IEEE SECON 2004

Andres Lagar Cavilla

Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks

First edition IEEE Communications Society 4-7 October 2004 Santa Clara, California

Miscellaneous Stats

68/358 papers accepted (~19%) Two keynote speeches Four Panels Four Tutorials

Overall Impresions

The Industry is hyping about this Sensor nets preferred over Ad hoc nets

– More tangible right now

But the Industry is also waiting

The Killer Application

A panacea? Everybody is looking for it. No one is risking

anything– Most of the funding comes from the military– No clear guidelines

The chicken & egg problem

Standards to support the development of applications are missing

Applications to propel (and steer) the development of standards are missing

However…

Some startups are taking the first strides– Crossbow– Sensoria– PacketHop

Many industry envoys wre “probing” the field during the conference

Exponential growth in investment predicted

Three things to think about at home

802.15.4– IEEE standard to integrate multiple radio interfaces

in a network ZigBee

– An industry alliance, equivalent to WiFi for sensor networks and 802.15.4

Ultra Wide Band– No spectrum constraints– Quasi-unlimited propagation

A National Sensor Network

John Strand, Oak Ridge National Labs A review of what US army has been doing on

sensor networks Total Installation Awareness Scary!!!! But they claim to have it working

Commercial Wireless Sensor Networks

Mike Horton, Crossbow Tech First field for deployment of sensor nets will be on

monitoring tasks Last field will be ubiquitous computing Enabling technology is already here Integrating standards in order to provide solutions are

missing Everything Crossbow does is Open Source

Enabling Integration Solutions

Greatest technological challenges in deploying MANETS

Multi network roaming– Cross layer design between L2/L3– Support for hybrid networking interfaces

Integration of Internet gateways MANETs are hardly self-managing

– PacketHop people insisted on this

Lack of service discovery

Mesh networks

Provide community broadband access– Multihop routing– Nodes are neither mobile nor resource constrained

Lots of impulse from Microsoft, via Viktor Bahl Skepticism from pretty much everyone else

Paper session: Applications

Controlled Mobility for Sustainable Wireless Sensor Netorks– Controlled mobility enhancing sensor network

coverage in the wild eBlocks – Electronic Blocks for Basic Sensor-

Based Systems– Educational: students would try to assemble

systems from basic blocks Analysis of the performance of IEEE 802.15.4

for Medical Sensor Body Area Netowrking

Other interesting papers

The Limits of Localization Using Signal Strength: A Comparative Study– A review of localization algorithms, concluding

they’re all pretty much the same

ATEMU: A Fine-Grained Sensor Network Simulator– A HUGE Mica Mote simulator at the CPU instruction

level