<p>Communication in a sensor network needs guaranteed reception of data without fail and providing security to it. The authenticity and confidentiality of the data has to be ensured as sensors have limited hardware resources as well as the bandwidth. This thesis addresses the security aspects in wireless sensor networks. The main task of the project is to identify the critical security parameters for these distributed embedded systems. The sensors have extremely limited resources: small amount of memory, low computation capability and poor bandwidth. For example, a sensor platform can have 8KB of flash memory, a 4MHz 8-bit Atmel processor, and a 900MHz radio interface. Various security threats posed to these small wireless sensor networks has been made and solutions proposed. Secure communication between these communicating partners is to be achieved using cryptography.</p>

Communication in a sensor network needs guaranteed reception of data without fail and providing security to it. The authenticity and confidentiality of the data has to be ensured as sensors have limited hardware resources as well as the bandwidth. This thesis addresses the security aspects in wireless sensor networks. The main task of the project is to identify the critical security parameters for these distributed embedded systems. The sensors have extremely limited resources: small amount of memory, low computation capability and poor bandwidth. For example, a sensor platform can have 8KB of flash memory, a 4MHz 8-bit Atmel processor, and a 900MHz radio interface. Various security threats posed to these small wireless sensor networks has been made and solutions proposed. Secure communication between these communicating partners is to be achieved using cryptography.

<p>To predict the lifetime of wireless sensor networks before their installation is an important concern. The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is specifically meant to support long battery life time; still there are some precautions to be taken by which a sensor network system application based on the standard can be made to run for longer time periods.</p><p>This thesis defines a holistic approach to the problem of energy consumption in sensor</p><p>networks and suggests a choice of node architecture, network structure and routing</p><p>algorithm to support energy saving in the network. The idea and thrust of the thesis is that stand-alone measures such as selecting a low-power microcontroller with embedded transceiver will not alone be sufficient to achieve energy saving over the entire network. A comprehensive design study with energy saving as a primary task must be made. Focus given on the design objectives needs to look at different aspects – application code, network configuration code, routing algorithms etc to come up with an energy efficient network.</p>

To predict the lifetime of wireless sensor networks before their installation is an important concern. The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is specifically meant to support long battery life time; still there are some precautions to be taken by which a sensor network system application based on the standard can be made to run for longer time periods. This thesis defines a holistic approach to the problem of energy consumption in sensor networks and suggests a choice of node architecture, network structure and routing algorithm to support energy saving in the network. The idea and thrust of the thesis is that stand-alone measures such as selecting a low-power microcontroller with embedded transceiver will not alone be sufficient to achieve energy saving over the entire network. A comprehensive design study with energy saving as a primary task must be made. Focus given on the design objectives needs to look at different aspects – application code, network configuration code, routing algorithms etc to come up with an energy efficient network.

No description available.

The Mobile Electronic Dispensary System (MEDS) is an indoor medical dispensary system where robots locate and travel to patients within a grid in order to deliver medication or other medical supplies based on a predefined schedule. For older people or individuals with physical or mental disabilities, it is important to ensure that medications are taken as prescribed. Missing or mixing dosages can cause unwanted and even harmful consequences. As individuals grow older or battle disabilities, it is expected that adhering to their medicine regimen will be a daily challenge without the assistance of a fulltime caregiver. Therefore, to assist individuals in maintaining their independence, MEDS ensures the proper medicine is dispensed to the patient at the prescribed time and dosage. At the core of MEDS is a scheduler that maintains the medicines to be dispensed, including the times and dosages. Once a scheduled time arrives to deliver medicine to a patient, MEDS instructs the appropriate robot to wake up, locate the patient within a defined grid, and then travel to the patient and deliver the medicine. Upon receiving the delivery, the patient will accept the medicine physically and then update their mobile device, informing MEDS that the medicine was successfully delivered. At this time, the robot will return to its home base within the grid. The patients are within the confines of a building where GPS is not a viable solution to track items to pinpoint accuracy. Therefore, an indoor location based system with beacons and listeners are required in order to define a grid and enable robots to locate and travel to the patient. This paper defines and details the programs, database, algorithms, and hardware of MEDS using the Cricket Indoor Location System and iRobot Creates. / text

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Gurdip Singh / TinyOS is an open-source component based operating system designed for highly memory constrained wireless embedded sensor network. TinyOS includes interfaces and components for communication management, routing and data acquisition tools to be refined further for custom applications. This project aims at developing a system which detects overlapping paths for data collection in different applications in the network and utilizing that information for efficient data acquisition. This prevents a reconfiguring the entire network of wireless sensor nodes (called motes) for each new application request. The application for initial or first data acquisition request tries to build the tree architecture on motes in the network where each node in the tree knows its immediate parent and children. The application builds the tree routed at the base station for the initial request and each intermediate node sends data to its parent when the data request is made. Each base station can request Light, Temperature and Passive Infrared sensory data from all or a subset of motes present in the system. When a new base station comes and connects to the network through a mote/node in the tree, the system reconfigures only those parts of the tree built in the initial phase which do not overlap with the tree required for the new base station as the root, all the other overlapping parts of the tree are left unchanged. We present experimental result to illustrate the efficiency of the approach.

This research proposed the use of state-of-the-art wireless communications and networked embedded systems technologies to provide environmental sensing for the early detection of natural disasters. The data is acquired, processed and transmitted, from the location where the disaster originates, to potentially threatened conurbations in order to promptly notify the population. The acquired data is transformed from its raw form into information that can be utilized by local authorities to rapidly assess emergency situations and then to apply disaster management procedures. Alternatively, the system can generate alerting signals without human intervention. Furthermore, recorded historical data can be made available for scientists to build models, to understand and to forecast the behavior of disasterous events. An additional, important, contribution of this research was the analysis and application of Wireless Sensor Network technology for disaster monitoring and alerting.

Ever since the University of California, Berkeley released the first commercial Wireless Sensor Network, (WSN), "mote", applications that employ the WSN technology have increased many fold. There are many kinds of prototypes and architectures for WSNs that are being developed by major communication companies. Due to the lack of a common standard for different physical and MAC layer protocols, interoperability among the wireless systems is constrained. Additionally, remote sensing capability, reconfigurability and interoperability have not yet been designed. In the current platforms hardware upgrading has to be performed on-site by replacing the old sensors with new ones. This procedure increases considerably the costs of deployment and maintenance. On-site upgrading also imposes serious constraints on applications that operate in very limited access environments.

No description available.