Sensor Networks As Development and Data Acquisition Platforms

To use distributed wireless sensor networks for many data acquisition and development applications a user-friendly, versatile, scalable, and reliable distributed sensor development platform is needed. The development of such a system is plagued by several technical challenges namely; resource (e.g., bandwidth and battery power) constraints, reliability and health of sensors, computational limitations of the sensor nodes and connectivity of the network. Furthermore, sensors are deployed instantaneously and implemented with little or no fixed network support. Clearly, these challenges and requirements for the wireless sensor network can significantly differ in the development and data acquisition phases from those in the actual operational scenarios. While in the development and experimentation phase it might be more important to reliably collect large data sets for different data acquisition applications and sensing modalities, the testing and operational setting might stress on the real-time processing capability of the system.

Our Innovation

To overcome many of the aforementioned real challenges ISTI has developed novel and dedicated versatile, scalable and easy to use distributed wireless sensor networks solutions for many data acquisition and development applications. This system supports many different sensing modalities including acoustic, scanning lasers, and seismic. The users/developers can examine different collaborative signal processing and data fusion methods for data acquisition and algorithm development applications. The system console allows the user to select a particular data recoding and processing strategy, information routing, sampling synchronization, basic sensor-level processing and functionalities, and sensor and network health monitoring remotely from the central location. Among the key features and characteristics of the system are:

• Node-level utilities allow the users/developers to activate different sensor-level signal processing, monitor the health and battery at each node, enable collaboration and coordination with different nodes in a cluster, test different synchronization schemes, and run multiple algorithms side-by-side for benchmarking.
• Network-level utilities facilitate network health and connectivity monitoring, define actual and virtual network topologies, activate and test different message routing, enable collaborative signal processing and allow for sensor self-localization.
• System-level utilities allow the users/developers to test different data acquisition strategies, examine various trade-offs such as bandwidth utilization versus real-time data acquisition, monitor the entire network and the sensors, test various data synchronization and message routing, configure different sensor networks for different applications, and activate different signal processing algorithms and test their performance. All such functionalities are accessible via a system-level console with a powerful yet user-friendly GUI. Figure below shows the face of such a GUI and some of its functionalities.

System console for configuring and monitoring the sensor network for various applications.

The current system can be configured for a wide variety of data acquisition and development applications such as in surveillance and monitoring, security, power grids, and remote sensing. For further information please contact mo@infsyst.biz.