Energy-efficient computing for wildlife tracking

Abstract

Over the past decade, mobile computing and wireless communication have become increasingly important drivers of many new computing applications. The field of wireless sensor networks particularly focuses on applications involving autonomous use of compute, sensing, and wireless communication devices for both scientific and commercial purposes. This paper examines the research decisions and design tradeoffs that arise when applying wireless peer-to-peer networking techniques in a mobile sensor network designed to support wildlife tracking for biology research.The ZebraNet system includes custom tracking collars (nodes) carried by animals under study across a large, wild area; the collars operate as a peer-to-peer network to deliver logged data back to researchers. The collars include global positioning system (GPS), Flash memory, wireless transceivers, and a small CPU; essentially each node is a small, wireless computing device. Since there is no cellular service or broadcast communication covering the region where animals are studied, ad hoc, peer-to-peer routing is needed. Although numerous ad hoc protocols exist, additional challenges arise because the researchers themselves are mobile and thus there is no fixed base station towards which to aim data. Overall, our goal is to use the least energy, storage, and other resources necessary to maintain a reliable system with a very high `data homing' success rate. We plan to deploy a 30-node ZebraNet system at the Mpala Research Centre in central Kenya. More broadly, we believe that the domain-centric protocols and energy tradeoffs presented here for ZebraNet will have general applicability in other wireless and sensor applications.

Environmental Monitoring WSN

“…In some cases, sensors are attached to the targeted objects or location (Jovanov et al, 2003;Juang et al, 2002, Martinez et al, 2005 in order to monitor the data of interest or current location. Mobile sensor networks have a different set of supporting infrastructures compared to the traditional WSN.…”

“…To be application specific results in a more complicated design process, especially in the case of designing a generic power-aware protocol. I n t o t a l , s e v e n g r o u p s o f a p p l i c a t i o n s h a v e b e e n c a t e g o r i s e d b y u s b a s e d u p o n t h e i r functionalities including habitat monitoring (HM) (Juang et al, 2002;Mainwaring et al, 2002;Szewczyk et al, 2004), environmental monitoring (EM) (Allen et al, 2006;Martinez et al, 2005), health monitoring (HEM) (Jovanov et al, 2003, Otto et al, 2006, structural health monitoring (SHM) (Chintalapudi et al, 2006;Kottapalli et al, 2003;Paek et al, 2005, Schmid et al, 2005, event detection and tracking (EDT) (Arora et al, 2004;Dreicer et al, 2002;Simon et al, 2004), transport monitoring (TM) (Coleri et al, 2004) and location-aware system (LAS) (Brignone et al, 2005). Specific capabilities and underlying communication paradigms have been outlined.…”

Real-Time Optimization of Video Transmission in a Network of AAVs

“…Increasingly, sensor networks research incorporates dynamic network topologies as well. In [7], [8], [9], the authors conduct an experimental analysis on a dynamic sensor network where nodes move in a large area gathering data and then sending the collected data when near an access point. In our paper, the nodes move in a prespecified pattern and gather media, e.g.…”

Opportunistic DTN routing with window-aware adaptive replication

“…However, this will usually imply further degrading the connectivity. Another proposed solution is to architecture the network into multiple tiers as in Zebranet [12] or DataMules [10], thus maximizing energy savings at one single tier -albeit the most sensitive one -the sensor tier. However, such a network specialization is hard to implement in social, urban scenarios where heterogeneity is key property and association/dissociation of nodes to the network is very dynamic.…”