Kristofer S.J. Pister (Advisor)

An enabling technology for large scale sensor networks is the ability to determine a sensor node’s location after deployment. Some applications, such as inventory management, use sensors that move regularly, and this spatial information is crucial to the network's operation. A device to wirelessly measure the distance between two network nodes using an RF transceiver will be developed. The distance measurement is performed by calculating a cross correlation between a received and an expected signal. Methods for reducing the effects of noise, clock offset and multipath propagation...

Recent breakthroughs in understanding insect flight have led to increased interest in small robotic flying aircraft which can hover and navigate through cluttered environments. MEMS inertial sensors have been an enabler in this regard. What types of additional sensors are required for autonomous flight and of what sorts of behaviors could palm-sized fliers be capable? We are performing a Multidisciplinary Design Optimization, combining constraints of propulsive technologies, powertrain efficiencies, novel sensors and communication drop-off payload to understand this space. The...

The goal of this project is to build a multi-channel sniffer capable of listening on all available channels at the same time, and which can interpret the packets it receives. In its current state, 16 Atmel IEEE802.15.4 radios are driven by software capable of parsing packets into a user defined format. A front end graphical user interface displays the content of the received packets. Frequency-agile protocols for low power wireless sensor networks, such as IEEE802.15.4E or WirelessHART, use channel hopping to increase the robustness of the wireless link. In these networks, packets...

Analyses and simulations of a comprehensive wireless sensor network for industrial automation applications. Utilizing WirelessHART architecture, the proposed network will consist of 1 million motes within an area of 10 km2. Each mote is presumed to be single sensing and sampling vibration, pressure, temperature, or light. The project seeks to evaluate the scaling limits and challenges for deployment of a reliable (characterized by at least 99.9% reliability), frequently sensing (measuring levels every 10 secs), low power (7+ year lifetime power), secure wireless network (encrypted...