1. Wireless Sensor Networks: Instrumenting the Physical World
Deborah Estrin
UCLA Computer Science Department
and
USC/ISI
Collaborative work with SCADDS researchers Heidemann, Govindan, Bulusu, Cerpa, Elson, Ganesan, Girod, Intanagowat, Yu, and Zhao (USC/ISI and UCLA); and Shenker (ACIRI)
9/17/2018

2. The long term goal
Embed numerous distributed devices to monitor and interact with physical world: in work-spaces, hospitals, homes, vehicles, and “the environment” (water, soil, air…)
Disaster Response
Circulatory Net
Network these devices so that they can coordinate to perform higher-level tasks.
Requires robust distributed systems of hundreds or thousands of devices.
9/17/2018

3. Vision
Embed large numbers of small, low-power, computationally powerful, communicating devices...
Communicate to correlate and coordinate
Design, deploy, and control robust distributed systems composed of hundreds or thousands of physically-embedded devices
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4. Super Sensing
Supercomputing and computational science qualitatively altered science and engineering by making it practical to analyze what was not previously practical
Distributed micro-sensing now makes it practical to measure and monitor what was not previously practical--radically increases the spatial and temporal density of in situ monitoring
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5. In the laboratory Marine Biology Contaminant flows
e.g., correlate samples with temperature, salinity, etc.
Contaminant flows
Measure flows without disrupting process
Bio-Tank
-scaled
Tethered
Robot
Algae
2 meters
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6. In the Field Habitat studies Environmental monitoring Sensors
Inner wall of storm drain
Sensors
Habitat studies
Environmental monitoring
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7. Model Development and Validation
Seismic activity in urban centers
Atmospheric monitoring in heterogeneous regions
Oceanographic current monitoring
Coastal ocean networks
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Topex-

8. Complex Structures Seismic response in buildings Bridges Aircraft
Photocopiers
Transportation
“Computational Fabric”
Sensors
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9. New Constraints Tight coupling to the physical world
Need better physical models
More experimentation
Designing for energy constraints
Coping with “apparent” loss of layering
Radio…to MAC…to routing…to application
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10. New Design Goals
Designing for long-lived (and often energy-constrained) systems
Low-duty cycle operation
Exploiting redundancy
Tiered architectures
Self configuring systems
Measure and adapt to unpredictable RF and sensing environment
Exploit spatial diversity of sensor/actuator nodes
Localization and Time synchronization are key building blocks
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11. Technical challenges
Ad hoc, self organizing, adaptive systems with predictable behaviors
Collaborative processing, data fusion, multiple sensory modalities
Data analysis/mining to identify collaborative sensing, triggering thresholds, etc
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12. Enormous Potential Impact
Disaster Recovery
and Urban Rescue
Earth Science
Exploration
Condition Based Maintenance
Medical monitoring
Wearable computing
Networked Embedded Systems
Smart spaces
Transportation
Environmental Monitoring
Active Structures
Biological Monitoring
Strand
Stand
Bio-Tank
-scaled
Tethered
Robot
Algae
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Sensors
2 meters