Contemporary Topics in ECE 55:195, Spring 2005
Introduction to Wireless Sensor Networks

Course Announcement

One result of significant technological advances in radio technology is the emergence of wireless sensor networks.  Nodes in such networks consist of sensors and actuators connected to low/very low power radio transceivers.  Because nodes are comparatively inexpensive, it is possible to deploy them in large numbers to create a pervasive, often non-intrusive sensing network. These networks may consist of a fixed array of nodes, or they may be ad-hoc, self-organizing, and transient.  That is, two or more nodes organize themselves automatically into a network.  As nodes join or leave, the network dynamically reorganizes itself.  Such wireless sensor networks find application in monitoring bridges, buildings and other structures, environmental monitoring, wildlife tracking and monitoring, anti-terrorism applications, and many more.  Wireless sensor networks provide many interesting challenges for a broad range of Computer Scientists and Electrical Engineers: power and bandwidth management, scalable communication, security, data compression, and reliability.  They may be viewed as a new type of networked computing system.

This course is designed to provide students with an introduction to wireless sensor networks.  Students in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Physics, and Computer Science will benefit from the course.  At the conclusion of the course students will be familiar with terminologies such as: motes, self-organizing networks, smart dust, ZigBee, directed diffusion, TinyDB, TinyOS, RFID, TinySec, and localization.  The class will focus on programming, relevant hardware aspects of sensor networks and sensors, and selected applications.  The course is open to graduate students at all levels.  With the consent of the instructor/department chair, upper-level undergraduates may also take the course.  Students will read 2–3 papers a week and write short summaries of each paper.  Assignments will provide hands-on experience using the hardware and software from Crosbow Technology®.  Students will learn to program TinyOS, an embedded operating system for sensor nets, and will develop protocols and applications in this environment.