ODCSSS 4th level

"Odysseus is innovative trans-institutional approach to the provision of a feeder pathways from undergraduate research experience into postgraduate research in new 4th Level Ireland Masters and PhD programmes"

Project 2406-ucd:application development and power measurement for wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) consist of tiny devices or motes which combine processing, sensing and communication capabilities. It is planned that thousands of low-cost motes will be deployed over wide-areas to provide long-term monitoring of conditions and/or activity. Potential applications include traffic monitoring, precision agriculture, habitat monitoring, building security, waste control and seismic sensing. All of these have serious impact on the way pervasive computing will evolve.

However, in order to have serious impact on the spread and use of wireless sensor networks, the issue of power consumption in these autonomous devices needs to be addressed. Currently available motes are assembled from off-the-shelf components. Recent studies have shown that the battery life of a mote can be as low as a few days depending on application. Research is currently underway within the School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin, to reduce the power consumption of WSN motes.

The goals of the proposed intern project are to: 1. Develop and demonstrate applications running on a real-world WSN. 2. Measure and model of the power consumption of WSN motes for these applications.

Relevance of Project to the Host Laboratories:

The deliverables from the project will provide an application testbed and WSN power model for the Enterprise Ireland funded BlueDot research project. The goal of the BlueDot project is to develop a novel low power WSN mote. The power model provided by the intership project will be used to inform and direct design activity on the BlueDot project. The applications developed during the intership will be used to verify and validate the low power WSN mote design. The project also has intersection with a similar project running in DCU supervised by Dr. Noel O'Connor (code 2808-DCU) which also addresses low power hardware design, in that case for video processing, and much of the resources of the two projects will be shared.

Supervisors:

Dr Chris Bleakley (Computer Science and Informatics, UCD)

 

Keywords:

Wireless sensor networks; Power consumption; Application development.