It’s hip2b2

While doing a bit of reading on WiMesh networks, I bumped into a lot of literature about another form of wireless ad-hoc network called a Wireless Ad-hoc Sensor Network. People have been studying sensor management for quite sometime now. There is even an ACM publication dedicated to wireless sensor studies.

These types of networks will have many of the characteristics of our previously featured ad-hoc wireless mesh networks such as being wireless, ad-hoc, distributed and connected. The most common uses of wireless sensor networks are commonly used for a whole multitude of applications such as telemetry for both military and civilian applications. The ability to easily distribute, collect data and manage sensors open up numerous possibilities for grown in this space [1]. However, they are not necessarily mobile, multi-hop and multi-channel. Most of these sensors have fixed positions after they are deployed and discovered. Data is typically not routed between the nodes themselves but directly to a central collector. Since, majority of the applications are network telemetry, this does not require a lot of bandwidth and thus does not require a whole lot of channels.

A quick way to get started with wireless sensor networks would be look the freely available tools. The most popular operating system and simulators for these types of networks are provided by TinyOS and TOSSIM.

TinyOS is an open-source operating system designed for wireless embedded sensor networks. It features a component-based architecture which enables rapid innovation and implementation while minimizing code size as required by the severe memory constraints inherent in sensor networks.

An Intel Mote - remote sensor

If you really want to try it on “real” hardware you can get one of these motes from vendors like Intel. Definitely an interesting field of research and its seems that there are a lot of resources available.

References:
[1] Römer, Kay; Friedemann Mattern (December 2004). “The Design Space of Wireless Sensor Networks”. IEEE Wireless Communications 11 (6): 54-61.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 1:45 am and is filed under ProjectWM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.