Habitat monitoring: Application driver for wireless communications technology

As new fabrication and integration technologies reduce the cost and size of micro-sensors and wireless interfaces, it becomes feasible to deploy dense ly distributed wireless networks of sensors and actuators. These systems pr omise to revolutionize biological, earth, and environmental monitoring appl ications, providing data at granularities unrealizable by other means. In a ddition to the challenges of miniaturization, new system architectures and new network algorithms must be developed to transform the vast quantity of raw sensor data into a manageable stream of high-level data. To address thi s, we propose a tiered system architecture in which data collected at numer ous, inexpensive sensor nodes is filtered by local processing on its way th rough to larger, more capable and more expensive nodes. We briefly describe Habitat monitoring as our motivating application and in troduce initial system building blocks designed to support this application . The remainder of the paper presents details of our experimental platform.