A one-page paper announcing that wireless technology is for the birds. Or at least the chickens. Michigan State University has plucked a $375,000 federal grant to study the habits of commercial egg-laying hens by using wireless sensors to track “activity profiles.” That’s academic speak for how the hens pass the time when not laying eggs, cackling or playing coy with roosters.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is paying researchers to hook up chickens with a “hen-mountable wireless system” to study how they interact with other birds. The work will help the farmers know how much space hens need and what types of “non-cage housing systems” will provide the “best possible welfare for the animals,” according to MSU.

“Ultimately, the sensors will tell us what behavior a hen is performing. Is she laying an egg? Eating? Or roosting on a perch? Does she fly or walk to move around?” Janice Siegford, a professor of animal science at MSU, said in a statement.

More info here.

The CONET Consortium just released their Research Roadmap (2009 ver) to the public domain. The book contains an introduction to the topic of cooperating objects, state of the art review in the field and a compendium of research gaps and trends. It serves well as an overview of hot research topics to be pursued by their members and the community at large in the near future.

You may download the Rodmap here (6 Mb pdf file).

Researcher Carlo Alberto Boano, formerly at SICS, received the Bengt Asker Award for his thesis: Application Support Design for Wireless Sensor Networks (Zip 10 MB).

The award is given by The Swedish National Real-Time Association for the best Swedish master or final year thesis in the field of real-time and embedded systems.

The research work was conducted within the Center for Networked Systems. The author was jointly supervised by Pablo Suarez (Saab) and Thiemo Voigt (SICS).

Congratulations from the WSNBlog team!

More details here and there

Innovative uses of advanced sensors and sensor networks are starting to be translated into new ecological knowledge. These sensors are providing a new set of “eyes” through which researchers may observe the world in new ways, extend spatial and temporal scales of observation, more accurately estimate what cannot be observed, and, most important, obtain unexpected results or develop new paradigms. Automated sensors are widely deployed by members of the Organization of Biological Field Stations, yet some needs—particularly for chemical and biological sensors—are not currently being met. There are additional opportunities for developing sensor networks at synoptic, regional, continental, and global scales. Although we are seeing more uses of sensor systems and, in particular, sensor networks, the opportunities for these systems are just beginning to be realized, with much more work to be done, including formulation of new questions, development of new sensors, better software, and new ways for researchers to work together across large distances.

From a paper in BioScience, May 2009, by American Institute of Biological Sciences

Full text available here (campus/library subscription required)

With the explosive proliferation of mobile communication and wireless computing devices, the scalability property is becoming an increasingly popular and important issue in wireless communication research, as it has been recognized as one of the key features for supporting pervasive networking scenarios.

The International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems (IJCNDS)  has a call for papers for a special issue on “Scalable Wireless Neworks”.

The aim of this special issue is to bring together the state-of-the-art research contributions that address the major opportunities and challenges of scalable wireless communication and networking, with emphasis on the design, analysis and evaluation of new techniques and novel application scenarios.

Specific topics of interest and CFP are available here

Important Dates
Paper submission due: 1 October, 2009
Notification of acceptance: 15 January, 2010
Camera-ready version due: 1 March, 2010

ISPN’09 was held last month in San Francisco.  The conference featured two interleaved tracks, the Information Processing (IP) track, and the Sensor Platforms, Tools and Design Methods (SPOTS) track. Each of which selected best paper awards.

The former one had two nominations: one best paper award and a best student paper award, which correponded to: Secure and Highly-Available Aggregation Queries in Large-Scale Sensor Networks via Set Sampling by Haifeng Yu (National University of Singapore) and On Hierarchical Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks by Konrad Iwanicki et al (VU Amsterdam), respectively.

On the SPOTS track the award corresponds to Monitoring Heritage Buildings with Wireless Sensor Networks: The Torre Aquila Deployment by M. Ceriotti et al (Bruno Kessler Foundation / University of Trento / TRETEC)

Check out our previous post from EWSN’09 and go figure who made two awards in a row this year!

Congrats to all the authors for the good work.

Within the context of the Karbon footprinting demonstrator and in an effort with Episensor and Tyndall, CLARITY have started monitoring the energy consumption and people activity of several parts of its premises at UCD and DCU.

Data streaming in real time is available online in XML format (data rate is about 1 packet per minute and needs to be refreshed to see updates)
The overall aim of the Karbon Footprinting demonstrator is to provide a opportunity for small to medium scale carbon footprinting. In brief, a wide range of sensor technologies will be used to measure and analyse the energy consumption, activity, and waste management profiles of individuals and groups of individuals in both home and small-office environments.
The Karbon Footprinting Demonstrator will provide a platform collaboration across a number of different groups within the core CLARITY CSET, as well as providing an opportunity for existing and new partners to participate in a substantial development opportunity.

For more info about the Karbon Footprinting, send an email to ruzzelli@ucd.ie
For more information click here

Waspmote from Libelium

Less than 4 weeks left for the results of the sensor survey launched by Libelium to be published. It is the first time a manufacturer ask the future users to take part in the design of a wireless sensor platform.

As far as now, more than 200 researchers and developers have participied, sending the list of sensors they would like to find integrated in the new mote developed by the spanish brand. The sensor platform will be released under the name of Waspmote

As an advance of the upcoming results, the Libelium’s CTO, David Gascón pointed out the special interest shown in the gas sensors (CO, CO2, O2), motion sensors (accelerometer, tilt, vibration) and sensors for agricultural and environmental applications.

You can still take part of the Sensor Survey during the current month of May. There will be a prize draw for a Waspmote Developer Kit among all the participants.

On 1st June the results will be published in the Libelium RSS, the Newsletter bulletin and of course, in a special post in our blog.

Many WSN deployments require the devices to run for long periods (months) using a combination of duty cycling and renewable energy sources (e.g., solar panels). This technical report is the first comprehensive study of end-to-end data collection from a solar-powered Sun SPOT over a period of multiple weeks.

We ran our experiment for nearly a month and collected sensor data into a mySQL database for later analysis and visualization. This experiment helped us uncover and fix several issues that caused disruptions in data collection — the occasional inability of the device to enter deep sleep, the resulting clock reset due to premature battery exhaustion, and loss of connectivity to the database after long periods of inactivity. The report offers important lessons in the design of a sensor data collection framework and lists both recommended best practices as well as potential pitfalls to avoid.

The report by Vipul Gupta is available here and some comments are on his blog here.