Abstract-Recent

Clock synchronization is critical for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) due to the need of inter-node coordination and collaborative information processing. Although many message passing protocols can achieve satisfactory clock synchronization accuracy, they incur prohibitively high overhead when the network scales to more than tens of nodes. An alternative approach is to take advantage of the global time reference induced by existing infrastructures including GPS, timekeeping radio stations, or power grid. However, high power consumption and geographic constraints present them from being widely adopted in WSNs. In this paper, we propose ROCS, a new clock synchronization approach exploiting the Radio Data System (RDS) of FM radios. First, we design a new hardware FM receiver that can extract a periodic pulse from FM broadcasts, referred to as RDS clock. We then conduct a large-scale measurement study of RDS clock in our lab for a period of six days and on a vehicle driving through a metropolitan area of over 40 km 2 . Our results show that RDS clock is highly stable and hence is a viable means to calibrate the clocks of large-scale city-wide sensor networks. To reduce the high power consumption of FM receiver, ROCS intelligently predicts the time error due to drift, and adaptively calibrates the native clock via the RDS clock. We implement ROCS in TinyOS on our hardware FM receiver and a TelosB-compatible WSN platform. Our extensive experiments using a 12-node testbed and our driving measurement traces show that ROCS achieves accurate and precise clock synchronization with low power consumption.

Abstract-Time synchronization is a fundamental service for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). This paper proposes a novel WSN time synchronization approach by exploiting the existing Wi-Fi infrastructure. Our approach leverages the fact that ZigBee sensors and Wi-Fi nodes often occupy the same or overlapping radio frequency bands in the 2.4 GHz unlicensed spectrum. As a result, a ZigBee node can detect and synchronize to the periodic beacons broadcasted by WiFi access points (APs). We experimentally characterize the spatial and temporal characteristics of Wi-Fi beacons in an enterprise Wi-Fi network consisting of over 50 APs deployed in a 300,000 square foot office building. Motivated by our measurement results, we design a novel synchronization protocol called WizSync. WizSync employs advanced Digital Signal Processing (DSP) techniques to detect periodic Wi-Fi beacons and use them to calibrate the frequency of native clocks. WizSync can intelligently predict the clock skew and adaptively schedules nodes to sleep to conserve energy. We implement WizSync in TinyOS 2.1x and conduct extensive evaluation on a testbed consisting of 19 TelosB motes. Our results show that WizSync can achieve an average synchronization error of 0.12 milliseconds over a period of 10 days with radio power consumption of 50.9 microwatts/node.

Recent years have witnessed pilot deployments of inexpensive wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for active volcano monitoring. This paper studies the problem of picking arrival times of primary waves (i.e., P-phases) received by seismic sensors, one of the most critical tasks in volcano monitoring. Two fundamental challenges must be addressed. First, it is virtually impossible to download the real-time high-frequency seismic data to a central station for P-phase picking due to limited wireless network bandwidth. Second, accurate P-phase picking is inherently computationintensive, and is thus prohibitive for many low-power sensor platforms. To address these challenges, we propose a new P-phase picking approach for hierarchical volcano monitoring WSNs where a large number of inexpensive sensors are used to collect fine-grained, real-time seismic signals while a small number of powerful coordinator nodes process collected data and pick accurate P-phases. We develop a suite of new in-network signal processing algorithms for accurate P-phase picking, including lightweight signal pre-processing at sensors, sensor selection at coordinators as well as signal compression and reconstruction algorithms. Testbed experiments and extensive simulations based on real data collected from a volcano show that our approach achieves accurate Pphase picking while only 16% of the sensor data are transmitted.

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Monitoring important aquatic processes like harmful algal blooms is of increasing interest to public health, ecosystem sustainability, marine biology, and aquaculture industry. This article presents a novel approach to spatiotemporal aquatic field reconstruction using inexpensive, low-power mobile sensing platforms called robotic fish. Robotic fish networks are a typical example of cyber-physical systems where the design of cyber components (sensing, communication, and information processing) must account for inherent physical dynamics of the robots and the aquatic environment. Our approach features a rendezvous-based mobility control scheme where robotic fish collaborate in the form of a swarm to sense the aquatic environment in a series of carefully chosen rendezvous regions. We design a novel feedback control algorithm that maintains the desirable level of wireless connectivity for a sensor swarm in the presence of significant environment and system dynamics. Information-theoretic analysis is used to guide the selection of rendezvous regions so that the spatiotemporal field reconstruction accuracy is maximized subject to the limited sensor mobility. The effectiveness of our approach is validated via implementation on sensor hardware and extensive simulations based on real data traces of water surface temperature field and on-water ZigBee wireless communication.