Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks: Algorithms and Protocols for Scalable Coordination and Data Communication

1.17 EXPERIMENTS ON TEST BEDS

Wireless sensor networks have been implemented on test beds in applications for environmental monitoring, business, military, health care and so on. A pioneering work is the use of a WSN for habitat monitoring on Great Duck Island (Mainwaring et al., 2002). MICA motes are adopted as sensor nodes. The MICA Weather Board provides sensors which are able to monitor changing environmental conditions with the same functionality as a traditional weather station. The MICA Weather Board includes temperature, photo resistor, barometric pressure, humidity, and passive infrared sensors. Thirty-two motes were deployed on the island for 4 weeks.

A recent experiment on environmental monitoring used a flock of micro air vehicles (MAVs) to sense weather phenomena (Allred et al., 2007). Each MAV may be equipped with temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speed or direction and/or other sensors. The MAVs are able to provide detailed mapping of hurricanes, thunderstorms and tornados, and also return data to ground stations. These data are useful in improving storm track predictions and in the understanding of storm genesis and evolution. In the experiment, the MAV is designed to keep the weight and the maximum speed of the airplane under 500 g and 20 m/s, respectively. The CUPIC autopilot board is employed. It contains a CPU, pressure sensor, radio, rate gyro and GPS device that send navigation information to the CPU. The cost of the entire airplane is less than $600. ...