DIVISION OF ENGINEERING AND APPLIED SCIENCES
HARVARD UNIVERSITY

CS 263. Wireless Communications and Sensor Networks Prof. Matt Welsh Fall 2004

Course Description

Instructor: Prof. Matt Welsh
Office Hours: Thursdays 10-12, Maxwell Dworkin 233
Lectures (Fall 2004): Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:30-4
Location: Maxwell Dworkin G125 (lecture hall, ground floor)

Teaching Fellow: Victor Shnayder
Office Hours: Wednesdays 1:30-3:30, Maxwell Dworkin 238

This class surveys the field of wireless communications with a special focus on low-power embedded sensor networks. The course will begin with a survey of wireless communications standards and protocols, including 802.11, Bluetooth, and 802.15.4/Zigbee. Higher-level network services, such as reliable delivery, routing, naming, and security will be discussed next. Finally, the course will place significant emphasis on wireless sensor networks, including system architectures, OS and language support, distributed algorithms, and applications.

Students will read 2-3 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 groups of 2-3 students. At the end of the term, students will present projects in class and prepare a written project report.

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). Students who have taken CS263 last year are not normally eligible to take CS263 again, however, we may be able to make special arrangements.

Textbook and Readings

Required textbook: Wireless Communications and Networking by William Stallings, 1st Ed., Prentice Hall, 2002. ISBN 0130408646. This book is available at the Harvard Co-op as well as from several online vendors. The first section of the course will be taught from this book so it is required.

All of the required paper readings in the course are linked from this page.

Assignments

This course will involve paper readings, a couple of homework assignments, and a research project. You are expected to read the papers for each lecture, and send a short(!) summary -- 3 or 4 bullet items at the most -- of 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-reviews@eecs.)

Assignment #1 - Due November 4, 2004, 11:59pm Assignment #1 Details

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.

Project Proposal Details and Ideas

Final paper information

Syllabus and Schedule

Date	Topic	Readings
Tu 9/21/04	No lecture
Th 9/23/04	Course Intro	None
Tu 9/28/04	RF Basics and Signal Encoding	Stallings Ch. 2 (also read Appendix 2A!), Ch. 6.1-6.2
Th 9/30/04	Antennas and spread spectrum	Stallings Ch. 5, Ch. 7
Tu 10/5/04	Medium Access Control	Stallings Ch.9, Ch.10
Th 10/7/04	The 802.11 Standard	Stallings Ch. 14
Tu 10/12/04	Bluetooth and 802.15.4	Stallings Ch. 15
Th 10/14/04	Ad-hoc Routing Protocols	Review of ad hoc routing protocols, High-throughput path metric
Tu 10/19/04	TCP/IP in Mobile Environments	TCP performance over ad hoc networks
Th 10/21/04	Community Wireless Networks	Roofnet
Tu 10/26/04	Sensor Networks Overview	System Architecture for Networked Sensors(note - read only Chapters 1-3 of this thesis, and avoid printing the whole thing),
Th 10/28/04	Sensor Network Applications Research project proposals due	Great Duck Island, Zebranet
Tu 11/2/04	Sensor Network Operating Systems	Emergence of Networking Abstractions in TinyOS
Th 11/4/04	Sensor Network Radios Assignment #1 Due	SCALE, Taming
Tu 11/9/04	Power Management	Energy efficient MAC protocol (Wei Ye et al.)
Th 11/11/04	Holiday - Veteran's Day
Tu 11/16/04	Programming Abstractions	Abstract Regions, Bridging the gap with Application specific virtual machines
Th 11/18/04	Querying Sensor Networks	TinyDB
Tu 11/23/04	Storage Project updates due	GHT, Multiresolution search and storage
Th 11/25/04	Holiday - Thanksgiving
Tu 11/30/04	Distributed Data Processing	IDSQ: Scalable information-driven sensor querying and routing
Th 12/2/04	Localization	RADAR, Cricket
Tu 12/7/04	Time Synchronization	Fine grained time synchronization using reference broadcasts
Th 12/9/04	Security	TinySec, Encryption overheads
Tu 12/14/04	Internet-Based Query Systems	Stream-Based Overlay Networks (Peter Pietzuch)
Th 12/16/04	Application: Shooter Localization	Countersniper System
Tu 12/21/04	No class
Fr 1/7/05	Final Project Reports Due

Papers (Note: Not all papers are required reading. See the syllabus above.)

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

• 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.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.