Exploitation of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in ubiquitous computing environments is continuously increasing for gathering data. Contemporary distributed software systems on WSNs for pragmatic business applications have become extremely adaptive, dynamic, heterogeneous and large scaled. Management of such system is not trivial to fulfil these features, leading to more and more complex management and configuration. Along with encompassing state of art and novel techniques for such diversely dynamic system, in this thesis two alternative techniques namely “task initiation by command” and “run-time task deployment and processing” are compared, for such system’s setup and configuration. Both techniques have their own pros and cons which makes them suitable according to the requirements and contextual situations. A lot of effort has been put to make WSNs more and more efficient in terms of computations and power consumption. Hence comparative analysis of both techniques used in this report to setup and configure WSN can be a benchmark to lead towards most appropriate solution to compensate the need of efficient energy and resource consumption.Both alternative schemes are implemented to setup WSN on Sun Microsystems sunSPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology) sensor nodes which are embedded microcontrollers and programmed them in java (j2me). It performs radio communication between wireless sensors and host via sink node also called base station, along with over the air run-time management of sensors. SunSPOTs built in libraries and KSN libraries are used to implement these alternatives and compare the memory footprint, communication pattern and energy consumption.Exploitation of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in ubiquitous computing environments is continuously increasing for gathering data. Contemporary distributed software systems on WSNs for pragmatic business applications have become extremely adaptive, dynamic, heterogeneous and large scaled. Management of such system is not trivial to fulfil these features, leading to more and more complex management and configuration. Along with encompassing state of art and novel techniques for such diversely dynamic system, in this thesis two alternative techniques namely “task initiation by command” and “run-time task deployment and processing” are compared, for such system’s setup and configuration. Both techniques have their own pros and cons which makes them suitable according to the requirements and contextual situations. A lot of effort has been put to make WSNs more and more efficient in terms of computations and power consumption. Hence comparative analysis of both techniques used in this report to setup and configure WSN can be a benchmark to lead towards most appropriate solution to compensate the need of efficient energy and resource consumption.Both alternative schemes are implemented to setup WSN on Sun Microsystems sunSPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology) sensor nodes which are embedded microcontrollers and programmed them in java (j2me). It performs radio communication between wireless sensors and host via sink node also called base station, along with over the air run-time management of sensors. SunSPOTs built in libraries and KSN libraries are used to implement these alternatives and compare the memory footprint, communication pattern and energy consumption.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is an electronic labeling technique.These electronic labels are called tags and read wirelessly. In this thesis a battery and amicroprocessor are connected to the tag. The work consisted of programming themicroprocessor to transfers sensor data into the tags memory. The tags are placed ontrains and data is collected from sensors at the train's axle. That way sensor data can betransmitted from a train to readers stationed along the railroad tracks.The aim of the project is to predict service intervals. There is currently no possibility tosee wear in real time and stop a train before it breaks. At present, there is a form of heatdetectors located along the railroad tracks to measure temperatures of wheels and axlesof passing trains. These are expensive and have the disadvantage of being able to detecterrors that have already occurred, they can not detect errors that do not radiate heat.The thesis aims to provide a solution for this. By programming a microprocessor totransmit sensor data to the tags memory it is possible for an RFID reader to read thesensor data from the tag. Ensuring that data and identity can be read from the tag atspeeds up to 250 km/h, you can get the status of a trains wagon before it breaks.

An antenna for a wireless sensor network for trains is designed and built. The network will monitor temperature and vibrations of the wheel bearings on the train wagons. Doing this will allow for an earlier detection of damaged wheels, which will ease planning of maintenance and reduce wear on the rails considerably. The requirement of the system is that it is to be installed without any cables attached to the sensor nodes. This calls for wireless communication, and that for that antennas are needed.A train is a difficult environment to transmit electromagnetic (EM) waves in. It is full of metal and EM-waves cannot pass through a conducting material. Having much metal in its vicinity also affects the function of the antenna. This needs to be taken into consideration when making the design.The constructed antenna is a small dual-layer patch antenna. Dual layer means that it is constructed out of two sheets known as substrates of isolating material with different characteristics. The lower one of these substrates is made in such a way that integration with a circuit board is possible. Such integration would reduce the production cost considerably. The antenna is designed for direct placement on a conducting surface. This surface could be part of the train. It uses the surrounding metal as a ground plane in order to reduce its size. The result is a small patch antenna with good radiation qualities in metallic surroundings. The longest side is 18.35 mm, equaling 14.9 % of the wavelength that the antenna is designed for. / WISENET

The technology for the realization of wireless sensors has been available for a long time, but due to progress  and  development  in  electrical  engineering  such  sensors  can  be  manufactured  cost effectively  and  in  large  numbers  nowadays.  This  availability  and  the  possibility  of  creating cooperating  wireless  networks  which  consist  of  such  sensors  nodes,  has  led  to  a  rapidly  growing popularity  of  a  technology  named  Wireless  Sensor  Networks  (WSN).  Its  disadvantage  is  a  high complexity in the task of programming applications based on WSN, which is a result of its distributed and  embedded  characteristic.  To  overcome  this  shortcoming,  software  agents  have  been  identified as  a  suitable  programming  paradigm.  The  agent  based  approach  commonly  uses  a  middleware  for the execution of the software agent. This thesis is meant to compare such agent middleware in their performance in the WSN domain. Therefore two prototypes of applications based on different agent models are implemented for a given set of middleware. After the implementation measurements are extracted  in  various  experiments,  which  give  information  about  the  runtime  performance  of  every middleware in the test set.  In the following analysis it is examined whether each middleware under test  is  suited  for  the  implemented  applications  in  WSN.  Thereupon,  the  results  are  discussed  and compared with the author’s expectations. Finally a short outlook of further possible development and improvements is presented.

Wireless sensor networks have attracted the interest of the process industry. A process plant typically contains thousands of devices, monitoring or controlling the process. Today, all these devices are usually connected with wires. Using wireless technology simplifies deployment of new devices in a network and eliminates the need for extensive wiring. But wireless communication is also more sensitive than its wired counterpart. Therefore work is needed to make wireless sensor networks a viable option in many applications. Important issues are, for example, robustness, energy efficiency, and latency. One of the leading communication protocols for industrial wireless sensor networks is the WirelessHART protocol. This thesis investigates three ways of improving performance of the protocol, in terms of reliability and energy requirements. First, the structure of a WirelessHART packet is studied and the removal of certain fields is suggested to make the communication overhead smaller. Second, forward error correcting codes are evaluated using simulations in MATLAB. Third, measurement experiments in actual industrial environments are conducted where radio signals are transmitted and received. The variability of the received signal strength is measured and the effect that polarization diversity has on the signal variability is analyzed. The findings indicate that substantial improvements can be attained by employing polarization diversity, which can reduce channel variability and increase the expected signal strength significantly. The improvements in channel gain can be on the order of several tens of dB. The evaluations of forward error correcting codes show that the reliability is improved, with a channel gain of 3 dB. The study of the WirelessHART packet structure indicate that the packet sizes can be reduced by 15%. In turn, this also reduces energy requirements and packet error rates by 15%. This is equivalent to a gain in SNR on the order of a tenth of a dB.

The objective of the presented report focuses on the data acquisition of pressure and heart beat rates from external sensors over the TinyOS 2.x platform. This sensing application may be used in the e-health care field in order to sample the data information. The designed test-bed consists of several hardware devices, containing an MIB520CB USB interface board, two MICAz motes, an MDA300CA data acquisition board and external sensors for the pressure and heart beat rate. The programming language is NesC,which is used to build applications under the TinyOS 2.x environment. Data information is sampled from the external sensors, and this is then realized by the mote via the on-board ADC channel. The values are then transferred from one mote to another over radio communication. Finally, the expected results are transmitted to the PC by using serial communication. The report also discusses the sensing outcomes in order to determine the practical usage of the sensor devices. This project represents a common sensing application in wireless sensor networks, demonstrating a small case within the e-health care monitoring system. In order to meet the specific demands and to save resources, the wireless sensor networks are widely used in various applications. The designed test-bed could be also deployed as a part of larger-scale wireless sensor networks in order to achieve the requirements in relation to the sensing data information for further detailed use in future work.

In recent years, the development of wireless sensor networks has made a great progress. Early projects focused on replacement of existing systems equipped with wires. These systems started out as simple static data collection networks with one smart central node that could decide further actions based on the content of the collected data. Through time, the intelligence has become more decentralized, which means the nodes now can cooperate in a more efficient and dynamic manner. The task given is to evaluate TinyOS and NesC on specific hardware from Crossbow Technology Inc, applied on an application called the Open Secure Office Project. This application is designed to enhance the security without negative effects on comfort in a frequently visited open-plan office. Finally, a real world system demonstration should be performed. We propose a solution where there is no urgent need to cover the entire office area with radio signals to maintain a secure sensor system. This is true as long as all entries and exits to the office area are “guarded” by some base station which has as main task to keep track of people and equipment entering or leaving the office. Small scale tests have been performed which show that it is possible to easily develop and maintain a wireless sensor network security system, that could be coordinated by alternative systems.

Wireless sensor networks offer easy implementation, flexibility and mobility of hand held devices. Sensors consist of an internal power source, which is the great limitation for the life time and the usage of sensor networks. To increase the life time, sensors should stay in energy saving sleep mode as long as possible, because in sleep mode the radio is either shut down or working with less energy. Better energy handling is implemented in different power saving mechanism of common Medium Access Control protocols, which are evaluated and analyzed and further extensions and ideas to improve the energy efficiency are presented. Slotted PSM is simulated with the NS2 and compared to the WLAN 802.11 PSM technology and the results show that energy efficiency and power consumption are much better implemented and life time increases with the use of Slotted PSM.

An achievable rate region for general wireless sensor networks is proposed. A general multi-source, multi-relay, multi-destination wireless sensor network with arbitrarily correlated sources is considered. Each node can sense some real phenomena and send its readings to one or more sinks (data gathering nodes) via some relays. It also can relay some correlated or independent readings of other nodes, simultaneously. In this problem the source and channel coding separation is not optimal and the information which each reading has about others nodes is destroyed in separation. Thus, a joint source channel coding scheme can be used. The problem consists of relay channels and multiple access channels with arbitrarily correlated sources. The proposed scheme is based on regular block Markov encoding/backward decoding and code division multiple-access (CDMA) and the result is a combination of multi-relay and multiple-access with correlated sources.

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have generated tremendous interest among researchers these years because of their potential usage in a wide variety of applications.<p> Sensor nodes are inexpensive portable devices with limited processing power and energy resources. Sensor nodes can be used to collect information from the environment, locally process this data and transmit the sensed data back to the user.<p> This thesis proposes a new reliable data delivery protocol for general point-to-point data delivery (unicasting) in wireless sensor networks. The new protocol is designed that aims at providing 100% reliability when possible as well as minimizing overhead and network delay. The design of the new protocol includes three components. The new protocol adopts a NACK-based hop-by-hop loss detection and recovery scheme using end-to-end sequence numbers. In order to solve the single/last packet problem in the NACK-based approach, a hybrid ACK/NACK scheme is proposed where an ACK-based approach is used as a supplement to the NACK-based approach to solve the single/last packet problem. The proposed protocol also has a new queue management scheme that gives priority to new data. By introducing the idea of a Ready_Bit and newer packet first rule in the transmission queue, nodes can detect and recover lost packets in parallel with the normal data transmission process. The performance of the new protocol is tested in a Crossbow MicaZ testbed. Experimental results show that the new protocol performs well under various system and protocol parameter settings.