Getting Started
Back in 2001, Anish Arora (PI, Ohio State), Mohamed Gouda (University of Texas at Austin), Ted Herman (University of Iowa), Mikhail Nesterenko (Kent State University), and Sandeep Kulkarni (Michigan State University), collectively referred to as the "OSU Team," were selected to receive a DARPA ITO grant under the Networked Embedded Software Technology (NEST) Program for their proposal titled, "Self-Stabilization in NEST."
In 2003, about halfway through the NEST Program, DARPA asked several of the participating teams to demonstrate the current state-of-the-art through a series of public demos designed to showcase different applications of the core technology. The OSU Team was selected to demonstrate a concept called A Line in the Sand or "LITeS." After a six month research and development effort (very short for University R&D!), OSU completed a very successful demonstration in August at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. The successful results of not only the OSU Team, but also teams from Berkeley, MIT, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, and Virginia have lead to several new veins of research in 2004. Among them, part of OSU's work is being commercialized by Northrup Grumman. Of great significance if you're reading this page is that OSU was selected to lead an effort to increase the scale of the Line in the Sand demo by a factor of 100 - to a network of 10,000 sensor nodes! This demo was completed in December of 2004.
It is widely believed that someday there will be sensor network deployments of hundreds of thousands of nodes. The challenges in scaling to networks of this size are quite different than the ones encountered in fielding much smaller networks of dozens or hundreds of nodes. The former subsumes the latter and add a host of new problems. The motivation for the DARPA Extreme Scaling project, code-named "ExScal," is to investigate the challenges in scaling to a network of 10,000 sensor nodes. While 10,000 nodes is still a fraction of "hundreds of thousands," we have encountered many of the basic challenges of extreme scaling that we believe will be encountered with larger numbers of nodes. Consequently the ExScal experience has provided us with a rich set of experiences and has given us a visceral understanding of the "real" problems that are posed by networks of extreme scale.
Distributed wireless sensor networks or "SensorNets" hold great promise as an enabling technology for a variety of contemporary and futuristic applications. SensorNet applications are emerging at a torrent pace and the field has captured the collective imagination of hundreds of researchers and dozens entrepreneurs alike. This zealous group is pursuing tangible applications and envisioning new ones as diverse as environmental monitoring, traffic surveillance, battlefield awareness, habitat monitoring, supply chain integration, and weather tracking.
As an international research agenda, sensor networks have had the spotlight for less than five years. But, in this short time, there has been considerable research output that is both broad and deep. As is typical in such cases, survey papers provide a good high-level introduction to the research topic. For more depth, you can either follow the references in these survey papers and you can also visit the class homepages of seminar courses taught on the research topic. I would recommend doing both, since different people tend to emphasize different areas. Equally important, don't forget to visit the relevant conference and workshop homepages to get an idea of the current state-of-the-art. Finally, use the digital libraries like IEEE Xplore and ACM Digital Library to find journal articles, conference papers, and technical reports.
1. Mark Weiser, "The Computer for the Twenty-First Century," Scientific American, pp. 94-10, September 1991.
2. Embedded Everywhere: A Research Agenda for Networked Systems of Embedded Computers, National Academy of Sciences, 2001.
3. Ian F. Akyildiz, Weilian Su, Yogesh Sankarasubramaniam, and Erdal Cayirci, A Survey on Sensor Networks, IEEE Communications Magazine, pgs. 102-114, Aug. 2002.
4. Lav Rai and Kameswari Kotapati, A Survey on Sensor Network, 2003.
5. Visit Steve Lai's CIS788K11 class homepage.
6. Visit David Culler's CS294-1 class homepage.
7. Visit Deborah Estrin's CS213 class homepage.
8. See the ACM SenSys 2003 Program for a survey of works in the field from 2003.
9. See the ACM SenSys 2004 Program for a survey of recent works in the field.
