Wireless Sensor Networks: Instrumenting the Physical World

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Wireless Sensor Networks Instrumenting the
Physical World

• Deborah Estrin
• UCLA Computer Science Department
• and
• USC/ISI
• http//lecs.cs.ucla.edu/estrin
• destrin_at_cs.ucla.edu
• Collaborative work with SCADDS researchers
  Heidemann, Govindan, Bulusu, Cerpa, Elson,
  Ganesan, Girod, Intanagowat, Yu, and Zhao
  (USC/ISI and UCLA) and Shenker (ACIRI)

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The long term goal
Embed numerous distributed devices to monitor and
interact with physical world in work-spaces,
hospitals, homes, vehicles, and the environment
(water, soil, air)
Network these devices so that they can coordinate
to perform higher-level tasks. Requires robust
distributed systems of hundreds or thousands of
devices.
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Vision

• Embed large numbers of small, low-power,
  computationally powerful, communicating
  devices...
• Communicate to correlate and coordinate
• Design, deploy, and control robust distributed
  systems composed of hundreds or thousands of
  physically-embedded devices

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Super Sensing

• Supercomputing and computational science
  qualitatively altered science and engineering by
  making it practical to analyze what was not
  previously practical
• Distributed micro-sensing now makes it practical
  to measure and monitor what was not previously
  practical--radically increases the spatial and
  temporal density of in situ monitoring

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In the laboratory

• Marine Biology
• e.g., correlate samples with temperature,
  salinity, etc.
• Contaminant flows
• Measure flows without disruptingprocess

Bio-Tank
?-scaled Tethered Robot
Algae
2 meters
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In the Field

• Habitat studies
• Environmental monitoring

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Model Development and Validation

• Seismic activity in urban centers
• Atmospheric monitoring in heterogeneous regions
• Oceanographic current monitoring
• Coastal ocean networks

www.argo.ucsd.edu
Topex-www.jpl.nasa.gov
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Complex Structures

• Seismic response in buildings
• Bridges
• Aircraft
• Photocopiers
• Transportation
• ComputationalFabric

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New Constraints

• Tight coupling to the physical world
• Need better physical models
• More experimentation
• Designing for energy constraints
• Coping with apparent loss of layering
• Radioto MACto routingto application
• More experimentation

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New Design Goals

• Designing for long-lived (and often
  energy-constrained) systems
• Low-duty cycle operation
• Exploiting redundancy
• Tiered architectures
• Self configuring systems
• Measure and adapt to unpredictable RF and sensing
  environment
• Exploit spatial diversity of sensor/actuator
  nodes
• Localization and Time synchronization are key
  building blocks

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Technical challenges

• Ad hoc, self organizing, adaptive systems with
  predictable behaviors
• Collaborative processing, data fusion, multiple
  sensory modalities
• Data analysis/mining to identify collaborative
  sensing, triggering thresholds, etc

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Enormous Potential Impact
Disaster Recovery and Urban Rescue
Earth Science Exploration
Condition Based Maintenance
Wearable computing
Medical monitoring
Networked Embedded Systems
Smart spaces
Transportation
EnvironmentalMonitoring
Active Structures
Biological Monitoring
Bio-Tank
Strand Stand
?-scaled Tethered Robot
Algae
Sensors
2 meters