A Low-Power Mobile Sensing Architecture

The system and network architecture for stationary sensornets is largely solved today with many commercial solutions now available and standardization efforts underway at the IEEE, IETF, ISA, and within many industry groups. However, the existing techniques for reliable, low-power communications in stationary sensornets fail on both counts when confronted with mobility. In this dissertation, we argue that awareness of real or potential mobility enables a solution that handles the mobile case well, and supports stationary networks as a special case. This dissertation addresses micropower mobiscopes, a nascent class of mobile sensornets – small, embedded, and battery-powered systems – that experience unpredictable but structured mobility and are severely energy-constrained. We show how awareness of mobility can simplify their communication challenges, enable low-power operation, and enhance the reliability of data delivery. We introduce the MOV metric, a measure of mobility, and present techniques to gather it on a near nano-power budget. We also present iCount, a regulator-integrated energy meter design that allows nodes to introspect their own energy usage, and adapt their behavior to the actual energy availability and consumption. Integrating the pieces, we present three concrete hardware platforms that support our mobile sensing architecture. We develop a novel asynchronous neighbor discovery algorithm called Disco that allows nodes to operate their radios at very low duty cycles and yet still discover neighbors without any external synchronization information. Recognizing the necessity of beaconing in mobile networks, and the need for mobile-stationary node interactions, we design a link layer synchronization primitive, Backcast, and a receiver-initiated link layer, HotMac, that are suitable for mobile sensing, but also work for stationary networks across a range of conventional data collection workloads and a broad range of duty cycles. We evaluate our thesis with three mobile sensing applications that embody our proposed architecture. The three applications – AutoWitness, SleepTrack, and CommonSense – are representative of asset tracking, health and fitness, and participatory urban sensing, and they each stress different aspects of the architecture, including motion detection, neighbor discovery, communications, interaction patterns, energy management, and data transport. These design points illustrate that our architecture is general enough to enable a range of applications but specific enough to support them well.