The Signpost Platform for City-Scale Sensing

Abstract

City-scale sensing holds the promise of enabling a deeper understanding of our urban environments. However, a city-scale deployment requires physical installation, power management, and communications-all challenging tasks standing between a good idea and a realized one. This indicates the need for a platform that enables easy deployment and experimentation for applications operating at city scale. To address these challenges, we present Signpost, a modular, energy-harvesting platform for city-scale sensing. Signpost simplifies deployment by eliminating the need for connection to wired infrastructure and instead harvesting energy from an integrated solar panel. The platform furnishes the key resources necessary to support multiple, pluggable sensor modules while providing fair, safe, and reliable sharing in the face of dynamic energy constraints. We deploy Signpost with several sensor modules, showing the viability of an energy-harvesting, multi-tenant, sensing system, and evaluate its ability to support sensing applications. We believe Signpost reduces the difficulty inherent in city-scale deployments, enables new experimentation, and provides improved insights into urban health. † https://github.com

TESLA: Traffic-Aware Elastic Slotframe Adjustment in TSCH Networks

“…Orchestra [11] provides autonomous TSCH scheduling together with the RPL routing layer. 1 For the construction of TSCH and RPL network, Orchestra employs two types of slotframes. The first is the EB (Enhanced Beacon) slotframe which has two active timeslots in each node, one dedicated for EB transmission and the other for EB reception from the time source.…”

“…In industrial IoT networks, numerous sensors and actuators are deployed for system monitoring and remote control. From smart homes to smart cities [1], [2], new applications and network services are emerging such as electricity management, home security, health care [3], and smart grid. As IoT applications become diverse, the need for reliable, energy-efficient, and flexible (i.e., adaptable to diverse and dynamic applications) network protocols is growing up steadily.…”

Capacity over capacitance for reliable energy harvesting sensors

“…Most examples of such devices are deployed outdoors. For these systems, the obvious choice is to use secondary-cells, as they can better capture a significant portion of copious solar energy [2,11,22,23,28]. Most notable of this group is Prometheus, which utilizes a supercapacitor as a short term energy store, and when full, charges a backup rechargeable lithium battery [22].…”

EmRep: Energy management relying on state‐of‐charge extrema prediction

“…Over the past years, energy harvesting (EH) has been a vital competitor for powering Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in many applications. Devices powered by ambient energy-for example, solar EH [1], vibration harvesting [2] or temperature difference harvesting [3]-allow uninterrupted operation without human intervention. This is especially important in critical places, for example, bridges [2,4] and the Matterhorn [5], where access is time consuming and costly.…”

“…We argue that the requirements of modern applicationsalso including industrial context-demand a new way of managing energy for ENO devices in EH-WSNs. Hence, we present EmRep, 1 which integrates utility into energy management. EmRep uses SoC estimation to identify low-intake and high-intake phases, and then decouples energy management in these two phases.…”