Tuesday, November 6, 2007
136-4

Wireless Sensor Network Backbone for Real-Time and Remote Environmental Monitoring Over Vast Areas.

Liangping Ma1, Hua Zhu1, Gayathri Nallamothu1, Bo Ryu1, and Heidi Howard2. (1) San Diego Research Center, Inc, 6696 Mesa Ridge Rd, San Diego, CA 92121, (2) USA-CERL, U.S. Army Eng Res & Dev Ctr. CERL, PO Box 9005, Champaign, IL 61826

San Diego Research Center (SDRC) is currently designing and developing the SensorBone system, a self-organizing, energy-efficient, scalable, cost effective, rapidly deployable, and secure wireless backbone system that enables real-time remote environmental and events monitoring with up to thousands of heterogeneous sensors deployed over the vast areas of military lands and training facilities administrated by the DoD. The vast size of lands to be monitored, together with lack of reliable and cheap electricity, makes currently available wireless technologies inadequate and extremely inefficient and costly. During the Phase I study, SDRC has designed and evaluated the SensorBone system architecture that addresses the fundamental challenges such as energy-efficient, long-range, and low-duty-cycle optimized radio design, scalable networking protocols, and modular and cost-effective hardware platforms. Our novel design leverages the latest developments in the mobile ad hoc network (MANET), low-duty-cycle sensor network and extremely energy-efficient sensor radio technologies, and aims for the eventual hardware implementation and demonstration of the SensorBone system. The Phase II work encompasses the entire system design cycle of the SensorBone system, including design and evaluation of the system architecture, development of the hardware platform, development of the SensorBone radio, protocol stack implementation in both the network simulator and on the hardware platform, and development of the network deployment and management tools. The resulting SensorBone system prototype is planned to be demonstrated using actual environmental sensors deployed at Ft. Benning near the end of FY2007.