This collaborative project, deploying a large-scale open sensor network testbed for urban monitoring (called CitySense), aims at building a large-scale, urban sensor testbed of nodes powered by city electricity and then operating it as an open facility for academic and industrial groups to experiment with novel distributed sensing architectures. The modular network nodes will be attached to streetlights for power. These nodes contain sufficient processing power and memory to handle a wide range of experimental software, plus radios to interconnect all the nodes by multi-hop networking across Cambridge to its wireline access points. Each node comes with software in flash to provide a robust sensor network architecture including reliable ad hoc networking. CitySense will be tested with a specific application: monitoring air pollution transport in a dense urban environment. Aiming at pushing the envelope for sensor network testbeds, CitySense contains a basic set of meteorological and air quality sensors supporting a broad range of research projects in large-scale sensor networks. Enabling many research experiments with a real large-scale in-situ WSN, the overall research focuses on:
-High-level programming models for WSN, -Resource sharing among multiple users of the testbed, -Data collection from geographically diverse sensor nets, and -Urban-scale air pollution monitoring.
Broader Impact: By providing a permanent, extensible, public testbed, CitySense should have significant impact on the development of large-scale wireless sensor network systems. The open city-wide testbed allows external groups to remotely download their software images into all the nodes in the network, or into a sensor swath when multiple groups share the testbed. Monitoring air pollution transport in a dense urban environment, the application constitutes one of the first high-resolution studies of pollution and its effect on the urban population. Moreover, CitySense will be used as a tool to teach distributed systems concepts. Outreach involves curriculum development for K-12 in sensor networks.
