Exam

General Information

• You are expected to complete a research project, either individually or in groups.
• The first step is to send an e-mail to the examiners with your project proposal.
• The expected outcome of the project is a short report (no more than 3 pages) and a demo or a poster, depending on the nature of your project.

Key Dates

• Proposals are to be e-mailed to the examiners by 11:59 CET on December 13, 2010.
• Proposals will be approved by December 16, 2010.
• The project is due by February 16, 2011.

Topic Suggestions

Here follows a list of possible project topics, but you are encouraged to come up with your own topic.  

• General Sensing: write a simple application that allows a naive user to interact (e.g., play) with one of the available sensors (light, humidity, temperature). For example, write an app that lights up an LED when a person touches the humidity sensor. Note: this project represents the minimum requirement for students with no background in networking or embedded systems.
• Temperature: write an app that samples the temperature every 10s and sends the information over a low-power (duty-cycled) wireless link to a base station mote connected to the USB port of a host computer. Write a piece of software that runs on the host and posts the temperature info on a web page.
• Lunch: the idea is that each person in your research group will be given two motes. One will be connected to a USB port (the master), and one will sit right next to it (the slave). The slave will continuously send packets to the master, who will monitor the received signal strength. When a person is ready for lunch, she or he will move the slave. The master will detect the change in received signal strength and will notify an application running on the person’s computer. The application will notify every other group member via e-mail or in whatever way you prefer.
• Routing: because this project is significantly more involved than the previous two, it comes with extra credit (indicatively 2 extra points, to be confirmed with the instructor). Due to its nature, this project lends itself to a collaborative effort. The project goal is the extension of the research paper:

  O. Gnawali, R. Fonseca, K. Jamieson, D. Moss, and P. Levis, "Collection Tree Protocol", SenSys'09

  We will refer to this paper as the CTP (Collection Tree Protocol) paper. It describes and evaluates the Collection Tree Protocol, a routing protocol for many-to-one stationary sensor networks. The TinyOS implementation of the CTP is publicly available. You are expected to learn how CTP works and test it out on your motes and/or on the MoteLab testbed. As stated above, your task is to extend the CTP paper. The expected output is a well-written and carefully typeset 5-page paper. Ideally, your paper will lead to a poster or even a workshop publication. Note that the contribution of each student must be made very clear.

  Possible extensions include: repeating the performance evaluation under particularly challenging conditions, such as very poor connectivity, and see what changes; selective evaluation of a specific subsystem of the protocol; testing of proposed improvements.