Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Identifier

735

Author

Somnath Mitra

Date

2012

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Major

Computer Science

Committee Chair

Santosh Kumar

Committee Member

Timothy W Hnat

Committee Member

King Ip Lin

Abstract

The progress of radio technology has made several flavors of radio available on the market.Wireless sensor network platform designers have used these radios to build a variety of platforms. Withnew applications and different types of radios on wireless sensing nodes, it is often hard to interconnectdifferent types of networks. Hence, often additional radios have to be integrated onto existingplatforms or new platforms have to be built. Additionally, the energy consumption of these nodes have to be optimized to meetlifetime requirements of years without recharging.In this thesis, we address two issues of single and multi radio platform designfor wireless sensor network applications - engineering issues and energy optimization.We present a set of guiding principles from our design experiences while building 3 real life applications,namely asset tracking, burglar tracking and finally in-situ psychophysiological stress monitoring of human subjects in behavioral studies.In the asset tracking application, we present our design of a tag node that can be hidden inside valuable personal assets such asprinters or sofas in a home. If these items are stolen, a city wide anchor node infrastructure networkwould track them throughout the city. We also present our design for the anchor node.In the burglar tracking application, we present the design of tag nodes and the issueswe faced while integrating it with a GSM radio. Finally, we discuss our experiencesin designing a bridge node, that connects body worn physiological sensorsto a Bluetooth enabled mobile smartphone. We present the software framework that acts as middleware toconnect to the bridge, parse the sensor data, and send it to higher layers of the softwareframework.We describe 2 energy optimization schemes that are used in the Asset Tracking and the Burglar Tracking applications, that enhance the lifetime of the individual applications manifold.In the asset tracking application,we design a grouping scheme that helps increase reliability of detection of the tag nodes at theanchor nodes while reducing the energy consumption of the group of tag nodes travelling together.We achieve an increase of 5 times improvement in lifetime of the entire group. In the Burglar Tracking application, weuse sensing to determine when to turn the GSM radio on and transmit data by differentiatingturns and lane changes. This helps us reduce the number of times the GSM radio is woken up, thereby increasing thelifetime of the tag node while it is being tracked. This adds 8 minutes of trackablelifetime to the burglar tracking tag node. We conclude this thesis by observing the futuretrends of platform design and radio evolution.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to the local University of Memphis Electronic Theses & dissertation (ETD) Repository.

Share

COinS