Office Testbed

The WiSAR Lab is deploying a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) in its offices in the Letterkenny Institute of Technology to facilitate the development and analysis of hardware, MAC and Routing protocols in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) under real world conditions. The initial stage of the testbed consists of 15 wireless sensor motes placed throughout the 5 WiSAR Lab offices.

It is planned to extend the tesbed by adding additional motes, different types of motes, multi-hop functionality, remote network setup and a node alert function. These features will allow greater range, added network scalability and easier maintenance, as well as creating a richer test environment for a range of devices, protocols and software.

The WiSAR Office Testbed can be viewed at http://monitor.wisar.ie/

The testbed currently uses the WiSAR Development Mote. The motes are located in the corners of each room at ceiling height so as to be discrete and arranged in such a manner as to measure all the variables including temperature, humidity, PAR and human presence within each room. Each mote is programmed with a low power TinyOS application that allows for low current consumption and long battery life.

Testbed Topology and Configuration 

The initial testbed is running in a simple star topology where every mote transmits its measured data back to the basestation, where the data is stored and processed on a server. This data can be used to monitor the temperature, humidity, light and human presence within the WiSAR Lab. The basestation also measures the received signal strength from each packet received and is useful for investigating the effect mote location, building materials and human presence have on the transmission range.