture
- Radio communication, physical layer of computer networks
- Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum, Code Division Multiple Access, Transceiver Design
- Transceiver characteristics, energy supply, runtime environment
- Medium Access Layer (MAC), Aloha, MACA, hidden terminal problem, exposed terminal problem
- IEEE 802.15.4, SMACS, TRAMA
- Time synchronization in WSN, motivation and principles
- Localization and Positioning: Introduction and Trilateration
- Topology control: (weak/power) spanner graphs, Delaunay graph, Gabriel graph, Yao graph

You can find the lectures here.

Crossbow Technology has announced a family of kits for Wireless Sensor Networks to accelerate technology evaluation, commercial application development and the set up of WSNs in educational teaching labs. The complexities of wireless communication and incomplete and inflexible offerings often created difficult challenges to deploy WSNs for end-users and developers. The new Crossbow kits contain pre-integrated, packaged hardware and software which reduces installation and set up of WSNs from days to minutes. Users can immediately start evaluating the benefits of WSN technology without the need for any programming or hardware configuration.

Bundled with all kits is MoteView, a PC based application for capturing, visualizing and analyzing sensor data and network management. For developers that go beyond technology evaluation and develop WSN systems or applications, the kits are modular in design and fully supported with Crossbow’s MoteWorks mesh networking software platform. The kits support 433MHz, 868/900MHz and 2.4GHz/IEEE 802.15.4 operation and the sensor nodes and base stations are certified against FCC and CE regulations for operation in most countries worldwide.

More information on the family of kits is available here.

Crossbow Technology has announced the Crossbow Imote2, a hardware platform for wireless sensor network research and development. The Crossbow Imote2 enables a new level of processing performance for wireless sensor networks and is a commercial release of the Intel Mote 2 design licensed from Intel. Integrating a high performance, low power, PXA271 Intel XScale processor and a 802.15.4 radio with a built in 2.4 GHz antenna, the Imote2 provides a platform for advanced, compute intensive wireless sensor network applications such as digital imaging and industrial vibration monitoring.

The PXA271 processor on the Imote2 can be configured to support a low voltage (0.85V), low frequency (13 MHz) mode as well as other scalable processing modes of up to 416 MHz. The 256KB of on-chip SRAM, 32 MB of SDRAM and 32MB of FLASH memory provide several orders of magnitude more resources for memory intensive applications than previous WSN hardware platforms. Power consumption is extremely low making this platform ideally suited for demanding but battery powered applications.

Several I/O and sensor interfaces on the board allow the development and integration of sensor boards that leverage the full capabilities of the Imote2, making it a versatile and flexible platform for a broad range of applications, including imaging, acoustics, seismic and vibration based signal processing. The 802.15.4 standard compliant radio supports a 250kb/s data rate with 16 channels in the 2.4 GHz band. With the integrated 2.4 GHz surface mount antenna, a typical range of 100 feet (30m) is achieved. For longer range requirements an external antenna can be used via an optional SMA connector. Currently, the Imote2 is supported by several operating systems including TinyOS 1.1, TinyOS 2.0, SOS and Linux.

More information on the Imote2 is available here.

Crossbow’s website is http://www.xbow.com/

Within the EU sponsored project AWARE project, autonomous robotics systems and wireless sensor networks are jointly considered. The project involves the development of co-operative robotics functionalities.

The platform will offer self-deployment, selfconfiguration and self-repairing features by means of cooperating autonomous helicopters. These features are highly relevant in natural and urban environments without pre-existing infrastructure or in situations where the infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed.

Two validation scenarios are being considered: DisasterManagement/CivilSecurity and Filming applications.

The project is coordinated by Anibal Ollero from AICIA, Sevilla, Spain

Do you want to know more check the project web site.

Jennic has launched a recruitment drive for embedded software and wireless applications engineers in the UK.

The firm, which is based in Sheffield, is looking for a dozen engineers particularly with experience of wireless mesh networks and developing protocol stacks, as well as those with applications engineering experience with microcontrollers.

The firm’s CEO Jim Lindop said: “This recruitment drive is part of our long-term strategy to support our product and pricing roadmap in wireless sensor networks. For product development we need additional engineers on proprietary, application-orientated protocols and ZigBee network stacks.”

Jennic recently told Electronics Weekly that 90 per cent of the developments kits that it sells are for ZigBee, while a year ago 90 per cent were for 802.15.4.

Jennic’s career webpage can be found here.

As part of an EPSRC CASE award in collaboration with a UK government research and development organisation, we are seeking to recruit a highly motivated PhD student in the research area of Wireless Sensor Networks applied to sensors for physical intruder detection within high security environments.

Currently available wireless sensor networks lack the required features. The successful candidate will devise methods that allow us to use wireless sensor networks in areas which require secure and predictable communication within a potentially hostile and manipulative electromagnetic environment.

The studentship is supported by a standard EPSRC allowance, which covers the stipend and university fees. Additional finance is available to provide equipment, consumables and travel costs. The successful applicant will have the opportunity to interact with the government partner and will be part of a Laboratory involved in state-of-the-art research in communication systems.

More information is available here.

From Moteiv’s blog:

Boeing Phantom Works has published a very interesting paper on a system to detect corrosion in aircraft using wireless sensors at IMECE 2006. Previous research into aircraft maintenance has show that “by far, the largest single maintenance problem facing the operators [airlines] is structural corrosion.”

Their proposed solution is an environmentally powered wireless network of Tmote Sky nodes with corrosion sensors. The system is powered by a piezoelectric bimorph energy harvester with a power conditioning circuit. It operates at a 0.13% duty cycle, sending corrosion readings every 30 minutes.

According to the authors, “Moteiv’s Tmote Sky transceiver design requires the least amount of power to operate. In addition, the Moteiv transceiver met all of our requirements and was the lowest in cost.”

For more information, see the ASME website and look for paper IMECE2006-13381.

Adam Dunkels the author of widely used sensornet softwares like micro-TCP/IP, Contiki OS, and Protothreads would defend his PhD thesis entitled “Programming Memory-Constrained Networked Embedded Systems“, at 10:00 AM on the 15th of February 2007 in the conference rooms “Filen” 2 & 3 on level 3 in Electrum, Kista, Sweden.

Opponent of the defense is Dr. Kay Römer from the Institute for Pervasive Computing at ETH Zurich. Everyone is invited to attend!

More information could be found here.

Ever wondered who are the authors of this blog? We finally have an about-us page, where you can read about us (and have a look at our pictures!).

The about-us is available here!

Potential applications for distributed networks of sensors are numerous and varied. Concern for the environment is one of the driving forces behind extensive research into all aspects of sensor networks (communication protocols, energy harvesting, and microelectronic device fabrication, to name a few), and motivation to explore this many-faceted world is high.

Optical wireless communication (OWC) must contend with phenomena resulting from the interaction of the propagating light beam (the optic carrier) with the transmission medium, such as scattering of light by particles in the channel. However, this very scattering, considered an obstacle for achieving high-performance OWC, can also be exploited as a sensing mechanism, as is familiar from lidar (light detection and ranging) probing. We have proposed a sensor system for atmospheric investigation based on the principle of lidar and using orthogonally coded data signals to overcome multiaccess interference problems. We now pose the question, Can the same principle be applied for underwater contaminant detection and monitoring?

The complete article can be found here.

The first Annual IEEE International Workshop “From Theory To Practice in Wireless Sensor Networks” (t2pWSN’2007) will be co-located with the IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks in Helsinki.

T2PWSN 2007 is devoted to the central question on how the abundance of results in algorithms, theory and modeling in the context of wireless sensor networks can be put into pratctical use and real experiences.

T2PWSN is intended to be a lively meeting, covering many experiences for the application of theoritical results of the algorithmic aspects of this field ranging from optimization, computational geometry, spatial stochastic models for wireless communications, graph, random graphs, spatial point processes and stochastic geometry, discrete and continuum percolation, theory combinatorics and approximation algorithms.

The workshop is intended to foster discussion, cooperation among researchers in mobile computing and researchers in discrete and distributed algorithms and offer an opportunity to discuss and express their views on the application of theoritical results, and on a critical review of additionally required resarch activities.

Complete information can be found here.