Title: Sensor Network Applications
1 Sensor Network Applications
2Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- Introduction
- Habitat and environmental monitoring represent
essential class of sensor network applications by
placing numerous networked micro-sensors in an
environment where long-term data collection can
be achieved - The sensor nodes perform filtering and triggering
functions as well as application-specific or
sensor-specific data compression algorithms thru
the integration of local processing and storage - The ability to communicate allows nodes to
cooperate in performing tasks such as statistical
sampling, data aggregation, and system health and
status monitoring - Increased power efficiency assists in resolving
fundamental design tradeoffs, e.g., between
sampling rates and battery lifetimes
3Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- Introduction
- The sensor nodes can be reprogrammed or retasked
after deployment in the field by the networking
and computing capabilities provided - Nodes can adapt their operation over time in
response to changes in the environment - The application context helps to differentiate
problems with simple and concrete solutions from
open research areas - An effective sensor network architecture and
general solutions should be developed for the
domain - The impact of sensor networks for habitat and
environmental monitoring is measured by their
ability to enable new applications and produce
new results
4Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- Introduction
- This paper develops a specific habitat monitoring
application, but yet a representative of the
domain - It presents a collection of requirements,
constraints and guidelines that serve as a basis
for general sensor network architecture - It describes the core components of the sensor
network for this domain hardware and sensor
platforms, the distinct networks involved, their
interconnection, and the data management
facilities - The design and implementation of the essential
network services power management,
communications, re-tasking, and node management
can be evaluated in this context
5Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- Habitat Monitoring
- Researchers in the Life Sciences are concerned
about the impacts of human presence in monitoring
plants and animals in the field conditions - It is possible that chronic human disturbance may
adversely effect results by changing behavioral
patterns or distributions - Disturbance effects are of concern in small
island situations where it may be physically
impossible for researchers to avoid some impact
on an entire population - Seabird colonies are extreme sensitive to human
disturbance - Research in Maine Anderson 1995, suggests that
a 15 minute visit to a cormorant colony can
result in up to 20 mortality among eggs and
chicks in a given breeding year. Repeated
disturbance can lead to the end of the colony
6Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- Habitat Monitoring
- On Kent Island, Nova Scotia, research learned
that Leachs Storm Petrels are likely to desert
their nesting burrows in case of disturbance
during the first two weeks of incubation - Sensor networks advances the monitoring methods
over the traditional invasive ones - Sensors can be deployed prior to the breeding
season or other sensitive period or while plants
are dormant or the ground is frozen on small
islets where it would be unsafe or unwise to
repeatedly attempt field studies - Sensor network deployment may be more economical
method for conducting long-term studies than
traditional personnel-rich methods - A deploy em and leave em strategy of wireless
sensor usage would decrease the logistical needs
to initial placement and occasional servicing
7Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- Great Duck Island
- The College of Atlantic (COA) is field testing
in-situ sensor networks for habitat monitoring - Great Duck Island (GDI) is a 237 acre island
located 15 km south of Mount Desert Island, Maine - At GDI, three major questions in monitoring the
Leachs Storm Petrel Anderson 1995 - What is the usage pattern of nesting burrows over
the 24-72 hour cycle when one or both members of
a breeding pair may alternate incubation duties
with feeding at sea? - What changes can be observed in the burrow and
surface environmental parameters during the
course of the approximately 7 month breeding
season (April-October)?
8Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- Great Duck Island
- What are the differences in the
micro-environments with and without large numbers
of nesting petrels? - Presence/absence data is obtained through
occupancy detection and temperature differentials
between burrows with adult birds and burrows that
contain eggs, chicks, or are empty - Petrels will most likely enter or leave during
the daytime however, 5-10 minutes during late
evening and early morning measurements are needed
to capture the entry and exit timings - More general environmental differentials between
burrow and surface conditions can be captured by
records every 2-4 hours during the extended
breeding season whereas, the differences between
popular and unpopular sites benefit from
hourly sampling
9Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- Great Duck Island Requirements
- Internet Access
- The sensor networks at GDI must be accessible via
the Internet since the ability to support remote
interactions with in-situ networks is essential - Hierarchical Network
- Habitats of interest are located up to several
kilometers away. A second tier of wireless
networking provides connectivity to multiple
patches of sensor networks deployed at each of
the areas. - Sensor Network Longevity
- Sensor networks that runs for several month from
non-rechargeable power sources would be desirable
since studies at GDI can span multiple field
seasons
10Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- Great Duck Island Requirements
- Operating off-the grid
- Every level of the network must operate with
bounded energy supplies - Renewable energy such as solar power may be
available some locations, disconnected operation
is a possibility - GDI has enough solar power that run the
application 24x7 with small probabilities of
service interruptions due to power loss - Management at-a-distance
- Remoteness of the field sites requires the
ability to monitor and manage sensor networks
over the Internet. The goal is no on-site
presence for maintenance and administration
during the field season, except for installation
and removal of nodes
11Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- Great Duck Island Requirements
- Inconspicuous operation
- It should not disrupt the natural processes or
behaviors under study - Removing human presence from the study areas
would eliminate a source of error and variation
in data collection and source of disturbance - System behavior
- Sensor networks should present stable,
predictable, and repeatable behavior at all times
since unpredictable system is difficult to debug
and maintain - Predictability is essential in developing trust
in these new technologies for life scientists
12Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- Great Duck Island Requirements
- In-situ interactions
- Local interactions are required during initial
development, maintenance and on-site visits - PDAs can be useful in accomplishing these tasks
they may directly query a sensor, adjust
operational parameters and so on - Sensors and sampling
- The ability to sense light, temperature,
infrared, relative humidity, and barometric
pressure are essential set of measurements - Additional measurements may include
acceleration/vibration, weight, chemical vapors,
gas concentrations, pH, and noise levels
13Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- Great Duck Island Requirements
- Data archiving
- Sensor readings must be achieved for off-line
data mining and analysis - The reliable offloading of sensor logs to
databases in the wired, powered infrastructure is
essential - It is desirable to interactively drill-down and
explore sensors in near real-time complement
log-based studies. In this mode of operation, the
timely delivery of sensor data is the key - Nodal data summaries and periodic
health-and-status monitoring also requires timely
delivery of the data
14Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- System Architecture
- A tiered architecture is developed
- The lowest level consists of the sensor nodes
that perform general purpose computing and
networking as well as application-specific
sensing - The sensor nodes may be deployed in dense patches
and transmit their data through the sensor
network to the sensor network gateway - Gateway is responsible for transmitting sensor
data from the sensor patch through a local
transit network to the remote base station that
provides WAN connectivity and data logging - The base station connects to database replicas
across the internet - At last, the data is displayed to researchers
through a user interface
15Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
Figure 1 System architecture for habitat
monitoring
16Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- System Architecture
- The autonomous sensor nodes are placed in the
areas of interest where each sensor node collects
environmental data about its immediate
surroundings - Since these sensors are placed close to the area
of interest, they can be built using small and
inexpensive individual sensors high spatial
resolution can be achieved through dense
deployment of sensor nodes - This architecture offers higher robustness
compared to traditional approaches which use a
few high quality sensors with complex signal
processing - The computational module is a programmable unit
that provides computation, storage and
bidirectional communication with other nodes
17Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- System Architecture
- The computational module interfaces with the
analog and digital sensors on the sensor module,
performs basic signal processing and dispatches
the data according to the needs of the
application - Compared to traditional data logging systems,
networked sensors offer two main advantages they
can be re-tasked in the field and they can
communicate with the rest of the system - In-situ re-tasking gives researchers the ability
to refocus their observations based on the
analysis of the initial results initially,
absolute temperature readings are desired, after
a while, only significant temperature changes
exceeding a threshold may become more useful
18Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- System Architecture
- Individual sensor nodes communicate and
coordinate with one another - These nodes form a multi-hop network by
forwarding each others messages and if needed,
the network can perform in-network aggregation
(e.g., relaying the average temperature across
the region) - Eventually, data from each sensor needs to be
propagated to the Internet - The propagated data may be raw, filtered or
processed data - Since direct wide area connectivity cannot be
brought to each sensor path due to several
reasons (e.g., cost of equipment, power,
disturbance created by the installation of the
equipment in the environment), wide are
connectivity is brought to a base station instead
19Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- System Architecture
- The base station may communicate with the sensor
patch using a wireless LAN where each sensor
patch is equipped with a gateway that can
communicate with the sensor network and provides
connectivity to the transit network - The transit network may consist of a single hop
link or series of networked wireless nodes and
each transit network design has different
characteristics with respect to expected
robustness, bandwidth, energy efficiency, cost
and manageability - To provide data to remote end-users, the base
station includes WAN connectivity and persistent
data storage for the collection of sensor patches
20Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- System Architecture
- It is expected that WAN connection will be
wireless - The architecture needs to address the
disconnection possibilities - Each layer (sensor nodes, gateways, base
stations) has some persistent storage to protect
against data loss due to power outage as well as
data management services - At the sensor level, these will be primitive,
taking the form of data logging - The base station may provide relational database
service while the data management at the gateways
falls somewhere in between - When it comes to data collection, long-latency is
preferable to data loss - Users interact with the sensor network in two ways
21Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- System Architecture
- Remote users access the replica of the base
station database - This approach assists on integration with data
analysis and mining tools while masking the
potential wide area disconnections with the base
stations - On-site users may require direct interaction with
the network and this can be accomplished with a
small, PDA-sized device, referred to as gizmo - Gizmo allows the user to interactively control
the network parameters by adjusting the sampling
rates, power management parameters and other
network parameters - The connectivity between any sensor node and
gizmo may or may not rely on functioning on
multi-hop sensor network routing
22Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- Implementation Strategies
- Sensor Network Node
- UC Berkeley motes are used as the sensor nodes
- Mica uses a single channel, 916 MHz radio from RF
Monolithics to provide bi-directional
communication at 40 Kbps, an Atmel Atmega 103
microcontroller running at 4 MHz and 512 KB
nonvolatile storage - A pair of conventional AA batteries and a DC
boost converter provide the power source
however, other renewable energy sources can be
used
23Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- Implementation Strategies
- Sensor Board
- The Mica Weather Board provides sensors that
monitor changing environmental conditions with
the same functionality as a traditional weather
station - The Mica Weather Board includes temperature,
photoresistor, barometric pressure, humidity, and
passive infrared (thermopile) sensors
Table 1 Mica Weather Board
24Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- Implementation Strategies
- Sensor Board
Figure 2 Mica Hardware Platform The Mica sensor
node (left) with the Mica Weather Board developed
for environmental monitoring applications
25Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- Implementation Strategies
- Energy Budget
- Typical habitat monitoring applications need to
run for nine months - The application chooses how to allocate the
energy budget between sleep modes, sensing, local
calculations and communications - Since different nodes have different functions,
they also have different power requirements, for
instance, the nodes near the gateway may need to
forward all messages from a patch while a node in
a nest may only need to report its own readings - When a set of power limited nodes exhaust their
power supplies, the network can become
disconnected and inoperable - There is a need to budget the power with respect
to the energy bottlenecks of the network
26Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- Implementation Strategies
- Energy Budget
- The baseline life time of the node is determined
by the current draw in the sleep state - Minimizing power in sleep mode means turning off
the sensors, the radio and putting the processor
into a deep sleep mode
Table 2 Power required by various Mica operations
27Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- Implementation Strategies
- Sensor Deployment
- A wireless sensor network using Mica motes with
Mica Weather Board has been deployed in July 2002 - Environmental protective packaging has been
designed which minimally obstruct sensing
functionality
Figure 3 Acrylic enclosure used for deploying
the Mica mote
28Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- Implementation Strategies
- Patch Gateways
- Usage of different gateway nodes directly affects
the underlying available transit network - Two designs implemented an 802.11b single hop
with an embedded Linux system and a single hop
mote-to-mote network - Initially, CerfCube Cerfcube which is a small
StrongARM-based embedded system to act as a
sensor patch gateway, is chosen - Each gateway is equipped with a CompactFlash
802.11b adapter - Gateway use permanent storage of up to 1GB
- The mote-to-mote solution consisted of a mote
connected to the base station and a mote in the
sensor patch
29Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- Implementation Strategies
- Patch Gateways
- The differences between the mote and CerfCube
include different - communication frequency
- power requirements
- software components
- The motes MAC layer does not require
bi-directional link like 802.11b - In addition, the mote sends raw data with a small
packet header (4 bytes) directly over the radio
as opposed to overheads imposed by 802.11b and
TCP/IP connections
30Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- Implementation Strategies
- Base-station installation
- For achieve remote access, collection of sensor
patches is connected to the Internet through a
wide-area link - On GDI, Internet connectivity is accomplished
through a two-way satellite connection provided
by Hughes and similar to DirecTV system - The satellite system is connected to a laptop
which coordinates the sensor patches and provides
a relational database service - Database Management System
- The base station uses Postgres SQL database which
stores time-stamped readings from the sensors,
health status of the individual sensors, and
metadata (e.g., sensor locations)
31Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring
Mainwaring 2002
- Implementation Strategies
- Database Management System
- The GDI database is replicated every fifteen
minutes over the wide-area satellite link to
Postgres database in Berkeley - User Interfaces
- Many user interfaces can be implemented on top of
the sensor database - GIS systems provide a widely used standard for
analyzing geographical data and most statistics
and data analysis packages implement interfaces
to relational databases - Number of web interfaces can be implemented to
provide the ubiquitous interfaces to the habitat
data
32Energy-Efficient Computing for Wildlife Tracking
Design Tradeoffs and Early Experiences with
ZebraNet Juang 2002
- Introduction
- Focus is on issues related to dynamic sensor
networks with mobile nodes and wireless
communication between them - In this system, the sensor nodes collars carried
by the animals under study wireless ad hoc
networking techniques are used to swap and store
data in a peer-to-peer manner and to pass it
towards a mobile base station that sporadically
traverses the area to upload data - Biology and biocomplexity research has been
focused on gathering data and observations on a
range of species to understand their interactions
and influences on each other - For example, how human development into
wilderness areas affects indigenous species
there understand the migration patterns of wild
animals and how they may be affected by changes
in weather patterns or plant life, by
introduction of non-native species, and by other
influences
33Energy-Efficient Computing for Wildlife Tracking
Design Tradeoffs and Early Experiences with
ZebraNet Juang 2002
- Introduction
- Finding and learning these details require
long-term position logs and other biometric data
such as heart rate, body temperature, and
frequency feeding - Current wildlife tracking studies rely on simple
technology, for example, many studies rely on
collaring a sample subset of animals with simple
VHF transmitters - Researchers periodically drive through and/or fly
over an area with a receiver antenna, and listen
for pings from previously collared animals - Once animal is found, its behavior can be
observed and its observed position can be logged
however, there are limits to such studies - First, data collection is infrequent and can miss
many interesting events
34Energy-Efficient Computing for Wildlife Tracking
Design Tradeoffs and Early Experiences with
ZebraNet Juang 2002
- Introduction
- Second, data collection is mostly limited to
daylight hours, but animal behavior and movements
in night hours can be different - Third, data collection is impossible or very
limited for secluded species that avoid human
contact - The most elegant trackers commercially available
use GPS to track position and use satellite
uploads to transfer data to a base station - These systems also suffer from several
limitations - First, at most a log of 3000 position samples can
be logged and no biometric data - Second, since satellite uploads are slow and uses
high power consumption, they are done
infrequently this limits how often position
samples can be gathered without overflowing
3000-entry log storage
35Energy-Efficient Computing for Wildlife Tracking
Design Tradeoffs and Early Experiences with
ZebraNet Juang 2002
- Introduction
- Third, downloads of data from the satellite to
the researchers are both slow and expensive,
therefore, constraining the amount of data
collected - Finally, these systems operate on batteries
without recharge when power is drained, the
system become unusable unless it is retrieved,
recharged and re-deployed - ZebraNet project is building tracking nodes that
include a low-power miniature GPS system with
user-programmable CPU, non-volatile storage for
data logs, and radio transceivers for
communicating either with other nodes or with a
base station
36Energy-Efficient Computing for Wildlife Tracking
Design Tradeoffs and Early Experiences with
ZebraNet Juang 2002
- Introduction
- One of the key principles of ZebraNet is that the
system should work in arbitrary wilderness
locations no assumptions are made about the
presence of of fixed antenna towers or cellular
phone service - The system uses peer-to-peer data swaps to move
the data around periodic researcher drives bys
and/or fly-overs can collect logged data from
several animals despite encountering relatively
few within range - Even though ad hoc sensor networks have been
heavily studied, not much has been published
about the characteristics of mobile sensor
networks with mobile base stations and very few
studies focus on building real systems
37Energy-Efficient Computing for Wildlife Tracking
Design Tradeoffs and Early Experiences with
ZebraNet Juang 2002
- Introduction
- This paper has the following unique
contributions - To the best knowledge of authors, this is the
first study of mobile sensor networks protocols
in which the base station is also mobile. It is
presumed that researchers will upload data while
driving or flying by the region - Zebra-tracking is a domain in which the node
mobility models are unknown which makes it a
research goal. Understanding how, when and why
zebras undertake long-term migrations is the most
essential biological question of this work. - ZebraNets data collection has communication
patterns in which data can be cooperatively
passed towards a base station - Energy tradeoffs are examined in detail using
real system energy measurements for ZebraNet
prototype hardware in operation
38Energy-Efficient Computing for Wildlife Tracking
Design Tradeoffs and Early Experiences with
ZebraNet Juang 2002
- Introduction
- Some of the interesting research questions to be
explored are - How to make the communications protocol both
effective and power-efficient? - To what extent can we rely on ad hoc,
peer-to-peer transfers in a sparsely-connected
spatially-huge sensor network? - How can we provide comprehensive tracking of a
collection of animals, even if some of the
animals are reclusive and rarely are close enough
to humans to have their data logs updated
directly? - This research work gives quantitative
explorations of the design decisions behind some
of these questions
39Energy-Efficient Computing for Wildlife Tracking
Design Tradeoffs and Early Experiences with
ZebraNet Juang 2002
- ZebraNet Design Goals
- The ZebraNet project is a direct and ongoing
collaboration between researchers in experimental
computer systems and in wildlife biology - The wildlife biologists have determined the
trackers overall design goals - GPS position samples are taken every three
minutes - Detailed activity logs taken for three minutes
every hour - One year of operation without direct human
intervention that is, not counting on
tranquilizing and re-collaring an animal more
than once per year - No fixed base stations, antennas, or cellular
service - A high success rate for eventually delivering all
logged data is essential while latency is not as
critical - For a zebra collar, a weight limit of 3-5 lbs is
recommended
40Energy-Efficient Computing for Wildlife Tracking
Design Tradeoffs and Early Experiences with
ZebraNet Juang 2002
- ZebraNet Design Goals
- Ultimately, this detailed information may include
several position estimates, temperature
information, weather data, environmental data,
and body movements that will serve as signatures
of behavior however, in this initial system, the
focus is only on position data - Overall, the key goal is to deliver to
researchers a very high fraction of the data
collected over the months or years that the
system is in operation - Therefore, ZebraNet must be power-efficient,
designed with appropriate data log storage, and
must be rugged to ensure reliability under tough
environmental conditions
41Energy-Efficient Computing for Wildlife Tracking
Design Tradeoffs and Early Experiences with
ZebraNet Juang 2002
- ZebraNet Problem Statement
- The biologists design goals need to be translated
into the engineering task at hand - Success rate at delivering position data to the
researchers data homing rate should approach
100 - Weight limits on each node translate almost
directly to computational energy limits since
weight of the battery and solar panel takes bulk
of the total weight of a ZebraNet node
therefore, collar and protocol design decisions
must manage the number and size of data
transmissions required - System design choices must be made that limit the
range of transmissions since the required
transmitter energy increases dramatically with
the distance transmitted
42Energy-Efficient Computing for Wildlife Tracking
Design Tradeoffs and Early Experiences with
ZebraNet Juang 2002
- ZebraNet Problem Statement
- The amount of storage needed to hold position
logs must be limited if many redundant copies
are stored and swapped, the storage requirements
can scale as O(n2) - Although the energy cost of storage is small
compared to that of transmissions, it is still
necessary to develop storage-efficient design - Due to limited transceiver, coverage and a base
station only sporadically available, ZebraNet
must forward data through other nodes in
peer-to-peer manner and store redundant copies of
position logs in other tracking nodes - Some of the key challenges in ZebraNet come from
the spatial and temporal scale of the system
43Energy-Efficient Computing for Wildlife Tracking
Design Tradeoffs and Early Experiences with
ZebraNet Juang 2002
- ZebraNet Problem Statement
- In terms of temporal scale, keeping a system
running autonomously months at a time is
challenging it requires tremendous design-time
attention to both hardware and software
reliability - In terms of spatial scale, ZebraNet is also
aggressive it is the specific intent of the
system to operate over an area of hundreds or
thousands of square square kilometers - Due to the large distances involved and sparse
sensor coverage, energy/connectivity tradeoffs
become key
44Energy-Efficient Computing for Wildlife Tracking
Design Tradeoffs and Early Experiences with
ZebraNet Juang 2002
- ZebraNet Problem Statement
- These challenges mentioned here tackles several
open problems - ZebraNet protocol promises good communication
behavior on mobile sensors forwarding data
towards a mobile base station - ZebraNet explores design issues for sensors that
are more coarse-grained than many prior sensor
proposals. Larger the weight limits and storage
budgets allow researchers to consider different
protocols with improved leverage for
sparsely-connected, physically-widespread sensors
45References
- Anderson 1995 J.G.T. Anderson, Pilot survey of
mid-coast Maine seabird colonies an evaluation
of techniques, Bangor, ME, 1995. Report to the
State of Maine Dept. of Inland Fisheries and
Wildlife. - Cerfcube Cerfcube embedded StrongARM system,
http//www.intrinsys.com/products/cerfcube - Juang 2002 P. Juang, H. Oki, Y. Wang, M.
Martonosi, L-S Peh, and D. Rubenstein,
Energy-Efficient Computing for Wildlife Tracking
Design Tradeoffs and Early Experiences with
ZebraNet, ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News,
vol. 30, no. 5, December 2002 . - Mainwaring 2002 A. Mainwaring, J. Polastre, R.
Szewczyk, D. Culler, and J. Anderson, Wireless
Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring, 1st ACM
International Workshop on Wireless Sensor
Networks and Applications (WSNA 2002), Atlanta,
Georgia, September 28, 2002.