A building block approach to sensornet systems

Abstract

We present a building block approach to hardware platform design based on a decade of collective experience in this area, arriving at an architecture in which general-purpose modules that require expertise to design and incorporate commonlyused functionality are integrated with application-specific carriers that satisfy the unique sensing, power supply, and mechanical constraints of an application. Of course, modules are widespread, but our focus is far less on the performance of any individual module and far more on an overall architecture that supports the prototype, pilot, and production stages of design, and preserves the artifacts and learnings accumulated along the way.We present heuristics for partitioning functionality between modules and carriers, and identify guidelines for their interconnection. Our approach advocates exporting a wide electrical interface, eliminating the system bus, and supporting many physical interconnect options for modules and carriers. We evaluate this approach by constructing a family of general-purpose modules and application-specific carriers that achieve a high degree of reuse despite very different application requirements. We show that this approach shortens platform development time-to-result for novice graduate students, making custom platforms broadly accessible.

Control Unit for Power Subsystem of a Wireless Sensor Node

“…Moreover, it should be noted that different applications of SNs set different weight for the mentioned requirements. Problem of sensing elements designing is described in [15]. The authors propose to use class of universally usable modules for development and application-oriented carriers and, thus, reach high degree of universality with possibilities to use the developed systems in the widest set of various applications.…”

Grafting energy-harvesting leaves onto the sensornet tree

“…Epic Core mote [3] incorporates an MSP430F1611 microcontroller and CC2420 radio (802.15.4-compliant). The MSP430 offers very fast wakeup and low active current, allowing us to minimize both the startup and active energy.…”

“…Figure 6(f) shows that daily irradiation can vary by more than an order of magnitude for a single location. 3 Most locations receive 1-10 J/cm 2 /day (or an average of 11-115 µW/cm 2 ), which is enough to ensure frequent leaf activity. Figure 7 shows the instantaneous, rather than average, irradiance of the underlying data over a one week period.…”

RoSe: A Subgigahertz Wireless Sensor Platform With Housing-Integrated Overmolded Antenna

“…Standard protocols [1], [2] have been defined, and several solutions have been introduced in the last decade [3]- [9].…”

“…Most of the mentioned published research describes either bare node platforms as in [3] and [4] or node platforms in application-specific prototype housing [5]- [7]. In [5], for instance, the authors present a modular approach built around the battery accepting it as the largest part of the wireless sensor node and using a commercial off-the-shelf monopole antenna of acceptable size.…”