COMMONSense Net (CSN) is an ongoing research project that focuses on the design and implementation of a sensor network for agricultural management in developing countries, with a special emphasis on the resource-poor farmers of semiarid regions. Throughout the year 2004, we carried out a survey on the information needs of the population living in a cluster of villages in Southern Karnataka, India. The results highlighted the potential that environment-related information has for the improvement of farming strategies in the face of highly variable conditions, in particular for risk management strategies (choice of crop varieties, sowing and harvest periods, prevention of pests and diseases, ef�cient use of irrigation water, etc.). Accordingly, we advocate an original use of information and communication technologies (ICT). Our demand-driven approach for the design of appropriate ICT tools that are targeted at the resource-poor, we believe, is relatively new. In order to go beyond a pure technocratic approach, we adopted an iterative, participatory methodology. (c) 2007 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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We consider the energy consumed in radio transmission of a set of sensors forming a data gathering wireless network.

Abstract-We describe the on-going design and implementation of a sensor network for agricultural management targeted at resource-poor farmers in India. Our focus on semi-arid regions led us to concentrate on water-related issues. Throughout 2004, we carried out a survey on the information needs of the population living in a cluster of villages in our study area. The results highlighted the potential that environment-related information has for the improvement of farming strategies in the face of highly variable conditions, in particular for risk management strategies (choice of crop varieties, sowing and harvest periods, prevention of pests and diseases, efficient use of irrigation water etc.). This leads us to advocate an original use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). We believe our demand-driven approach for the design of appropriate ICT tools that are targeted at the resource-poor to be relatively new. In order to go beyond a pure technocratic approach, we adopted an iterative, participatory methodology.

We discuss techniques for Voice Activity Detection (VAD) for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). VAD aids in reducing bandwidth requirement of a voice session thereby using bandwidth efficiently. Such a scheme would be implemented in the application Layer. Thus the VAD is independent of the lower layers in the network stack [3]. In this paper, we compare four time-domain VAD algorithms in terms of speech quality, compression level and computational complexity. A comparison of the relative merits and demerits along with the subjective quality of speech after pruning of silence periods is presented for all the algorithms. A quantitative measurement of speech quality for different algorithms is also presented.