Sun SPOT Project at RIT


Overview

The goal of this project is to foster more hands-on experience with wireless sensor networks for our students who will gain through this activity a better understanding of sensors and sensor networks. This proposal discusses the course syllabus modifications, the outlines of new course projects and lab exercises that we are planning to offer using Sun SPOTs. This proposal also provides the timeline of the project, our biographies, and the number of Sun SPOT kits requested for the project.

The faculty of the Department of Computer Science at RIT have conducted sensor networks research for a few years. We have a dozen of old MICA2 and six Telos v. B motes produced by Crossbow Inc. Although we started promoting our research results into an educational activity, we believe that we need to acquire more knowledge about a Java based platform as Java is used as a primary programming language in our educational program. Our introductory course sequence (CS1-CS3) is delivered to computer science, computer and software engineering students with more than 500 freshmen enrolled each year.

[Our proposal in PDF]

Projects

Preliminary Study on Sun SPOTs

We studied the fundamentals of the Sun SPOT hardware and software. This includes the hardware characteristics, how to program in SPOTs along with the Sun SPOT APIs, and the communication components.

[Report in PDF]

Key Management for Security

As a proof-of-concept, we developed the pairwise key management algorithm discussed in "A Pairwise Key Pre-distribution Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks" written by Du et al.

[Report and implementation in zipped file (by Karthik Rajagopal)]
[Report2 in PDF (by Mesut Arik)]

We also studied and developed other pairwise key predistribution schemes on wireless sensor networks, namely:

  1. Random Key Predistribution Schemes for Sensor Networks
    [Report in PDF by Wisam Kadhim]
    [Implementation in zipped file by Wisam Kadhim]
  2. Lightweight Key Management in Wireless Sensor Networks by Leveraging Initial Trust
    Q-composite Random Key Predistribution Scheme
    [Report in PDF by Jeegar Brahmakshatriya]
    [Implementation in zipped file for lightweight key management]
    [Implementation in zipped file for Q-composite scheme]
  3. PIKE: Peer Intermediaries for Key Establishment in Sensor Networks
    [Report in PDF by Mihir Daftari]
    [Implementation in zipped file by Mihir Daftari]

Routing

We developed the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol on Sun SPOTs.

[Report in PDF(by Brahmakshatriya, Daftari and Kadhim)]
[Implementation in zipped file]

Intelligent Systems

Other Applications

Corey Andalora's embedded software applications for monitoring air conditioners [web site]

Plan

We will develop course projects based on these prior studies and projects with Sun SPOTs.

People

Faculty

Alan Kaminsky, Leon Reznik, and Minseok Kwon

Students

Karthik Nathan, Karthik Rajagopal, Maxat Maketov, Mesut Arik, Corey Andalora, Jeegar Brahmakshatriya, Mihir Daftari, and Wisam Kadhim

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge the support from Sun Microsystems for Sun SPOT devices.


Last updated 05/28/09