Adaptive Time Synchronization and Frequency Channel Hopping for Wireless Sensor Networks

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission. Second Reader Date Acknowledgements This thesis sprung up from the interest to immerse myself in the inner-workings of the wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that I was deploying as part of my Ph.D. dissertation in Civil Engineering. Inevitably, too much immersion led to discovery of open ended research topics. Exposure to these topics, as well as exposure to fundamental WSN theory would not have been possible without the support of Kris Pister's research group. Kris Pister and his group members were more than welcoming, and taught me invaluable lessons that have ultimately made me a better systems engineer. I would like to thank Thomas Watteyne for his continued support and patience during our work on OpenWSN and various papers. Almost all the papers resulting from this thesis were a direct product of a collaboration with Thomas. He has taught me the fundamentals of embedded programming, and has demystified to me the various tools necessary to implement complex embedded systems. Through his help I have learned the value of writing clean, organized, and modularized code, something which has fundamentally changed how I now develop software. I would like to thank the whole OpenWSN group, and especially Fabien Chraim, for his collaboration and for teaching me the importance of " really " reading data sheets. I would like to thank Ankur Mehta for his ideas on pushing TDMA networks towards mobile agent applications. I would also like to thank my Ph.D. adviser, Steven Glaser, for supporting my work in EECS, and allowing me to dabble in disciplines outside of the Civil Engineering " core. " Last, but certainly not least, I would sincerely like to thank Kirs Pister, for graciously hosting me in his group, guiding my work, sharing his academic philosophies, and teaching me the value of counting micro-amps.