This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Given the growing global importance of water issues caused by dwindling water resources and global climate change, building and deploying a real-time sensing infrastructure across water bodies---including rivers, streams, and watersheds --- will be one of the great scientific hurdles and also one of the great research opportunities of the next several decades. Despite numerous technological advances in wireless sensor networks, a chasm separates what is offered by off-the-shelf products and what is needed by scientists for robust, easy deployment of a monitoring infrastructure over running waters. This research involves the design of a solar-powered river sensor network testbed that will enable the vision of perpetual river sensor deployments streaming data continually to laboratory servers.
This testbed will enable fundamental, cross-disciplinary research on developing robust, easily deployable over-water wireless networks as well as sensor platforms for monitoring rivers and streams. Specific research challenges include design of solar-powered wireless networks to address lack of electrical infrastructure, heterogeneous multi-radio sensor nodes and protocols to address problems posed by sparse deployments over large geographic regions, and self-managing sensor networks for unattended management. In addition to addressing Computer Science research problems, the testbed will enable environmental scientists to study several scientific research questions, while using the testbed as a test site for larger real-time monitoring deployments in other rivers. The proposed testbed will also directly impact undergraduate research and student diversity by 1) involving undergraduate students through REU programs, 2) impacting curriculum development by enabling field courses in sensor networks and ecology, and 3) involving local high schools to highlight river conservation issues.
