Trio: Enabling Sustainable and Scalable Outdoor Wireless Sensor Network Deployments

Source

Information Processing In Sensor Networks archive Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Information processing in sensor networks table of contents Nashville, Tennessee, USA SESSION: SPOTS'06 session 2--sensor network testbeds table of contents Pages: 407 - 415 Year of Publication: 2006 ISBN:1-59593-334-4

Authors

Prabal Dutta UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California Jonathan Hui UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California and Arched Rock Corporation, Berkeley, California Jaein Jeong UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California Sukun Kim UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California Cory Sharp Moteiv Corporation, Berkeley, California Jay Taneja UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California Gilman Tolle UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California and Arched Rock Corporation, Berkeley, California Kamin Whitehouse UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California David Culler UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California and Arched Rock Corporation, Berkeley, California

ABSTRACT
We present the philosophy, design, and initial evaluation of the Trio Testbed, a new outdoor sensor network deployment that consists of 557 solar-powered motes, seven gateway nodes, and a root server. The testbed covers an area of approximately 50,000 square meters and was in continuous operation during the last four months of 2005. This new testbed in one of the largest solar-powered outdoor sensor networks ever constructed and it offers a unique platform on which both systems and application software can be tested safely at scale. The testbed is based on Trio, a new mote platform that provides sustainable operation, enables efficient in situ interaction, and supports fail-safe programming. The motivation behind this testbed was to evaluate robust multi-target tracking algorithms at scale. However, using the testbed has stressed the system software, networking protocols, and management tools in ways that have exposed subtle but serious weaknesses that were never discovered using indoor testbeds or smaller deployments. We have been iteratively improving our support software, with the eventual aim of creating a stable hardware-software platform for sustainable, scalable, and flexible testbed deployments.

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~whitehouse/research/tracking/dutta06nestfe.pdf