A Distributed System for Mad-Cow Disease Monitoring and Tracking

Abstract

Advances in hardware technology and wireless communication have enabled the deployment of largescale sensor networks, where thousands to millions of self-powered, small and low-cost sensor nodes are distributed over a vast field to obtain sensing data. These sensor nodes are equipped with sensing, communicating, and data processing units, which allow sensor nodes to collect, exchange, and process data of the environment. The processing units used in the current generation of sensor nodes are already powerful enough to perform some complicated algorithms to process sensing data, and they are expected to be more powerful in the future. Due to these attractive characteristics, wireless sensor networks are ideal candidates for a wide range of civil applications and military operations. This paper provides an indepth study of applying wireless sensor networks to real-world mad-cow disease monitoring and beef distribution safety system. An extensive survey of the state of the art to design a distributed system for pervasive computing is conducted. A set of techniques and mechanisms are compared and ranked in the paper. Then the characteristics for designing this kind of pervasive system are listed; the system architecture is presented; and an instance of the key mechanisms for monitoring the mad-cow disease and tracking beef distribution system is presented. This system supports real-time communication and multitasking scheduling as well. KEYWORDSSensor Networks, Distributed System, Mad-Cow Disease (MCD) INTRODUCTIONSince Mark Weiser described the vision of pervasive computing in his seminal paper [1], a lot of progress has been achieved in this area. With the advance in MEMS devices and embedded processors and radio, it will soon be feasible to deploy large-scale sensor networks to perform distributed microsensing and control of physical environment [2]. For example, Civil engineers are using motes to monitor building integrity during earthquakes [3]; biologists are planning mote deployments for habitat monitoring [4], [5]; administrators of large computer clusters are using motes to monitor the temperature and power usage in their data centers.Recently, people are considering using sensors to monitor and track the mad-cow disease. The fast spread of mad-cow disease has caused severe results in the past. People got contaminated and economics was also affected by this event. To avoid disease spread out and track the distribution of beef, recording sensors have been put in different processing procedures [6]. The smart sensors and actuators are equipped with low-power processors and short-range radio 2 transceivers. They will automatically form multi-hop ad hoc networks to communicate with other sensors and remote base stations as well.Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) (Figure 1) has been used by PM Beef on cow/calf farms, feedlots and PM's harvest and fabrication facility in Windam, MN [7]. However, those RFIDs act only as identification: They do not group into sensor networks. Figure 1. RFID tagsThis...

Untitled

“…All base stations, grouped into a local monitoring network, can forward information to a central base station which connects with the Internet and can save the data information or forward them to the control center. The proposed system can provides disease detection and safety processing monitoring [17].…”