After 911 1, the United States (U.S.) was suddenly pushed into challenging situations they could no longer ignore as simple spectators. The War on Terrorism (WoT) was suddenly ignited and no one knows when this war will end. While the government is exploring many existing and potential technologies, the area of irel less Sensor networks (WSN) has emerged as a foundation for establish future national security. Unlike other technologies, WSN could provide virtual presence capabilities needed for precision awareness and response in military, intelligence, and homeland security applications. The Advance Concept Group (ACG) vision of Sense/Decide/Act/Communicate (SDAC) sensor system is an instantiation of the WSN concevt that takes a "systems of systems";iew. Each sensing nodes will exhibit the ability to: Sense the environment around them, Decide as a collective what the situation of their environment is, Act in an intelligent and coordinated manner in response to this situational determination, and Communicate their actions amongst each other and to a human command. This LDRD report -provides a review of the research and development done to bring the SDAC vision closer to d reality.

The recent war on terrorism and increased urban warfare has been a major catalysis for increased interest in the development of disposable unattended wireless ground sensors. While the application of these sensors to hostile domains has been generally governed by specific tasks, this research explores a unique paradigm capitalizing on the fundamental functionality related to sensor systems. This functionality includes a sensors ability to Sense -multi-modal sensing of environmental events, Decide -smart analysis of sensor data, Act -response to environmental events, and Communication -internal to system and external to humans (SDAC). The main concept behind SDAC sensor systems is to integrate the hardware, software, and networking to generate 'knowledge and not just data'. This research explores the usage of wireless SDAC units to collectively make up a sensor system capable of persistent, adaptive, and autonomous behavior. These systems are base on the evaluation of scenarios and existing systems covering various domains. This paper presents a promising view of sensor network characteristics, which will eventually yield smart (intelligent collectives) network arrays of SDAC sensing units generally applicable to multiple related domains. This paper will also discuss and evaluate the demonstration system developed to test the concepts related to SDAC systems.

Abstract

The system level hardware architecture of individual nodes in a wireless distributed sensor network has not received adequate attention. A large portion of the development work in wireless sensor networks has been devoted to the networking layer or the network communications, but considering the tight integration required between the hardware and software on each node can result in major benefits in power, performance, and usability as well. A novel hardware architecture based on the concept of task specific modular computing provides both the high flexibility and power efficiency required for effective distributed sensing solutions. A comparative power analysis with a traditional, centralized architecture gives a justifying motivation for pursuing the modular architecture. 1 Finally, three decentralized module self-control mechanisms developed to minimize total system power will be presented and explained in detail.

Reducing agricultural water use in arid regions while maintaining or improving economic productivity of the agriculture sector is a major challenge. Controlled environment agriculture (CEA, or, greenhouse agriculture) affords advantages in direct resource use (less land and water required) and productivity (i.e., much higher product yield and quality per unit of resources used) relative to conventional open-field practices. These advantages come at the price of higher operating complexity and costs per acre. The challenge is to implement and apply CEA such that the productivity and resource use advantages will sufficiently outweigh the higher operating costs to provide for overall benefit and viability. This project undertook an investigation of CEA for livestock forage production as a water-saving alternative to open-field forage production in arid regions. Forage production is a large consumer of fresh water in many arid regions of the world, including the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico. With increasing competition 4 among uses (agriculture, municipalities, industry, recreation, ecosystems, etc.) for limited fresh water supplies, agricultural practice alternatives that can potentially maintain or enhance productivity while reducing water use warrant consideration.The project established a pilot forage production greenhouse facility in southern New Mexico based on a relatively modest and passive (no active heating or cooling) system design pioneered in Chihuahua, Mexico. Experimental operations were initiated in August 2004 and carried over into early-FY05 to collect data and make initial assessments of operational and technical system performance, assess forage nutrition content and suitability for livestock, identify areas needing improvement, and make initial assessment of overall feasibility. The effort was supported through the joint leveraging of late-start FY04 LDRD funds and bundled CY2004 project funding from the New Mexico Small Business Technical Assistance program at Sandia.Despite lack of optimization with the project system, initial results show the dramatic water savings potential of hydroponic forage production compared with traditional irrigated open field practice. This project produced forage using only about 4.5% of the water required for equivalent open field production. Improved operation could bring water use to 2% or less. The hydroponic forage production system and process used in this project are labor intensive and not optimized for minimum water usage. Freshly harvested hydroponic forage has high moisture content that dilutes its nutritional value by requiring that livestock consume more of it to get the same nutritional content as conventional forage. In most other aspects the nutritional content compares well on a dry weight equivalent basis with other conventional forage. More work is needed to further explore and quantify the opportunities, limitations, and viability of this technique for broader use. Collection of greenhouse environmental data in this project was ...