Meeting Ecologists Requirements with Adaptive Data Acquisition

TR-2009-122, Authors: Marcus Chang and Philippe Bonnet

Marcus Chang
Philippe Bonnet
November 2009

Abstract

Ecologists instrument ecosystems with in-situ sensing to collect measurements. Sensor networks promise to improve on existing data acquisition systems by interconnecting stand-alone measurement systems into virtual instruments. Such ecological sensor networks, however, will only fulfill their potential if they meet the scientists requirements. In an ideal world, an ecologist expresses requirements in terms of a target dataset, which the sensor network then actually collects and stores. In fact, failures occur and interesting events happen making uniform, systematic ecosystem sampling neither possible nor desirable. Today, these anomalous situations are handled as exceptions treated by technicians that receive an alert at deployment time. In this paper, we detail how ecological sensor networks can adapt to anomalies and maximize the utility of the collected datasets. More specifically, we present the design of a controller that continuously maintains its state based on the data obtained from the sensor network (as well as external systems), and configures motes with parameters that satisfy a constraint optimization problem derived from the current state. We describe our implementation, discuss its scalability, and discuss its performance in the context of a case study.

Technical report ITU-TR-2009-122 in IT University Technical Report Series, November 2009.

Available as PDF.