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Interfacing Java DSP with Sensor Motes

Abstract

Distributed wireless sensor networks (WSN) are being proposed for various applications including defense, security, smart stages, and other. The introduction of hardware wireless sensors in a signal processing education setting can serve as a paradigm for data acquisition, collaborative signal processing or simply as a platform for obtaining, processing, and analyzing real-life real-time data. In this paper, we present a software interface that enables the Java-DSP (J-DSP) visual programming environment to communicate in a two-way manner with a wireless sensor network. This interface was developed by writing nesC code that enables J-DSP to issue commands to multiple wireless sensor motes, activate specific transducers, and analyze data using any of the existing J-DSP signal processing functions in real time. A series of exercises were developed to provide hardware experiences to signals and systems and DSP undergraduate students. The interface, the exercises, and some preliminary assessment results are discussed in the paper.

1. Introduction

The application area of wireless sensor networks poses a series of important research problems in signal processing, communication networks, power-aware implementations, and remote sensing1,2. Wireless sensors have been applied to a diverse series of applications including ecological and environmental monitoring, sound and sniper localization, multiple target tracking, smart stages, and biofeedback 3-7. Theoretical aspects of sensor networks include power versus bandwidth tradeoffs, clever parameterization schemes, robust information extraction, and collaborative sensor configurations. In addition to theoretical issues, implementation aspects present equally challenging problems owing to the lack of user-friendly software tools, poorly documented interfaces, “leaky” buffers, drifting sampling periods, etc. Although many of these problems will be eventually solved and perhaps some solutions are already available in classified literature, working with sensor motes is very useful from the education point of view. Working with inexpensive wireless sensor motes can be valuable in terms of providing undergraduate experiences with real-time heterogeneous transducer data. Simple paradigms of signal conversion, data collection and fusion, real-time filtering, and spectral estimation can go a long way in explaining both theory and applications of signal processing. The main difficulty, even with simple implementations of the above, is again the absence of user-friendly software tools. In this paper, we describe a Java/nesC graphical interface that we developed to provide capabilities for two way communications between a PC platform and a network of wireless sensor motes. This interface is integrated in our J-DSP8 visual programming environment and enables J-DSP to issue selective commands to

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BERISHA, V., & KWON, H., & Spanias, A. (2006, June), Implementing Sensor Networks Using Sensor Motes And J Dsp Paper presented at 2006 Annual Conference & Exposition, Chicago, Illinois. 10.18260/1-2--895