Visibility as a Wireless Sensor Network Design Principle

Building complex wireless sensing systems remains dicult and time consuming. In reviewing more than 50 deployment experience papers, we found that even though troubleshooting and management dominates the time spent in deployment efforts, in many cases researchers could not definitively identify the causes of major failures. Simply put, if one cannot diagnose the cause of a problem, one cannot reliably fix it. We are pursuing a long-term agenda of research and education to improve the robustness, manageability, and scalability of low-power wireless sensing systems. The dominant design principle behind this agenda is network visibility. Described colloquially, visibility measures a user's ability to identify the cause of a network event, such as a packet drop. We propose to research how to make networks more visible. The challenge lies in the fact that energy constraints bound how much data a wireless sensornet can collect, store, or report. Improving visibility involves making the most of this limited information. In our early exploration of this topic, we have found cases where visibility can be improved by reversing common protocol mechanisms, such as nodes granting the channel to other transmitters, rather than requesting it for themselves, and destinations pulling packets from sources rather than sources pushing packets to sinks. We seek to build on these initial point successes and generalize the techniques to a complete network architecture. To achieve this goal, we divide our work into answering four key questions: - How does one measure visibility? We will research how to quantify visibility at different stages of the design process, from paper protocol specifications to specific deployments. - How can a network architecture improve visibility? We explore designing network architecture that has visibility as its dominant design principle. We explore how visibility affects the protocol stack and layer responsibilities. - What does it mean to design a protocol for visibility? We research how to improve existing protocol visibility as well as design "clean slate" protocols where visibility is primary goal. - What are visibility's implications to system implementations? We examine how visibility affects OS and underlying system design and implementation. The research agenda is grounded in the exploration, development, and evaluation of the Mote Network (MNet) architecture, an open-source protocol suite and toolkit for sensor network application development and deployment. The protocol suite will include existing dominant protocols redesigned for improved visibility as well as novel protocols whose designs maximizes visibility. Our principal goal is to make long-lived sensornets significantly simpler to deploy and maintain. Our second goal is to apply our lessons learned to wireless meshes more generally.

People

Collaborators

Sub-project pages

Publications

CTP: An Efficient, Robust, and Reliable Collection Tree Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks. Omprakash Gnawali, Rodrigo Fonseca, Kyle Jamieson, Maria Kazandjieva, David Moss, and Philip Levis. In ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN), 2013.			WWW	Paper
Long-term modification of cortical synapses improves sensory perception. Robert C Froemke, Ioana Carcea, Alison J Barker, Kexin Yuan, Bryan A Seybold, Ana Raquel O Martins, Natalya Zaika, Hannah Bernstein, Megan Wachs, Philip A Levis, Daniel B Polley, Michael M Merzenich and Christoph E Schreiner. In Nature Neuroscience 16, 79-88, 2013.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Beyond Full Duplex Wireless. Kannan Srinivasan, Steven Hong, Mayank Jain, Jung Il Choi, Jeff Mehlman, Sachin Katti, and Philip Levis. In Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers, 2012.			WWW	Paper
Experiences from a Decade of TinyOS Development. Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the 10th Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI), 2012.		Slides	WWW	Paper
RFC 6719 - The Minimum Rank with Hysteresis Objective Function. Omprakash Gnawali and Philip Levis. In Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Request for Comments: 6719, 2012.			WWW	Paper
Practical, Real-time, Full-Duplex Wireless. Mayank Jain, Jung Il Choi, Taemin Kim, Dinesh Bharadia, Siddharth Seth, Kannan Srinivasan, Philip Levis, Sachin Katti and Prasun Sinha. In Proceedings of the 17th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (Mobicom 2011), 2011.		Slides	WWW	Paper
A high-resolution human contact network for infectious disease transmission. Marcel Salathe, Maria Kazandjieva, Jung Woo Lee, Philip Levis, Marcus W. Feldman and James H. Jones. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 2010.	Data		WWW	Paper
Granting Silence to Avoid Wireless Collisions. Jung Il Choi, Mayank Jain, Maria A. Kazandjieva, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the 18th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP), 2010.		Slides	WWW	Paper
A Case for Evaluating Sensor Network Protocols Concurrently. Omprakash Gnawali, Leonidas Guibas, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the Fifth ACM International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental evaluation and Characterization (WiNTECH), 2010.			WWW	Paper
Achieving Single Channel, Full Duplex Wireless Communication. Jung Il Choi, Mayank Jain, Kannan Srinivasan, Philip Levis and Sachin Katti. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (Mobicom 2010), 2010.		Slides	WWW	Paper
The k-factor: Inferring Protocol Performance Using Inter-Link Reception Correlation. Kannan Srinivasan, Mayank Jain, Jung Il Choi, Tahir Azim, Edward S Kim, Philip Levis and Bhaskar Krishnamachari. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (Mobicom 2010), 2010.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Experiences in Measuring a Human Contact Network for Epidemiology Research. Maria Kazandjieva, Jung Woo Lee, Marcel Salathe, Marcus W. Feldman, James H. Jones, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Embedded Networked Sensors (HotEmNets), 2010.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Physically-Based Models of Low-Power Wireless Links using Signal Power Simulation. Tal Rusak and Philip Levis. In Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking (COMNET), 2010.			WWW	Paper
An Empirical Study of Low Power Wireless. Kannan Srinivasan, Prabal Dutta, Arsalan Tavakoli, Philip Levis. In ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, 2010.			WWW	Paper
TOSThreads: Thread-Safe and Non-Invasive Preemption in TinyOS. Kevin Klues, Chieh-Jan Mike Liang, Jeongyeup Paek, Razvan Musaloiu-E., Philip Levis, Andreas Terzis, and Ramesh Govindan. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2009.		Slides	WWW	Paper
The Case for a Network Protocol Isolation Layer. Jung Il Choi, Maria Kazandjieva, Mayank Jain, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2009.			WWW	Paper
Collection Tree Protocol. Omprakash Gnawali, Rodrigo Fonseca, Kyle Jamieson, David Moss, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2009.	Data		WWW	Paper
Surviving Sensor Network Software Faults. Yang Chen, Omprakash Gnawali, Maria Kazandjieva, Philip Levis, and John Regehr. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP), 2009.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Burstiness and scaling in the structure of low-power wireless links. Tal Rusak and Philip Levis. In ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review, 2009.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Quanto: Tracking Energy in Networked Embedded Systems. Rodrigo Fonseca, Prabal Dutta, Philip Levis, and Ion Stoica. In Proceedings of the Eighth USENIX Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI), 2008.			WWW	Paper
The B-factor: Measuring Wireless Link Burstiness. Kannan Srinivasan, Maria Kazandjieva, Saatvik Agarwal, and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), 2008.		Slides	WWW	Paper
Investigating a Physically-Based Signal Power Model for Robust Wireless Link Simulation. Tal Rusak and Philip Levis. In Proceedings of the 11th ACM International Conference on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems (MSWiM), 2008.		Slides	WWW	Paper
The Emergence of a Networking Primitive in Wireless Sensor Networks. Philip Levis, Eric Brewer, David Culler, David Gay, Samuel Madden, Neil Patel, Joe Polastre, Scott Shenker, Robert Szewczyk, and Alec Woo. In Communications of the ACM, Volume 51, Issue 7, 2008.		Slides	WWW	Paper

Funding

This project is funded by the National Science Foundation under award 0846014 (CAREER). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Back to projects