Mobility Changes Everything in Low-Power Wireless Sensornets

The system and network architecture for static sensornets is largely solved today with many stable commercial solutions now available and standardization efforts underway at the IEEE, IETF, ISA, and within many industry groups. As a result, many researchers have begun to explore new domains like mobile sensor networks, or mobiscopes, since they enable new applications in the home and office, for health and safety, and in transportation and asset management. This paper argues that mobility invalidates many assumptions implicit in lowpower static designs so the architecture for micropower mobiscopes is still very much an open research question. In this paper, we explore several mobile sensing applications, identify research challenges to their realization, and explore how emerging technologies and real-time motion data could help ease these challenges.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: HOTOS
• Authors: Prabal Dutta, David E. Culler
• Keywords: HOTOS 2009, Lowpower Static Designs, Mobile Sensor Networks, Operating System, Stable Commercial Solutions