Field-Deployable Concurrent-Transmitter Networks for Long Term Environmental Monitoring
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Date
2014-01-15
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
In this work, I draw upon my experience with field deployments of low-power data collection systems to come up with new approaches to long-term environmental monitoring (LTEM). Our goal is to develop long-lived, reliable systems that can be deployed by non-experts.
The specific requirements of LTEM systems lead us to pursue techniques which can take advantage of the natural heirarchies that exist in sensor deployments while avoiding the difficulties inherent in selecting efficient data transmission routes in the face of unreliable hardware and difficult-to-measure link dynamics.
The approach we advocate eschews traditional single-path routing and transmission methods in favor of approaches that leverage non-destructive simultaneous packet transmissions over subsets of the network. We apply this principle to develop a medium access protocol suitable for dense networks (Flip-MAC) as well as a method for identifying the set of potentially-useful forwarders between a data source and its destination (CX).
This document not only characterizes and evaluates the low-level behavior of these protocols, but also describes the design of a larger multi-tiered data collection system based on CX, a suite of hardware which is well-suited to both CX and common deployment patterns, and the design of a ``dirt-to-database'' system which gives domain scientists the tools they need to deploy and manage networks on their own.
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Keywords
wireless sensor networks, network flooding, environmental monitoring, network protocols, low-power networking, wireless sensor network platforms, MAC protocols, routing protocols, data management