Ivy - A Sensor Network Infrastructure for the College of Engineering

A sensor network, that like ivy, spreads through the environment and links leaves to the root

Group meetings on Fridays at 3:00pm

Location: 476 Cory Hall
except March 14, 533 Cory Hall

Professor Kris Pister
Barbara Hohlt
Jaein Jeong
Lance Doherty
J.P. Vainio

Ideas

The goal of Ivy is to provide a research infrastructure of networked sensors for the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley. The infrastructure is intended to survive for a year on the energy from a pair of AA batteries per sensor node. It will support multiple applications simultaneously and allow public data retrieval from the Internet.

The basic setup of Ivy allows packets from the sensor network to be forwarded to a base station connected to a wired network and logged to a database where the data is web accessible.

Sensor nodes are driven by TinyOS and have three types: base station nodes, fixed nodes and application nodes.

Base station nodes act as a gateway between the wireless network and wired network. Fixed nodes multi-hop packets to and from the base station and provide the Ivy network infrastructure support. Application nodes are either mobile or fixed and send their sensor readings to the Ivy network.

Packet Routing - What is the communication scheme?

Routes along the network nodes are formed on an ad-hoc basis
All application nodes communicate directly to a network node

Broadcast Routing

When a network node receives a routing packet it determines if the packet is new.
If so, it saves the source of the packet and re-broadcasts the packet.

Time Division Multiple Access Routing

Each network node has a schedule of time slots.
Each time slot is reserved for transmitting to and receiving from specific network node pairs.

Application

Equipement Inventory System (EIS) - Where is my oscilloscope?

The goal of the EIS is to track shared equipment throughout the workplace.
Using wireless sensor nodes, the equipment can move around freely and tracking is transparent to the user.
A web user interface gives a view of equipment activities.

Here is the link to the web user interface .
Click WEB interface for ivytest database made in Java Applet (ID: ivyguest, Password: letmein)


A tracking node mounted on a multimeter	Network nodes relay the messages.	Web UI gives a view of equipment history

Environment sensing

Ivy can be used for environment sensing. Light, temperature, air velocity, etc can be measured at application nodes and forwarded through the network nodes.


Air velocity sensor and the interface to application node	Sensor reading screen