COURSE DESCRIPTION:

The advent of low power, small form factor devices that combine sensing, processing, and wireless networking makes it possible to monitor and observe the physical world at a scale that was impossible beforehand. For the better part of a decade now such wireless sensor network systems, incorporating many `mote' devices, have been of great interest in both academia and industry, leading to early applications in infrastructure and building monitoring, business asset management and tracking, heath-care delivery, disaster recovery, and location-aware services. However, both the deployment and management of such distributed systems present many unsolved challenges, due to the fragile nature of the devices themselves, the volatility of wireless links, and the basic difficulty of architecting a reliable system out of unreliable components. The issue of how multiple such systems will be able to co-operate and how they will be integrated into the next generation Internet also remains largely unaddressed.

This course takes an algorithmic point of view on sensors networks and focuses on the many non-trivial and interesting algorithm and protocol design problems that have been looked at already, or that still remain to be addressed. Included among these are time synchronization and localization, duty cycling, multi-hop routing and communication, in-network processing and information aggregation, information discovery and query processing, distributed storage, optimized sensor tasking and control, and others. A number of specific applications, such as tracking, will be covered in detail.

PREREQUISITES:

The course presumes a basic knowledge of networking and algorithms. Background material will be presented as needed, including a quick introduction to TinyOS and network simulators.

GRADING:

The class requirements include:

• An in-class presentation based on one or two recent papers from the literature
• A project will be required. Implementation projects will be able to use Crossbow imote2 hardware, or a combination of Nokia phones and tablets. More theoretical projects will also be possible.

These pages are maintained by Leonidas Guibas guibas@cs.stanford.edu.
Last update September 25, 2007.