|
Tyndall motes are in use in many institutes around Ireland and abroad. The modularity and ruggedised nature of the motes allow them to be used in applications as diverse as wearable computing to animal tracking, from wireless medical sensors to dancing. These have been predominantly developed for the National Access Program (NAP) and as such are in use throughout the country by researchers of various levels of expertise in the area of microcontroller use (ranging from expert Software programmers – typically in the computer science departments of research institutes to zero level expertise – say sensor researchers). ). A total of 28 NAP projects from 34 researchers at 9 Universities and Institutes around the country have been funded with the WSN team at Tyndall. The breakdown can be seen in Figure 1.
Figure 1: NAP projects in Irish Universities using Tyndall motes
A few case studies will be presented below.
Fault Tolerance and Low Power Cryptography in Wireless Sensor Networks
 A key issue for the large scale deployment of wireless sensor networks will be the reliability of data transmission and data security. Using customised variants of the Tyndall 25mm wireless sensor modules, Dr. Emanuel Popovici of the Department of Microeletronic Engineering in University College Cork is investigating fault tolerance and reliability in data transmission in distributed sensor networks as well as the study of effective solutions for very low power cryptosystems that address challenges in the area of systems security and trust. Specifically, the research is targeting fault tolerant architectures, error control codes (e.g. Reed-Solomon codes, LDPC codes), cryptography (AES, IDEA/FOX) and the translation of these algorithms to VHDL/C for synthesis onto FPGA and micro-controller platforms on the Tyndall wireless motes.
Researchers: Dr Emanuel Popovici and Rachit Agarwal
University: UCC
A presentation about the project can be found
here.
QoS Issues within a Medical environment using Wireless Sensor Networks
Researchers: Dr John Herbert & John O’Donoghue
University: UCC
Device Positioning Using Smart Zigbee Beacons
As the next generation of computer applications emerges, a variety of
location-aware technologies are becoming available. In the near future,
a mobile phone user will be able to order a taxi through a system which
detects his/her location and routes the nearest taxi to them. While GPS
technology is very useful, it is still too expensive to embed into most
everyday devices. Many GPS devices also tend to be ineffective when the
user is inside a building. In this project, the UCD researchers have
worked with the Tyndall Wireless Sensor team to develop a smart beacon
for use with inexpensive location applications for mobile devices based
on wireless signal triangulation. The Tyndall 25mm wireless mote was
used as the test platform to implement and evaluate the locating
technology.
Researchers: Dr. S. Neely & Dr. S. Dobson
University: UCD
A presentation about the project can be found
here.
Contact : Brendan O’Flynn – brendan.oflynn@tyndall.ie | webpage or John Barton – john.barton@tyndall.ie | webpage
|
