SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCES
HARVARD UNIVERSITY

CS 263r. Wireless Sensor Networks Prof. Matt Welsh Spring 2009 Lectures (Spring 2009): Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:30-4 Location: Maxwell Dworkin Hall, Room 221

Harvard CS263 course blog

Course Description

Instructor: Prof. Matt Welsh
Office Hours: Thursdays 10-12, Maxwell Dworkin 233

Teaching Fellow: Bor-rong Chen
Office Hours: Wednesdays 10-12, Maxwell Dworkin 238

This class surveys the emerging field of wireless sensor networks, which consist of many tiny, low-power devices equipped with sensing, computation, and wireless communication capabilities. The course will cover a broad range of topics, including operating systems, radio communication, networking protocols, time synchronization, localization, energy management, programming abstractions, mobility, and applications.

This is a research seminar course that focuses on reading and discussion of papers from the scientific literature. Students will read 2-4 papers a week and write short summaries of each paper. Two assignments will provide hands-on experience with wireless networking and sensor networks using the MoteLab testbed environment. Students will learn to program TinyOS, an embedded operating system for sensor nets, and will develop protocols and applications in this environment. Finally, students will undertake a significant research project, working in pairs or individually. At the end of the term, students will present projects in class and prepare a written project report.

The class will be based on in-class discussions of the papers driven by the students own observations and questions about the assigned reading. There will be no formal lectures. Students are expected to come to lecture each day and be prepared to discuss the reading in depth.

Grading will be based on a weighted combination of class participation, paper summaries, the final project presentation, and the project report.

This course is intended for graduate students at all levels as well as advanced undergraduates (CS161 or CS143 are required).

Assignment #1 posted -- Due March 10

Project ideas and schedule

Assignments

This course will involve paper readings, a single programming assignment, and a research project. You are expected to read the papers for each lecture, and send a short summary -- several paragraphs at most -- on each paper to the course e-mail address before the lecture. (Send these as a single email with the current lecture date in the subject line, to cs263-staff@eecs.)

Finally, you will undertake a significant research project during the term. The goal is to design, implement, and evaluate a real system and write a report that could eventually lead to publication. At the end of the course we will have project presentations where each group gives a short talk on their work. You may be able to combine your project with another graduate course, subject to approval by the instructors.

Syllabus and Schedule -- Click on lecture topic for slides

Date	Topic	Readings	Blogger
Th 1/29/09	Course Intro	Intro slides here
Tu 2/3/09	Intro to sensor networks	TinyOS (ASPLOS'00), Great Duck Island	Matt
Th 2/5/09	Understanding low-power wireless	B-MAC, Taming the underlying challenges	Bor-rong
Tu 2/10/09	Medium Access Control	Z-MAC, Component-based MAC architecture	Neil
Th 2/12/09	Operating system designs	NesC, Networking abstractions in TinyOS	Oliver
Tu 2/17/09	Operating system designs	t-Kernel, Pixie	Atanu
Th 2/19/09	Networking	Dozer, IP is Dead	Robin
Tu 2/24/09	Broadcast and dissemination	Trickle, RBP	Daniel
Th 2/26/09	Reliable transport	Flush, RCRT	Subhash
Tu 3/3/09	Time sync and localization	FTSP, Radio interferometric localization	CK
Th 3/5/09	No class
Tu 3/10/09	Data aggregation	TinyDB, Synopsis diffusion, Beyond Average	Matt T.
Th 3/12/09	Storage	Capsule, FlashDB	Peter
Tu 3/17/09	Tracking	Line in the Sand, Tracking using binary sensors	Mike
Th 3/19/09	Dealing with sensor data	Macroscope in the Redwoods, Volcano monitoring	Kevin
Tu 3/24/09	No class - spring break
Th 3/26/09	No class - spring break
Tu 3/31/09	Programming models	Tenet, Declarative sensor network	Jason
Th 4/2/09	Programming models	Regiment, Macrolab	Robin
Tu 4/7/09	Energy management	Power locks, Triage	Oliver
Th 4/9/09	Mobile sensing systems	CarTel, Activity classification using cell phones	CK
Tu 4/14/09	Acoustic sensor networks	VoxNet, Shooter Localization	Mike
Th 4/16/09	Camera-based sensor networks	Distributed image search, camera-based object tracking	Subhash
Tu 4/21/09	Underwater sensor networks	Underwater MAC, Underwater optical and acoustical sensor net	Jason
Th 4/23/09	No class
Tu 4/28/09	In-class project presentations
Th 4/30/09	In-class project presentations
Mo 5/11/09	Final Project Reports Due

Other papers

These papers are provided here for your reference. Some of them will be discussed in class, but most are supplemental.

Ad hoc networking

• A review of current routing protocols for Ad Hoc mobile wireless networks, E. Royer and C.-K. Toh, IEEE Personal Communications, 1999.
• A High-Throughput Path Metric for Multi-Hop Wireless Routing, Douglas De Couto, Daniel Aguayo, John Bicket, and Robert Morris, Mobicom'03
• Analysis of TCP Performance over Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, G. Holland and N. Vaidya, Wireless Networks 8, 2002.
• Link-level Measurements from an 802.11b Mesh Network, Daniel Aguayo, John Bicket, Sanjit Biswas, Glenn Judd, Robert Morris, SIGCOMM 2004.
• DSR: The Dynamic Source Routing Protocol for Multi-Hop Wireless Ad Hoc Networks, David B. Johnson, David A. Maltz, and Josh Broch, in Ad Hoc Networking, edited by Charles E. Perkins, 2001.
• Geometric Spanner for Routing in Mobile Networks, Jie Gao, Leonidas J. Guibas, John Hershburger, Li Zhang, and An Zhu, MobiHoc'01.
• ATP: A Reliable Transport Protocol for Ad-hoc Networks, Karthikeyan Sundaresan, Vaidyanathan Anantharaman, Hung-Yun Hsieh, Raghupathy Sivakumar, MobiHoc'03.

Sensor networks general

• System Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks, Jason Hill, Ph.D. Thesis, UC Berkeley, May 2003.
• System architecture directions for networked sensors, Jason Hill, Robert Szewczyk, Alec Woo, Seth Hollar, David Culler, and Kristofer Pister, ASPLOS'00.

Sensor network applications

• Monitoring Volcanic Eruptions with a Wireless Sensor Network, Geoff Werner-Allen, Jeff Johnson, Mario Ruiz, Jonathan Lees, and Matt Welsh, EWSN'05.
• Analysis of a Large Scale Habitat Monitoring Application, Robert Szewczyk, Joseph Polastre, Alan Mainwaring, John Anderson, and David Culler, SenSys'04.
• Design and Deployment of Industrial Sensor Networks: Experiences from a Semiconductor Plant and the North Sea
• Lessons from a Sensor Network Expedition, Robert Szewczyk, Joseph Polastre, Alan Mainwaring, and David Culler, EWSN'04.
• Implementing Software on Resource-Constrained Mobile Sensors: Experiences with Impala and ZebraNet, Ting Liu, Christopher Sadler, Pei Zhang and Margaret Martonosi, MobiSys 2004.
• Wireless Sensor Networks for Habitat Monitoring, Alan Mainwaring, Joseph Polastre, Robert Szewczyk, David Culler, and John Anderson, WSNA'02.
• An Energy-Efficient Surveillance System Using Wireless Sensor Networks, Tian He, Sudha Krishnamurthy, John A. Stankovic, Tarek Abdelzaher, Liqian Luo, Radu Stoleru, Ting Yan, Lin Gu, Jonathan Hui, and Bruce Krogh, MobiSys'04.
• Two-Tiered Wireless Sensor Network Architecture for Structural Health Monitoring, Venkata A. Kottapalli, Anne S. Kiremidjian, Jerome P. Lynch, Ed Carryer, Thomas W. Kenny, Kincho H. Law, Ying Lei, SPIE'03.
• A Line in the Sand: A Wireless Sensor Network for Target Detection, Classification, and Tracking, Anish Arora et al., Journal of Computer Networks, 2004.

Sensor network operating systems

• The Emergence of Networking Abstractions and Techniques in TinyOS, Philip Levis, Sam Madden, David Gay, Joe Polastre, Robert Szewczyk, Alec Woo, Eric Brewer and David Culler, NSDI'04.
• The nesC Language: A Holistic Approach to Networked Embedded Systems, David Gay, Phil Levis, Rob von Behren, Matt Welsh, Eric Brewer, and David Culler, PLDI'03.

Sensor networks: communications and routing

• SCALE: a tool for Simple Connectivity Assessment in Lossy Environments, Alberto Cerpa, Naim Busek and Deborah Estrin. Tech report, 2003.
• Taming the Underlying Challenges of Reliable Multhop Routing in Sensor Networks, Alec Woo, Terence Tong, and David Culler, SenSys'03.
• A Unifying Link Abstraction for Wireless Sensor Networks, Joe Polastre et al., Sensys'05.
• An Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks, Wei Ye, John Heidemann and Deborah Estrin, INFOCOM'02.
• Energy-efficient Communication Protocols for Wireless Microsensor Networks (pdf), Wendi Rabiner Heinzelman, Anantha Chandrakasan, Hari Balakrishnan, HICSS'00.
• Building Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks with Low-Level Naming, John Heidemann, Fabio Silva, Chalermek Intanagonwiwat, Ramesh Govindan, Deborah Estrin, and Deepak Ganesan, SOSP'01.
• Topology Management for Sensor Networks: Exploiting Latency and Density, Curt Schurgers, Vlasios Tsiatsis, Saurabh Ganeriwal, and Mani Srivastava, MobiHoc'02.
• ESRT : Event-to-Sink Reliable Transport in Wireless Sensor Networks, Yogesh Sankarasubramaniam, Ozgur Akan, Ian Akyildiz, MobiHoc'03.

Programming abstractions

• Programming Sensor Networks Using Abstract Regions, Matt Welsh and Geoff Mainland, NSDI'04.
• Active Sensor Networks, Philip Levis, David Gay, and David Culler, NSDI'05.
• Maté: A Tiny Virtual Machine for Sensor Networks, Philip Levis and David Culler, ASPLOS'02.
• Bridging the Gap: Programming Sensor Networks with Application Specific Virtual Machines, Philip Levis, David Gay, and David Culler, Tech Report, 2004.
• The Design of an Acquisitional Query Processor for Sensor Networks, Samuel R. Madden, Michael J. Franklin, Joseph M. Hellerstein, and Wei Hong, SIGMOD'03.
• GHT: A Geographic Hash Table for Data-Centric Storage, S. Ratnasamy, B. Karp, L. Yin, F. Yu, D. Estrin, R. Govindan, and S. Shenker, WSNA'02.
• An evaluation of multi-resolution search and storage in resource-constrained sensor networks, Deepak Ganesan, Ben Greenstein. Denis Perelyubskiy, Deborah Estrin and John Heidemann, SenSys'03.
• Beyond Average: Towards Sophisticated Sensing with Queries, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Wei Hong, Samuel Madden, and Kyle Stanek, IPSN'03.
• Query Processing in Sensor Networks, Yong Yao and J. E. Gehrke, CIDR'03.
• Cache-and-Query for Wide Area Sensor Databases, A. Deshpande, S. Nath, P. Gibbons, and S. Seshan, SIGMOD'03.

Distributed data processing

• Collaborative Signal and Information Processing: An Information Directed Approach F. Zhao, J. Liu, J. Liu, L. Guibas, and J. Reich, Proc. IEEE, 2003.
• Scalable information-driven sensor querying and routing for ad hoc heterogeneous sensor networks, M. Chu, H. Haussecker, F. Zhao, Int'l J. High Performance Computing Applications, 16(3):90-110, Fall 2002.

Localization and time synchronization

• RADAR: An In-Building RF-Based User Location and Tracking System, P. Bahl and V. N. Padmanabhan.
• The Cricket Location-Support SystemThe Cricket Location-Support System, Nissanka B. Priyantha, Anit Chakraborty, and Hari Balakrishnan, MobiCom'00.
• The Flooding Time Synchronization Protocol, Miklos Maroti, Branislav Kusy, Gyula Simon, Akos Ledeczi, SenSys'04.
• Fine-Grained Network Time Synchronization using Reference Broadcasts, Jeremy Elson, Lewis Girod and Deborah Estrin, OSDI'02.
• Localization from Mere Connectivity, Yi Shang, Wheeler Ruml, Ying Zhang, and Markus Fromherz, MobiHoc'03.
• Optimal and Global Time Synchronization in Sensornets (pdf), Richard Karp, Jeremy Elson, Deborah Estrin, and Scott Shenker, CENS Technical Report 0012.

Security

• TinySec: A Link Layer Security Architecture for Wireless Sensor Networks, Chris Karlof, Naveen Sastry, David Wagner, SenSys'04.
• Analyzing and Modeling Encryption Overhead for Sensor Network Nodes, Prasanth Ganesan, Ramnath Venugopalan, Pushkin Peddabachagari, Alexander Dean, Frank Mueller, Mihail Sichitiu, WSNA'03.

Other

• Path Optimimzation in Stream-Based Overlay Networks, Peter Pietzuch et al., Harvard technical report, 2004.
• Sensor network-based countersniper system, Gyula Simon et al, SenSys'04.