Wireless Sensor Networks: A Systems Perspective

Nirupama Bulusu and Sanjay Jha, editors
Artech House,  August 2005
You can order the book from Amazon  or Bookpool (which typically has a 15% discount).

 

Overview

Wireless sensor networks are one of the first real world examples of pervasive computing, the notion that small, smart, and cheap sensing and computing devices will eventually permeate the environment. Though the technology is still in its early days, the range of potential applications is mind-boggling --- tracking bushfires, microclimates, monitoring zebras, for defense systems, letting businesses monitor and control their work spaces etc.

They present a range of computer systems challenges because they are closely coupled to the physical world with all its unpredictable variation, noise, and asynchrony; they involve many energy-constrained, resource-limited devices operating in concert; they must be largely self-organizing, self-maintaining and robust despite significant noise, loss, and failure.

This first-of-a-kind book covers several fundamental building blocks for sensor networks in substantial depth from a systems perspective. The book is organized in four parts.

  • Part one (Chapter 1) overviews and categorizes the technological trends, leading applications, state-of-the art platform developments, future trends and challenges for sensor networks.
  • Part two (Chapters 2-11) covers network protocols and mechanisms for node localization, time synchronization, media access control, topology creation and management, routing, transport, and node deployment in large-scale sensor networks. 
  • Part three (Chapters 12-15) addresses issues in the design of middleware to support sensor network applications such as data-centric communications, storage, whole-network programming and
  • Part four (Chapters 16-19) focuses on important application domains and also how specific applications influence the architectural design of embedded-networked-systems.

Each topic covered in the book contains contributions from leading international researchers, several of whom initiated research on the topic they discuss.

This book can be used as a textbook or supplementary reading for graduate level courses on sensor networks, or for self study by researchers and engineering professionals.
 

 

Table of Contents

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION

1.      Introduction to Wireless Sensor Networks

1.1.   The Push: Technological Advances

1.2.   The Pull: Application Domains

1.3.   Systems Challenges

1.4.   Systems Taxonomy  Scale Variability  Autonomy

1.5.   State-of-the-Art

1.5.1.      Sensing and Actuation: Micro-electro Mechanical Systems

1.5.2.      Energy

1.5.3.      Wireless Communication

1.5.4.      Embedded Devices

1.5.5.      Operating Systems

1.5.6.      Distributed Systems Architecture

1.6.   Future Trends

 

PART II: NETWORK ORGANIZATION

 

2.      Sensor Coverage and Deployment
Andrew Howard (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratories) and Sameera Poduri (University of Southern California)

2.1.   Introduction  

2.2.   Related Work

2.3.   Sensor Node Capabilities

2.4.   Potential Fields: Theory and Implication

2.5.   Coverage

2.6.   Constrained Coverage

2.7.   Conclusion

 

3.      Sensor Fault Detection and Calibration

3.1.   Introduction

3.2.   Continuous Valued Sensors

3.2.1.      Physical State Variables and Concrete and Abstract Sensors

3.2.2.      Fault-tolerant Abstract Sensors

3.2.3.      Fault-tolerant Sensor Averaging

3.2.4.      Replicated Sensor Performance

3.2.5.      Limitations

3.3.   Correlated Sensing Modalities

3.4.   Sensor Redundancy

3.4.1.      Pairwise Calibration

3.4.2.      Consistency Maximization

3.4.3.      Discussion

3.5.   Conclusion

 

4.      Localization

4.1.   Introduction

4.2.   Application Requirements

4.3.   Localization Systems Components

4.3.1.      Measurement Techniques

4.3.2.      System Architecture

4.3.3.      Robust Positioning Algorithms

4.4.   Recent Developments

4.5.   Conclusion

 

5.      Time Synchronization
Saurabh Ganeriwal (University of California at Los Angeles), Jeremy Elson (Microsoft Research) and Mani Srivastava (University of California at Los Angeles)

5.1.   Introduction

5.2.   Models for Time Synchronization

5.3.   Sources of Delay

5.4.   Approaches to Synchronization Algorithms

5.4.1.      Sender-Receiver Synchronization

5.4.2.      Receiver-Receiver Synchronization

5.4.3.      Analysis

5.5.   Protocols

5.5.1.      Timing-Sync Protocol for Sensor Networks

5.5.2.      Reference Broadcast Synchronization

5.5.3.      Other Protocols

5.6.   Discussion

5.6.1.      Long-term Synchronization

5.7.   Conclusion

 

6.      Energy Conservation at the Link and Network Layers
John Heidemann and Wei Ye (USC Information Sciences Institute)

6.1.   Introduction

6.2.   Radio Transmit Power Control

6.3.   Medium Access Control

6.4.   Topology Control Protocols: Between MAC and Routing

6.5.   Routing

6.6.   Energy Conservation in Today's and Tomorrow's Applications

6.7.   Conclusion

 

7.      Multi-hop Routing

7.1.   Introduction

7.2.   Multihop Routing for Data Gathering

7.2.1.      Application Scenario: Data Gathering

7.2.2.      Building the Data-Gathering Tree

7.2.3.      Clustering: From Tree to Forest

7.2.4.      Geographic Routing

7.3.   Routing Components

7.3.1.      Link Quality Estimation

7.3.2.      Neighborhood Management under Limited Memory

7.3.3.      Route Selection

7.3.4.      Evaluation

7.4.   Conclusion

 

8.      Reliable Transmission and Congestion Control
Ozgur Akan (Middle Eastern Technical University, Turkey) and Mehmet C. Vuran (Georgia Institute of Technology)

8.1.   Introduction

8.2.   Reliable Transmission

8.2.1.      Physical-Layer Reliability

8.2.2.      Link-layer Reliability

8.2.3.      Network-Layer Reliability

8.2.4.      Transport-Layer Reliability

8.3.   Congestion Control

8.4.   Conclusion

 

9.      Energy Harvesting-Aware Power Management
Aman Kansal and Mani Srivastava (University of California at Los Angeles)

9.1.   Introduction

9.2.   Harvesting Technologies

9.2.1.      Solar Energy

9.2.2.      Vibration Energy

9.2.3.      Other Sources

9.3.   Description of the Components of a Harvesting Node

9.4.   Harvesting-Aware Power Management

9.4.1.      Harvesting Theory

9.4.2.      Scheduling Algorithms

9.5.   Distributed Harvesting

9.5.1.      Communication Protocol

9.5.2.      Distributed Power Management

9.6.   Conclusion

 

10.  Sensor Coordinated Actuation
Gaurav Sukhatme (University of Southern California)

10.1.                     Introduction

10.2.                    Mobile Robot-Assisted Sensor Network Deployment and Repair

10.3.                    Using a Sensor Network to Mediate Robot Task-Allocation

10.3.1.  Navigation

10.3.2.  Task Allocation

10.4.                    Coupling Local Sampling and Robotic Mobility to Detect Properties of a Scalar Field

10.4.1.  Using a Large Number of Mobile Sensors Only

10.4.2.  Using a Small Number of Mobile Sensors and a Large Number of Static Sensors

10.5.                    Related Work

10.6.                    Conclusion

 

11.  Sensor Network Tomography
Jerry Zhao (ICSI Berkeley) and Ramesh Govindan (University of Southern California)

11.1.                    Introduction

11.2.                    Monitoring Wireless Sensor Networks

11.2.1.  Design Challenges

11.2.2.  Related Work

11.2.3.  Sensor Network Tomography: A Monitoring Architecture

11.3.                    Sensor Network Scan and Digest

11.3.1.  Design Principles

11.3.2.  Sensor Network Scan: Taking a Global Snapshot

11.3.3.  Sensor Network Digest: Collecting Vital System Metrics

11.4.                    Conclusion

 

 PART III: MIDDLEWARE

 

12.  Enabling data-centric and event-centric communications
Wendi Heinzelmann, Amy Murphy and Mark Perillo (University of Rochester)

12.1.                    Introduction

12.2.                    Example Data- and Event-centric Applications

12.3.                    Architectures to Support QoS and Resource Management

12.4.                    Example Application Design Using a Cross-Layer Architecture

12.5.                    Discussion

 

13.  Storage issues in Sensor Networks
Deepak Ganesan (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Ben Greenstein (University of California at Los Angeles)

13.1.                    Introduction

13.2.                    Key Systems Building Blocks

13.2.1.  Geographic Routing

13.2.2.  Geographic Hashing for Rendezvous

13.2.3.  Hierarchical Indexing and Multi-resolution Processing

13.3.                    Taxonomy of Data Storage and Indexing Solutions

13.3.1.  Local Storage and Geographical Search

13.3.2.  Local Storage with Distributed Indexing

13.3.3.  Multi-resolution Storage and Indexing

13.4.                    Distributed multi-resolution storage and search

13.5.                    Conclusion

 

14.  A Whole-Network Approach to Sensor Network Programming
Matt Welsh (Harvard University) and Sam Madden (MIT)

14.1.                    Introduction: Goals and Challenges

14.2.                    Proposed Approach: Macroprogramming

14.3.                    Abstract Regions: Energy-aware collective communications for macroprogramming

14.3.1.  Abstract Regions Programming Model

14.3.2.  Abstract-Region Implementations

14.3.3.  Quality Feedback and Tuning Instructions

14.3.4.  Application Examples

14.4.                    TinyDB

14.4.1.  Query Language

14.4.2.  Aggregation Queries

14.4.3.  Query Dissemination and Result Collection

14.4.4.  Query Processing

14.4.5.  Communication Scheduling and Aggregate Queries

14.5.                    TASK

14.5.1.  The Garden Deployment

14.6.                    Related Work

14.7.                    Future Directions

 

15.  Sensor Network Security, Privacy and Fault-tolerance
Jing Deng, Richard Han , Shivkant Mishra(University of Colorado atBoulder)

15.1.                    Introduction

15.2.                    Security Threats in WSNs

15.3.                    Design Goals and Challenges of WSN Security

15.4.                    Cryptographic Primitives

15.4.1.  SPINS: Security Protocols for Sensor Networks

15.4.2.  TinySec

15.4.3.  Public-Key Schemes in a Sensor Node

15.5.                    Pair-wise Key Management

15.6.                    Secure and Fault-Tolerant WSN Routing

15.6.1.  INSENS Intrusion-Tolerant Routing

15.6.2.  Protecting the Base Station

15.6.3.  Fault Tolerance

15.6.4.  Securing Hierarchical Sensor-Network Communication

15.6.5.  Defending against DoS Attacks during Data Delivery

15.7.                    Data Aggregation

15.8.                    Physical Protection

15.9.                    Privacy and Anonymity

15.10.                Conclusion and Future Work

 

PART IV: APPLICATION-DRIVEN SYSTEMS ARCHITECTURE

 

16.  Habitat monitoring with Zebranet: Design and Experience
P. Zhang, C.M. Sadler, T. Liu, I. Fischoff, Margaret Martonosi , S.A. Lyon, D. I. Rubenstein (Princeton University)

16.1.                    Introduction

16.2.                    Habitat Monitoring and Zebranet's Biology Goals

16.2.1.  Wildlife Tracking and Habitat Research: Background

16.2.2.  Habitat Monitoring and Mobile Sensors

16.3.                    Zebranet System Overview

16.3.1.  Evolution of Our Hardware

16.4.                    The Impala Middleware System

16.4.1.  Impala System Layers

16.4.2.  Regular Operation Scheduling

16.4.3.  Event-Handling Model

16.4.4.  Communication Characteristics and Impala Networking

16.4.5.  Time-slot-based Media Access Control

16.4.6.  Impala Evaluations

16.5.                    Deployment

16.6.                    Related Work

16.7.                    Conclusion

 

17.  SensorWebs in the Wild
Kevin A. Delin (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratories)

17.1.                    Introduction  

17.2.                    The Sensor Web: A Different Type of Wireless Network

17.3.                    Sensor Web Pods

17.4.                    Sensor Web Deployments

17.5.                    Deployment Operations

17.6.                    The Future

 

18.  Defense Systems: Self-Healing Land Mines
William M. Merrill, Lewis Girod, Brian Schiffer, Dustin McIntire, Guillaume Rava, Katayoun Sohrabi, Fredric Newberg, Jeremy Elson and William Kaiser (Sensoria Corporation)

18.1.                    Introduction

18.2.                    SHM System Need for a WSN and Program History

18.3.                    SHM Hardware

18.4.                    SHM Software

18.5.                    SHM Design Methodology

18.6.                    SHM Operation

18.7.                    Conclusion

 

19.  Workplace Applications of Sensor Networks
W. Steven Conner (Intel Research and Development), John Heidemann(USC Information Sciences Institute), Lakshman Krishnamurthy (Intel Research and Development), Xi Wang (USC Information Sciences Institute), and Mark Yarvis (Intel Research and Development)

19.1.                    Introduction

19.2.                    Hardware for Workplace Sensor Network Deployment

19.2.1.  Sensor Nodes

19.2.2.  Display Nodes

19.2.3.  Handheld Nodes

19.2.4.  Gateway Nodes

19.3.                    Conference Room Application

19.3.1.  Architecture and Operation

19.3.2.  Application Challenges

19.3.3.  Communication Protocols

19.4.                    Follow-Me Application

19.4.1.  Hardware

19.4.2.  Protocols

19.4.3.  User Interaction

19.5.                    Other Applications

19.6.                    Reusable Tools and Techniques

19.7.                    Conclusions