MoteLab is a experimental wireless sensor network deployed in Maxwell Dworkin Laboratory, the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science building at Harvard University. MoteLab provides a public, permanent testbed for development and testing of sensor network applications via an intuitive web-based interface. Registered users can upload executables, associate those executables with motes to create a job, and schedule the job to be run on MoteLab. During the job all messages and other data are logged to a database which is presented to the user upon job completion and then can be used for processing and visualization. In addition, simple visualization tools are provided via the web interface for viewing data while the job is running. MoteLab wil facilitate research in sensor network programming environments, communication protocols, system design, and applications.
Hardware
We have deployed 190
TMote Sky
sensor "motes", which consist of an TI MSP430 processor running at
8MHz, 10KB of RAM, 1Mbit of Flash memory and a Chipcon CC2420
radio operating at 2.4GHz with an indoor range of approximately 100 meters.
Each node includes sensors for light, temperature, and humidity.
Each mote is powered from wall power (rather than batteries) and is connected to the departmental Ethernet, which facilitates direct capture of data and uploading of new programs. The Ethernet connection is used as a debugging and reprogramming feature only, as nodes will generally communicate via radio.
Software
Nodes run the TinyOS operating
system and are programmed in the
NesC programming language, a
component-oriented variant of C. Typically, you will be able to
prototype your application either using the
TOSSIM
simulation environment or with a handful of motes on your desktop.
You then use the MoteLab web interface to upload your program to the
building-wide network.