Wireless Sensor Project Overview Seminar
Sandia National Laboratories
Modular Architecture for Sensor Systems (MASS) - Jesse Davis
The MASS project suggests a novel design approach achieving a balance between mission efficiency and
application flexibility in a single system. The key to the design is a modular, multi-processor hardware architecture
operating under a robust and intelligent distributed software control. Instead of relying on one of the two traditional
node architectures, in which resource control is centralized on a single processor, each resource in the node will be
built into physically separable modules with supporting resource-specific processors. On sensor modules, the
module processors will perform data collection and preliminary data analysis tasks. On the wireless communication
module, the module processor will manage power states of wireless transceivers and route network traffic. If a high
performance processor is needed for complex data manipulation or data fusion, this processor will also be integrated
into its own module, and its module processor will control its power states and I/O with the rest of the node. The
modularity provides functional encapsulation for the different parts of the system and allows unused or un-needed
resources to power down. Even a general purpose processor, which would traditionally be required to schedule
operations of the different node resources, may be un-needed for the majority of node operations. A theoretical
power comparison between the modular architecture and a centralized architecture shows that the lowest power
architecture to solve a given problem depends on specific environmental and mission parameters. Simulations are
currently being developed to verify the theoretical results, and investigate the decentralized control. The resulting
decentralized controller will be implemented on the HERD/SDAC v2 nodes.
Wireless Utility Module (WUM) - Ron Kyker
The wireless utility module is a system of wireless sensors designed to facilitate the rapid deployment of a telemetry
system with off the shelf components. These telemetry systems typically consists of a mix of low frequency e.g.
thermistor@1hz to high frequency e.g. accelerometer@10khz sensors. Telemetry systems require reliable and
deterministic synchronized data acquisition. This prevents the use of standard packetized networks which incurr
delay, retransmisison, acknowledgement etc.
Imaging sensors – Teresa Ko
Compared with alternatives it provides a more robust, informative, and cost effective alternative to manned
surveillance. By far the most common sensor employed for this task is a remote camera. Yet there is almost always
too much raw image data for the low bandwidth WSN's. This research bridges the gap between computer vision and
distributed sensor systems and pushes the limits of both these fields. The information gained by having a network of
information-rich image sensors will add the necessary robustness and resolution in space and time missing in current
computer vision systems while in-network processing of produced raw data will provide more relevant information
to the user than the current centralized approach without greatly sacrificing the lifetime of the system. Specifically,
this work will exploit the distributed processors to detect unknown events, track these events through a network of
sensor, and intelligently characterizing these events. As features are extracted within the sensor network, each node
hypothesizes which nodes share the same view by comparing the similarity of the detected features, self-calibrating
a randomly deployed sensor network. As more features are extracted, these hypotheses will be reinforced or negated.
In this way, overlapping clusters emerge within the sensor network based on shared information.
Intelligent Sensor Module/Sensor Management Architecture (ISM/SMA) – Michael Goldsby
An integrated hardware and software architecture to support rapidly deployable, sensor networks integration and
control. Integrates heterogeneous weapons of mass destruction detection technologies into unified sensor networks.
SMA is an intelligent, rapidly deployable sensor integration and management architecture supporting operations and
simulation. SMA monitors and controls sensor systems scattered throughout a large facility, and interface with
command and control systems both internal and external to a facility.