Lessons from a Sensor Network Expedition

Habitat monitoring is an important driving application for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Although researchers anticipate some challenges arising in the real-world deployments of sensor networks, a number of problems can be discovered only through experience. This paper evaluates a sensor network system described in an earlier work and presents a set of experiences from a four month long deployment on a remote island off the coast of Maine. We present an in-depth analysis of the environmental and node health data. The close integration of WSNs with their environment provides biological data at densities previous impossible; however, we show that the sensor data is also useful for predicting system operation and network failures. Based on over one million data and health readings, we analyze the node and network design and develop network reliability profiles and failure models.