EECS 369 - Introduction to Sensor Networks

EECS 510 Home (Winter 2011)

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Instructor: Prof. Peter Scheuermann
Office: Tech L452
Telephone: 847-491-7141
Email: peters @ eecs.northwestern.edu
Instructor: Prof. Goce Trajcevski
Office: Tech L360
Telephone: 847-461-7069
Email: goce @ eecs.northwestern.edu

Course Time - M W 3:30 – 4:50 pm
Location: Tech Room M152

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) consist of hundreds, possibly even thousands of tiny nodes --sensors, which are capable of observing and measuring various physical phenomena of interest (e.g., temperature, humidity, motion tracking, etc.) and performing some elementary calculations. More importantly, though, they are capable of communicating and self-organizing in ad-hoc networks for the purpose of performing various tasks of interest in a geographic area of interest, e.g., reporting the average temperature in a given region. Networks on sensor networks can achieve swarm intelligence, i.e., behave like systems of non-intelligent robots exhibiting collectively intelligent behavior. WSN are opening an unprecedented variety of application domains where there is a need for long-tem, inexpensive, unobtrusive  monitoring or data gathering in hostile, remote, harmful environments or in emergent situations.

The course will cover the state of the art in designing and building such systems, primarily focusing on the issues and challenges involved in scalable network self-organization and routing, as well as the efficient processing of massive amounts of spatially and temporally distributed data, under the constraint of limited energy and computation resources.

The course/seminar will consist of lectures given by the instructors, guest lecturers, as well as technical paper presentations by the students (in the last two weeks of the class). The course is self-contained---the relevant networking and database concepts needed will be covered as needed. Students will gain hands-on experience using sensor networks through programming projects in  TinyOS or MOS  MicaZ running on Telos motes.

Undergraduate students are encouraged to participate (two of the undergraduates who took the course last year had a paper resulting from their class project accepted to a prestigious conference )

TEXT: F. Zhao and  L. Guibas, Wireless Sensor Networks: An Information Processing Approach, Morgan Kaufman, 2004

Prerequisite: EECS 343 or instructor’s  permission.

If you have any questions about the course, please feel free to contact us.