This paper presents the design and deployment experience of an air-dropped wireless sensor network for volcano hazard monitoring. The deployment of five stations into the rugged crater of Mount St. Helens only took one hour with a helicopter. The stations communicate with each other through an amplified 802.15.4 radio and establish a self-forming and self-healing multi-hop wireless network. The distance between stations is up to 2 km. Each sensor station collects and delivers real-time continuous seismic, infrasonic, lightning, GPS raw data to a gateway. The main contribution of this paper is the design and evaluation of a robust sensor network to replace data loggers and provide real-time long-term volcano monitoring. The system supports UTCtime synchronized data acquisition with 1ms accuracy, and is online configurable. It has been tested in the lab environment, the outdoor campus and the volcano crater. Despite the heavy rain, snow, and ice as well as gusts exceeding 120 miles per hour, the sensor network has achieved a remarkable packet delivery ratio above 99% with an overall system uptime of about 93.8% over the 1.5 months evaluation period after deployment. Our initial deployment experiences with the system have alleviated the doubts of domain scientists and prove to them that a low-cost sensor network system can support real-time monitoring in extremely harsh environments.

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Abstract-We study efficient interference-aware joint routing and TDMA link scheduling for a multihop wireless network to maximize its throughput. Efficient link scheduling can greatly reduce the interference effect of close-by transmissions. Unlike the previous studies that often assume a unit disk graph model, we assume that different terminals could have different transmission ranges and different interference ranges. In our model, it is also possible that a communication link may not exist due to barriers or is not used by a predetermined routing protocol, while the transmission of a node always result interference to all non-intended receivers within its interference range.Using a mathematical formulation, we develop interference aware joint routing and synchronized TDMA link schedulings that optimize the networking throughput subject to various constraints. Our linear programming formulation will find a flow routing whose achieved throughput is at least a constant fraction of the optimum, and the achieved fairness is also a constant fraction of the requirement. Then, by assuming known link capacities and link traffic loads, we study link scheduling under the RTS/CTS interference model and the protocol interference model with fixed transmission power. For both models, we present both efficient centralized and distributed algorithms that use time slots within a constant factor of the optimum. We also present efficient distributed algorithms whose performances are still comparable with optimum, but with much less communications. We prove that the time-slots needed by our faster distributed algorithms are only at most O(min(log n, log ψ)) for RTS/CTS interference model and protocol interference model. Our theoretical results are corroborated by extensive simulation studies.

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We propose a novel communication efficient topology control algorithm for each wireless node to select communication neighbors and adjust its transmission power, such that all nodes together self-form a topology that is energy efficient simultaneously for both unicast and broadcast communications. We prove that the proposed topology is planar, which guarantees packet delivery if a certain localized routing method is used; it is power efficient for unicast-the energy needed to connect any pair of nodes is within a small constant factor of the minimum under a common power attenuation model; it is efficient for broadcast: the energy consumption for broadcasting data on top of it is asymptotically the best compared with structures constructed locally; it has a constant bounded logical degree, which will potentially reduce interference and signal contention. We further prove that the average physical degree of all nodes is bounded by a small constant. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first communication-efficient distributed algorithm to achieve all these properties. Previously, only a centralized algorithm was reported in [3]. Moreover, by assuming that the ID and position of every node can be represented in O(log n) bits for a wireless network of n nodes, our method uses at most 13n messages, where each message is of O(log n) bits. We also show that this structure can be efficiently updated for dynamical network environment. Our theoretical results are corroborated in the simulations.