CS 590Z: Programming Sensor Networks

Fall 2006

Instructor : Zhiyuan Li

Background:

Wireless sensor networks have a wide range of potential applications. Their operating environement, on the other hand, raise many technical challenges, such as low-energy consumption, constrained resources, self-reconfigurability, mobility, reliability and security. These challenges concern many aspects of the system and application design, including distributed computing, data queries, network protocols and programming language design.

This course is intended for graduate students to get some first-hand experience with programming sensor nodes and get exposure to the main research issues and existing literature.

Course Work:

The course will be experiments and projects-oriented, complemented by literature reading and discussions.

We will use the TOSSIM simulator for the Berkeley TinyOS as the main experimentation platform, and possibly use the sensor nodes in the instructor's research lab to gain further experience if the class size allows it.

Number of credits: 3.

The Grading Method:

The semester-long project is to be agreed between the instructor and the student after a few weeks from the beginning of the semester.

Reference Books

Two books will be reserved in the Engineering Library as a reference for this course.

(1) The main reference book (in addition to recent papers on various sensor-related subjects) wil be the following (which is a good survey book):
Wireless Sensor Networks: A Systems Perspective Nirupama Bulusu and Sanjay Jha, editors Artech House, August 2005 http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~nbulusu/book/

(2) We'll also quickly go through the general issues of embedded systems and software, using Wayne Wolf's following book as the main reference:
Computers as Components: Principles of Embedded Computing System Design, Author: Wayne Wolf ISBN: 0123694590 Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann