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
I came across an interesting article on the deployment of a wireless sensors network from Intelesense Technologies in Ethiopia to monitor antiretroviral drug therapies for AIDS. The system is expected to replace paper-based handwritten data collection systems currrently used to track the progress of the disease.
Ethiopia with a population of about 70 million faces one of the direst AIDS epidemics in all of Africa with more than 2 million thought to be infected with HIV and with about one million AIDS orphans.
Health-care delivery in Ethiopia seems to face challenges like lack of power, lack of adequate telecommunication systems and widely scattered population. About 80 percent of Ethiopians seem to live outside it’s cities in remote villages and doctors travel from village to village by foot or by cart.
There is a very cool Eclipse Plugin available (in beta testing) for TinyOS from here.
The plugin is basically aimed at making TinyOS and NesC programming easier. “Newcomers who have little experience in writing sensor network applications need help on fundamental aspects of TinyOS development. For one, getting used to the design philosophy of the operating system is not easy. Especially its completely modular application design and the unique way of combining modules by means of a so called “wiring” require some time to get used to.” … read ACM RealWSN’06 paper here
In bridging the digital divide, two important criteria are cost-effectiveness, and power optimization. While 802.11 is cost-effective and is being used in several installations in the developing world, typical system configurations are not really power efficient. In this paper, we propose a novel “Wake-on-WLAN” mechanism for coarse-grained, on-demand power on/off of the networking equipment at a remote site. The novelty also lies in our implementation of a prototype system using low-power 802.15.4-based sensor motes. We describe the prototype, as well as its evaluation on field in a WiFi testbed. Preliminary estimates indicate that the proposed mechanism can save significant power in typical rural networking settings.
The complete paper is available here.
The Sensors Network group at the Distributed Laboratory at The University of Copenhagen was in charge of the teachware as part of the Embedded WiseNet project (2004-2006) in the EU. The course is a nice introduction to the TinyOS community efforts to provide robust open software. The long term goal is to bring a consistent ground for applications beyond the academic world. The course material can be accessed here (2004 and 2005)
A very interesting paper on “Designing Wireless Sensor Networks as a Shared Resource for Sustainable Development” is available here.
In the paper, the authors (from UCLA, Center for Embedded Network Sensing) highlight their experience in developing and deploying water quality monitoring wireless sensor networks in Bangladesh and California.
Right now, there are hundreds of millions of cell phones in use around the world. According to UC Berkeley computer science graduate student R.J. Honicky, the ubiquity of those devices could be leveraged to help reduce pollution, fight disease, and tackle other societal scale problems with no additional effort on the part of the person carrying the phone. The key is outfitting newly manufactured cell phones with inexpensive environmental sensors.
The complete article is available here.
A paper on ” COMMON-Sense Net: Improved Water Management for Resource-Poor Farmers via Sensor Networks”, by Jacques Panchard, Seshagiri Rao, Prabhakar T.V, H.S. Jamadagni and Jean-Pierre Hubaux, will be presented at the ICTD 2006 conference in Berkeley, USA, May 25 and 26 2006, in the ICT for Agriculture track. The paper describes the on-going design and implementation of a sensor network for agricultural management targeted at resource-poor farmers in India.
The paper is available here, in the COMMON-Sense Net website.
