Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Multi-Modal Sensing And Communication Platform For Continental-Scale Migratory Bird Tracking, David J. Anthony

Computer and Electronics Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis presents a novel platform for tracking migratory birds on a continental scale. Cellular technology is used to augment the short-range radios that have traditionally been used in wireless sensor networks. The platform utilizes multiple sensors, including a GPS and solid state compass. By using these sensors, the platform is capable of not only tracking a bird’s migration path, but also provides information on a bird’s behavior during its life-cycle. Testing methodology utilizing simulations and aspect-oriented programming is used to reveal faults in the platform prior to deployment on wild animals. In collaboration with the International Crane Foundation, and …

Cross-Layer Analysis Of The End-To-End Delay Distribution In Wireless Sensor Networks, Yunbo Wang, Mehmet C. Vuran, Steve Goddard

School of Computing: Faculty Publications

Emerging applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) require real-time quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees to be provided by the network. Due to the nondeterministic impacts of the wireless channel and queuing mechanisms, probabilistic analysis of QoS is essential. One important metric of QoS in WSNs is the probability distribution of the end-to-end delay. Compared to other widely used delay performance metrics such as the mean delay, delay variance, and worst-case delay, the delay distribution can be used to obtain the probability to meet a specific deadline for QoS-based communication in WSNs. To investigate the end-to-end delay distribution, in this paper, a comprehensive …

Sensing Through The Continent: Towards Monitoring Migratory Birds Using Cellular Sensor Networks, David Anthony, William P. Bennett, Mehmet C. Vuran, Matthew B. Dwyer, Sebastian Elbaum, Anne Lacy, Mike Engels, Walter Wehtje

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

This paper presents CraneTracker, a novel sensor platform for monitoring migratory birds. The platform is designed to monitor Whooping Cranes, an endangered species that conducts an annual migration of 4, 000 km between southern Texas and north-central Canada. CraneTracker includes a rich set of sensors, a multi-modal radio, and power control circuitry for sustainable, continental-scale information delivery during migration. The need for large-scale connectivity motivates the use of cellular technology in low-cost sensor platforms augmented by a low-power transceiver for ad-hoc connectivity. This platform leads to a new class of cellular sensor networks (CSNs) for time-critical and mobile sensing applications. …

Service-Differentiated And Reliable Communication In Event-Based Wireless Sensor Networks, Yuyan Xue

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of low-power embedded devices with integrated sensing, computing and wireless communication capabilities. These devices, called sensor nodes or motes, are often battery-powered and deployed in a distributed manner to provide observations on the physical world. Reliably and promptly collecting the sensing data to convey the features of a surveillance area, especially the events of interest, to the sink is one of the most critical requirements of WSN design. However, dynamic wireless channel conditions and the constrained energy resources make it a challenging task to provide the end-to-end performance guarantees in multi-hop WSNs.

The objective of …

Spatio-Temporal Characteristics Of Point And Field Sources In Wireless Sensor Networks, Mehmet C. Vuran, Ӧzgür B. Akan

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are comprised of densely deployed sensor nodes collaboratively observing and communicating extracted information about a physical phenomenon. Dense deployment of sensor nodes makes the sensor observations highly correlated in the space domain. In addition, consecutive samples obtained by a sensor node are also temporally correlated for the applications involving the observation of the variation of a physical phenomenon. Based on the physical characteristics and dispersion pattern over the area, the phenomenon to be observed can be modeled as point source or field source. Clearly, understanding the spatio-temporal correlation characteristics of the point and field sources brings …

Spatial Correlation-Based Collaborative Medium Access Control In Wireless Sensor Networks, Mehmet C. Vuran, Ian F. Akyildiz

School of Computing: Faculty Publications

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are mainly characterized by dense deployment of sensor nodes which collectively transmit information about sensed events to the sink. Due to the spatial correlation between sensor nodes subject to observed events, it may not be necessary for every sensor node to transmit its data. This paper shows how the spatial correlation can be exploited on the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort which exploits spatial correlation in WSN on the MAC layer. A theoretical framework is developed for transmission regulation of sensor nodes under a distortion …