Sensor Networks




This page (http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~bharathi/sensor/snw.html) contains links to various papers and projects related to sensor networks maintained by Archana Bharathidasan.

This link gives the list of routing-related and other papers related to sensor networks (maintained by Vijay).

This link gives the list of clustering-related and other papers involving sensor networks (maintained by Jennifer).

Links to sensor networks related research web-sites:

Since this page is constantly under construction and needs a lot of updates, I shall be very glad if you let me know of sites I have missed. Mail me and I shall add a link :-).

1. Deborah Estrin's (UCLA) Home Page
2. Tiny OS - An Operating System for Networked Sensors
3. Hari Balakrishnan's (MIT) Home Page
4. University of Wisconsin Sensor Networks Research Group
5 Wireless Integrated Sensor Networks - WINS
6 Extreme Scale Wireless Sensor Networking (Ohio State University)


Links to sensor networks based applications:

1. Traffic Pulse Technology
2. Distributed Surveillance Sensor Network
3. Cougar: The Sensor Network is the Database
4. Eyes - Energy Efficient Sensor Netowrks
5. Reactive Sensor Networks
6. Wireless Sensing Networks
7. Smart Buildings Admit Their Faults
8. Smart Sensor Networks
9. Neural Network Based Sensor Systems for Manufacturing Applications


Survey on sensor networks:

1. Here is our survey paper discussing the papers below as well as the papers in Vijay's website. I got a few emails complaining that there is an error downloading the document. I have updated it with a pdf version - hope this works!

2. A Survey on Sensor Networks Akyildiz, I. F., Su, W., Sankarasubramaniam, Y., and Cayirci, E., IEEE Communications Magazine, August 2002.

3. Survey on Sensor Networks Praveen Rentala, Ravi Musunnuri, Shashidhar Gandham, Udit Saxena, University of Texas at Dallas.

4. A taxonomy of Wireless Micro-Sensor Network Models Sameer Tilak, Nael B. Abu-Ghazaleh and Wendi Heinzelman, ACM Mobile Computing and Communications Review (MC2R), Volume 6, Number 2, April 2002.

5.Sensor Networks : An Overview M. Tubaishat, S. Madria. IEEE Potentials, April/May 2003.

6. Current Researches on Sensor Networks Ayed Ahmed and M. Rasit Eskicioglu, Technical Report TR-01-06/04, June 2004, Telecommunication Research Labs, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.


Localization/position in sensor networks:

Localization of a node refers to the problem of identifying its spatial co-ordinates in some co-ordinate system. Many methods have been proposed for localization [1,4,5,7] The most commonly used method is some variation of multilateration, which is an extension to trilateration. A simple tutorial on Trilateration can be obtained here.
Trilateration techniques use beacons which act as reference points for a node to calculate its own position. Sufficient number of beacons is necessary as otherwise nodes which are not aware of their positions will not be able to calculate their positions. At the same time too many beacons will be too expensive and will also cause self interference. Thus it is necessary to have optimal beacon placement. This problem is dealt with in [2,3,6].

1. GPS-less Low Cost Outdoor Localization For Very Small Devices Nirupama Bulusu, John Heidemann and Deborah Estrin IEEE Personal Communications, Special Issue on "Smart Spaces and Environments", Vol. 7, No. 5, pp. 28-34, October 2000. [Summary]
This paper DESCRIBES A LOCALIZATIon system which is RF-based, receiver based, ad hoc, responsive, low-energy consuming and adaptive. A node calculates its position from a collection of reference points.

2.Adaptive Beacon Placement Nirupama Bulusu, John Heidemann and Deborah Estrin Proceedings of the Twenty First International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS-21), Phoenix, Arizona, April 2001.
This paper suggests an incrememntal beacon placement technique based on empirical adaptation. Hence, beacon placement is adjusted through adding more beacons rather than complete re-deployment. It compares two algorithms Max and Grid algorithms both of which take different approaches towards determing which place is most appropriate for beacon placement. These methods just suggest the location where the beacons could be placed - the method of actually deploying the beacons to those locations is left to the user.

3. Density-adaptive beacon placement algorithms for localization in ad hoc wireless networks. Nirupama Bulusu, John Heidemann, Vladimir Bychkovskiy and Deborah Estrin. UCLA Computer Science Department Technical Report UCLA-CS-TR-010013. July 2001.
This paper further elaborates the ideas in the paper above. The HEAP algorithm details the actual implementation of the max and grid algorithms. Besides this, it also describes a technique called STROBE (Selectively Turning off Beacons) for extending the lifetime of a sensor network by turning off beacons periodically.

4.Scalable, Ad Hoc Deployable, RF-Based Localization Nirupama Bulusu, Vladimir Bychkovskiy, Deborah Estrin and John Heidemann In Proceedings of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference 2002, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. October 2002.
This paper elaborates on RF-based localization, similar to what is given in 1.

5. Algorithms for Position and Data Recovery in Wireless Sensor Networks Lance Doherty. EECS Masters Report, UC Berkeley, May 2000 [Summary].
In this paper, the tastk of determining the position of a sensor node is treated as a mathematical problem. The sensor nodes can be treated as nodes of a graph and the connections between them can be treated as edges. Also the node placement is constrained by certain factors. Hence the problem becomes similar to solving a Linear Problem with a set of unknowns and a set of constraints governing those unknowns.

6. 1. An Incremental Self-Deployment Algorithm for Mobile Sensor Networks ,Howard, A., Mataric, M.J., and Sukhatme, G.S. (2002)Autonomous Robots, Special Issue on Intelligent Embedded Systems
This paper describes self-deployement algorithms for mobile sensor networks. The algorithm carries out the deployment of nodes one by one into an unknown environment. The goal is to maximize the network coverage while ensuring that the nodes retain line of sight communication with each other. The algorithm assumes that all the nodes are identical, the environment is static andthe position of each node is known in some arbitrary co-ordinate system.

7. Scalable Coordination for wireless sensor networks: Self-Configuring Localization Systems Nirupama Bulusu, Deborah Estrin, Lewis Girod and John Heidemann In Proceedings of the Sixth International Symposium on Communication Theory and Applications (ISCTA 2001), Ambleside, Lake District,UK, July 2001. This paper is a tutorial on various issues in sensor networks.

8. Localization in Sensor Networks with Fading and Mobility. P. Bergamo, G. Mazzini, IEEE PIMRC 2002, Lisbon, Portugal, September 15-18, 2002.

9. . Location Awareness in Ad Hoc Wireless Mobile Networks. * Y.-C. Tseng, S.-L. Wu, W.-H. Liao, and C.-M. Chao , IEEE Computer, Vol. 34, No. 6, June 2001, pp. 46-52.

10. Dynamic fine-grained localization in Ad-Hoc networks of sensors. Andreas Savvides, Chih-Chieh Han, Mani B. Strivastava, MOBICOM 2001: 166-179.

11. Locationing in distributed ad-hoc wireless sensor networks. Chris Savarese, Jan M. Rabaey, and Jan Beutel, In Proc. International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2001).

12. Coverage Problems in Wireless Ad-hoc Sensor Networks. S. Meguerdichian, F. Koushanfar, M. Potkonjak, M. B. Srivastava. INFOCOM 2001, Proceedings, IEEE, Vol. 3, 2001, pp.1380-1387 vol. 3.

13. Self-configuring Localization Systems: Design and Experimental Evaluation. Nirupama Bulusu, John Heidemann, Deborah Estrin and Tommy Tran. Submitted for review to ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (ACM TECS), August 2002. Technical Report 8, Center for Embedded Networked Sensing.

14. GPS-free Positioning in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks Srdjan Capkun, M. Hamdi, J. P. Hubaux, Cluster Computing Journal, April 2002.

15. Ad hoc Positioning System (APS), Dragos Niculescu, Badri Nathi, INFOCOM 2003, San Francisco, CA.

16. The bits and flops of the N-hop multilateration primitive for node localization problems. A.Savvides, H.Park and Srivastava.M. WSNA' 02, 2002.


17. Convex position estimation in wireless sensor networks. L. Doherty, K. Pister, L. Ghaoui, Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM 2001, volume 3, pages 1655-- 1663, Anchorage, Alaska, April 22-26 2001.

18. Energy-Aware Target Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks. Yi Zou and Krishnendu Chakrabarty, Proceedings Of The First IEEE International Conference On Pervasive Computing And Communications, 2003.

19. Range-Free Localization Schemes for Large Scale Sensor Networks1. Tian He, Chengdu Huang, Brian M. Blum, John A. Stankovic, Tarek Abdelzaher, MobiCom, 2003.

20. Distributed localization in wireless sensor networks: a quantitative comparison. Koen Langendoen and Niels Reijers, Elsevier, Computer Networks, 2003.

21. A Distributed Algorithm For Localization In Random Wireless Networks . Slobodan N. Simic, Shankar Sastry, submitted to Discrete Applied Mathematics.

22. Self-Localization Method for Wireless Sensor Networks, R. Moses, D. Krishnamurthy, and R. Patterson, Eurasip Journal on Applied Signal Processing, March 2003.

23.Relative Location Estimation in Wireless Sensor Networks, IEEE Trans. Signal Processing, Aug., 2003.

24. Using Proximity and Quantized RSS for Sensor Localization in Wireless Networks WSNA'03, Sept, 2003.

Energy efficiency:

Energy efficiency is a major consideration in sensor networks since the nodes are mostly ad hoc deployed in an infrastructure less environment and hence have only a small and finite source of energy. Any solution proposed for sensor networks must take energy considerations into account. Besides these solutions, hardware and software solutions have been proposed such that the sensor networks is built in a energy-efficient manner.

1. Power efficient organization of wireless sensor networks. S. Slijepcevic, M. Potkonjak,IEEE International Conference on Communications, vol. 2, pp 472-476, Helsinki, Finland, June 2001.

2.Energy-Aware Wireless Microsensor Networks Vijay Raghunathan, Curt Schurgers, Sung Park, and Mani B. Srivastava, IEEE Singal Processing Magazine, March 2002.

3.Residual Energy Scans for Monitoring Wireless Sensor Networks.Jerry Zhao, Ramesh Govindan and Deborah Estrin, IEEE Wilress Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC'02), Orange County Convention Center, Orlando, FL, USA, 17-21 March, 2002 (A longer version is also available as USC CS Department TR-01-745)

4.Optimizing Sensor Networks in the Energy-Latency-Density Design Space. Curt Schurgers, Vlasios Tsiatsis, Saurabh Ganeriwal, Mani B. Srivastava, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, Vol 1., 2002.

5. Upper Bounds on the Lifetime of Sensor Networks. Manish Bhardwaj, Timothy Garnett, Anantha P. Chandrakasan.Communications, 2001. ICC 2001. IEEE International Conference on , Volume: 3 , 2001 Page(s): 785 -790 vol.3

6. A Probabilistic Approach to Predict the Energy Consumption in Wireless Sensor Networks . A. F. Mini, Badri Nath, Antonio A. F. Loureiro.


Architecture, OS, Communication:

Many architectures and operating systems have been proposed taking the special characteristics of sensor networks into account. TinyOS is a component bases system - hence components can be added to the basic system depending upon the requirements. [3] describes how "active messages" can be used for communication in a energy-efficient manner. [1] talks about a middleware architecture for sensor networks - which organizes the nodes into an hierarchical cluster so as to minimize long-distance communication.

1. Sensor Information Networking Architecture. Srisathapornphat, C.Jaikaeo, C.Chien-Chung Shen International Workshops on Parallel Processing, Pages 23-30, 2000.
This paper proposes a middleware architecture for sensor networking systems. It uses attribute based naming and hierarchical clustering of the nodes. It also proposes the SQTL - Sensor Query and Tasking language as the programming interface between sensor applications and SINA middleware.

2. System Architecture Directions for Networked Sensors. J. Hill, R. Szewcyk, A. Woo, D. Culler, S. Hollar, K. Pister, To appear in ASPLOS 2000.

3. A Network-Centric Approach to Embedded Software for Tiny Devices. David E. Culler, Jason Hill, Philip Buonadonna, Robert Szewczyk, and Alec Woo, EMSOFT 2001:   First International Workshop on Embedded Software, Oct. 2001.
An active message communication model is proposed for energy efficient communication. It uses active messages. This model may be used as a building block to carry out higher level networking capabilities.

4.Self Localizing Sensor Network Architectures. F. Mondinelli, Zs. Kovacs-Vajna. Proc. of IMTC 2002 - Anchorage, Vol. 1, pp. 823-828, May 2002.
You will have to get a hard copy of this one! If you know where a soft-copy exists, email me!

5.An Architecture for Building Self-Configurable Systems. Lakshminarayanan Subramanian and Randy H.Katz. IEEE/ACM Workshop on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing (MobiHOC 2000), Boston, August 2000.

6.Self-Organizing Distributed Sensor Networks. Loren P. Clare, Gregory J. Pottie and Jonathan R. Agreaa. SPIE, April 1999.

7.Protocols for Self-Organization of a Wireless Sensor Network.K. Sohrabi, J. Gao, V. Ailawadhi, and G. J. Pottie. IEEE Personal Comm., Oct. 2000.

Sensor Networks and Robotics

Robots may also be treated as mobile sensor nodes in the sense that they are also expected to work in unsupervised, infrastructure less domains. This section looks at a schemes which propose localization for robots [2] and a scheme which proposes adaptive deployment of robots [1].

1. An Incremental Self-Deployment Algorithm for Mobile Sensor Networks ,Howard, A., Mataric, M.J., and Sukhatme, G.S. (2002)Autonomous Robots, Special Issue on Intelligent Embedded Systems

2. Relaxation on a mesh: A formalism for generalized localization,Howard, A., Mataric, M.J. and Sukhatme, G.S. 2001 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), October 29 - November 3, Maui, pp. 1055-1060
The authors view localization as a co-ordinate transform problem. If the position of a ndoe were known in two different coordinates systems, these two locations would map onto the same point in a global coordinate system. Each local co-ordinates system is represented as a rigid body and each correspondence is represented as a spring joining two points on the rigid body. By allowing the spring to relax to its lowest energy configuration, the optimal set of co-ordinates can be inferred.

General Papers:

This is a list of papers which would not fit comfortably into any other category. It contains sort of introductory details like challenges in sensor networks etc. Also some hardware details are given.

1. Distributed Sensor Processing Over an Ad Hoc Wireless network:simulation framework and performance criteria.Robert E. Van Dyck & Leonard E. Miller

2. Instrumenting the world with wireless sensor networks. Deborah Estrin, Lewis Girod, Greg Pottie, Mani Srivastava In Proceedings of the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2001), Salt Lake City, Utah, May 2001.

3. Next Century Challenges: Scalable Coordination in Sensor Networks.Deborah Estrin, Ramesh Govindan, John Heidemann and Satish Kumar In Proceedings of the Fifth Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networks (MobiCOM '99), August 1999, Seattle, Washington.
This is just an introductory paper looking at various issues/problems in Sensor networks.

4. Wireless sensor networks. Pottie, G.J. Information Theory Workshop, 1998 , 22-26 Jun 1998, Page(s): 139 -140.
This is just an introductory paper looking at various issues/problems in Sensor networks.

Sensor Network Systems:

Where are sensor networks applied? This section lists some papers which use sensor networks inside buildings/bounded areas. They illustrate real-world usage of localization principles. In fact some of the papers [1,2,3] have served as the basic starting point for many other researches involving localization techniques.

1.The Active Badge Location System. Roy Want, Andy Hopper, Veronica Falcao & Jon Gibbons, ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems (TOIS) Vol. 10. N0. 1, Jan 1992 Pages 91-102.
Active Badge Location System is a system for locating personnel/objects inside a building. Each person/object which has to be located, is tagged with an Active Badge which emits a unique infrfared code ever 10th of a second. These signals are picked up by networked sensors around the building. On the basis of the information provided by the sensor, the location of the tag and hence the person/object can be determined.

2. A New Location Technique for the Active Office.Ward.A, Jones.A, Hopper.A, IEEE Personal Communications, Vol. 4, No. 5, October 1997, pp 42-47.
This paper presents a sensor system which allows the location of indoor peopple or equipment to be calculated more accurately - within 15 cm of their actual location. A small wireless transmitter is attached to ever object to be located. A matrix of receiver elements equipped with ultrasonic detectors are mounted on the room of the ceiling. THe position of the transmitter is calculated using multilateration techniques.

3. A positioning system for finding things indoors. Jay Werb and Colin Lanzl, IEEE Spectrum, 35(9):71-78, September 1998.
Pin-point 3D-iD local positioning system described in this paper deals with the problem of locating an item in 3-D space inside a location fixed by boundaries. The system consists of 3D-iD readers and tags. The readers emit codes that are received by the tages and transponded back to the reader after changing the signal's frequency. Based on the round trip time of flight, the distance of the tag from the antenna is calculated. It has an accuracy of 1-3 metres.
The link I had for the soft-copy of this one is no longer active :-(. Any leads will be appreciated!

4. Smart kindergarten: sensor-based wireless networks for smart developmental problem-solving environments. Mani Srivastava, Richard R. Muntz, Miodrag Potkonjak MOBICOM 2001.

5. The Cricket Location-Support System.Priyantha.N, Chakraborty.A, Balakrishnan.H,6th ACM International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, 2000.
The Cricket-Location-Support System helps devices learn where they are and lets them decide whom to advertise this information to. It does not rely on centralized management and there is no explicait co-ordination among the beacons. Here beacons are attached to some unobstrusive location. The objects which need to be located have listeners attacehed to them. When an object is deployed into the network, the listener infers its current location from the set of beacons it hears. The Crickets system uses a combination of RF and ultrasound hardware. THought the system has the advantage that it is decentralized and hence easy to manage and configure, it has the drawback that there is no explicit coordination. Hence RF signals from various beacons might collide. Hence, It is the responsibility of the listener to analyze the various RF and ultrasound samples and deduce the correct RF,US pairs.

6. ASCENT: Adaptive Self-Configuring Sensor Networks Topologies. Alberto Cerpa and Deborah Estrin.In Proceedings of the Twenty First International Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (INFOCOM 2002), New York, NY, USA, June 23-27 2002.


7. SCalable Object-tracking through Unattended Techniques (SCOUT)Satish Kumar, Cengiz Alaettinoglu and Deborah Estrin, In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Network Protocols(ICNP), Osaka, Japan, November 2000.
This paper describes a hierarchical self-configuring approach for object location. It describes two schemes SCOUT-AGG and SCOUT-MAP for object location. SCOUT-AGG uses aggregation and naming, somewhat similar to IP addressing. For eg conf_equipment.projector.146 refers to a unique projector with the id 146. Each object has a name. On receiving a query, a sensor checks if the objecet is monitored locally, else it attaches its id to the query and forwards the query to its parent. The process is repeated till the sensor with the requested information is reached. SCOUT-MAP also organizes the sensors into an hierarchy. Each sensor has a radius which determines the number of hops that an advertisement from that node will be allowed to propagate. Mapping of objects to locator sensor addresses is carried based on an algorithm.

8. The Mobile Patient: Wireless Distributed Sensor Networks for Patient Monitoring and Care. P. Bauer, M. Sichitiu, R. Istepanian, and K. Premaratne, Proc. of the IEEE Conference on Information Technology Applications in Biomedicine (IEEE ITAB 2000), Nov 2000, pp. 17-21.


9. Scaleable, wireless web enabled sensor networks. Townsend, C.P.; Hamel, M.J.; Sonntag, P.; Trutor, B.; Galbreath J.; Arms, S.W. Sensors for Industry Conference, 2002. 2nd ISA/IEEE , 2002. Page(s): 172 -178.



Some Presentation Slides:

To make this page complete, a list of presentation slides. In some cases, they help in getting the gist quickly.

1. Comm 'n Sense: Research Challenges in Embedded Networked Sensing. Deborah Estrin,2001.

2. Dynamic Sensor Networks Project: Review of UCLA's activities. Mani Srivastava.

3. Robust Range Estimation Using Acoustic and Multimodal Sensing".Lewis Girod, 2001.

4. Ad-hoc Deployable Fine-Grained Localization for Wireless Sensor Networks.Lewis Girod, 2001.

5. Embedding the Internet: This Century Challenges . Deborah Estrin.



Some of the papers are linked directly from the IEEE/ACM websites so you can view them only if you have an account with them. Otherwise, if there are any wrong/missing/broken links, kindly let me know and I shall set it right. Also, if you have read interesting papers related to sensor networks, and find them missing here (I am sure there are tons of them!) let me know and I shall add a link. Thanks!

I have sensed that you are visitor to this page since July 9, 2002 thanks to my sensor :-).

Some members of our sensor networks group.

Page last updated on September 1, 2005.