CS344A: Sensor Network Systems


The purpose of the work in CS 344A is to introduce the fundamental research in wireless sensor networks in order to enable you to work on a research project of publishable quality. This requires reading deeply on a wide range of topics. Each student is therefore responsible for writing a short summary of each paper, which must be sent to the instructor and TA before the beginning of the class in which the paper is discussed. The summary should answer these three questions:

  1. Based on the assumptions the paper makes, when is the technical approach advocated suitable and when is it not? Do the author's claims match?
  2. What further evaluation would best support the conclusions of the paper (assuming it agreed)? If you have doubts about the claims in the paper, what experiment would you perform to test them?
  3. Give a specific example of how you might apply these results to a similar but different problem.

For some papers, one or more of the questions might not be directly applicable. Use your own judgement. Each student can miss one writeup; when you do this, still send email, but say that you're taking your freebie.


Date Topic Assignment Due
4/4 Wireless Sensor Networks No writeup needed
  • M. Weiser. "The Computer for the Twenty-First Century," Scientific American, pp. 94-10, September 1991. [PDF]
  • D. Estrin, R. Govindan, J. Heidemann, S. Kumar. "Next Century Challenges: Scalable Coordination in Sensor Networks, " Proceedings of MOBICOM 1999. [PDF]
  • 4/6 Application Drivers
  • R. Szewczyk, J. Polastre, A. Mainwaring, J. Anderson, and D. Culler. "Analysis of a Large Scale Habitat Monitoring Application," SenSys 2004. [PDF]
  • P. Juang, H. Oki, Y. Wang, M. Martonosi, L. Peh, D. Rubenstein. "Energy-Efficient Computing for Wildlife Tracking: Design Tradeoffs and Early Experiences with ZebraNet," ASPLOS 2002. [PDF]
  • 4/11 Hardware Profiles
  • Martin Leopold, Mads Bondo Dydensborg, and Philippe Bonnet. "Bluetooth and Sensor Networks: A Reality Check," SenSys 2003. [PDF]
  • P. Dutta, M. Grimmer, A. Arora, S. Bibyk, and D. Culler. "Design of a Wireless Sensor Network Platform for Detecting Rare, Random, and Ephemeral Events," IPSN/SPOTS 2005. [PDF]
  • 4/13 Operating Systems
  • J. Hill, R. Szewczyk, A. Woo, S. Hollar, D. Culler and K. Pister. "System Architecture Directions for Network Sensors." ASPLOS 2000. [PDF]
  • J. Koshy and R. Pandey. "VM*: A Scalable Runtime Environment for Sensor Networks." SenSys 2005. [PDF]
  • 4/18 Network Behavior Discovery
  • J. Zhao and R. Govindan. "Understanding packet delivery performance in dense wireless sensor networks," SenSys 2003. [PDF]
  • D. Son, B. Krishnamachari, and J. Heidemann. "Experimental Analysis of Concurrent Packet Transmissions in Low-Power Wireless Networks." USC-ISI Technical Report ISI-TR-2005-609, November 2005. [PDF]
  • 4/20 Failure
  • J. Regehr. "Randomized testing of interrupt-driven software." EMSOFT 2005.[PDF]
  • G. Candea and A. Fox. "Recursive Restartability: Turning the Reboot Sledgehammer into a Scalpel." HotOS 2001.[PDF]
  • 4/25 Network Protocols I
  • A. Woo, T. Tong, and D. Culler. "Taming the Underlying Challenges of Reliable Multihop Routing in Sensor Networks." SenSys 2003. [PDF]
  • C. Intanagonwiwat, R. Govindan and D. Estrin. "Directed diffusion: A scalable and robust communication paradigm for sensor networks." MobiCom 2000. [PDF]
  • 4/27 Network Protocols II
  • P. Levis, N. Patel, D. Culler, and S. Shenker. "Trickle: A Self-Regulating Algorithm for Code Propogation and Maintenance in Wireless Sensor Network." NSDI 2004. [PDF]
  • S. Nath, P. Gibbons, S. Seshan, and Z. Anderson."Synopsis diffusion for robust aggregation in sensor networks." SenSys 2004. [PDF]
  • 5/2 Application-level Programming Project Proposal
  • S. Madden and M. Franklin and J. Hellerstein and W. Hong. "TinyDB: An Acquisitional Query Processing System for Sensor Networks." Transactions on Database Systems (TODS) 2005. [PDF]
  • B. Greenstein, E. Kohler and D. Estrin. "A sensor network application construction kit (SNACK)." SenSys 2004. [PDF]
  • 5/4 Presentations of Assignment 1 Solutions Transport
  • No writeups required
  • P. Levis, D. Gay, and David Culler. "Active Sensor Networks." NSDI 2005. [PDF]
  • I. Vasilescu, K. Kotay, D. Rus, P. Corke, and M. Dunbabin. "Data Collection, Storage and Retrieval with an Underwater Optical and Acoustical Sensor Network," SenSys 2005. [PDF]
  • 5/9 Media Access I, Guest Lecturer: Prabal Dutta
  • V. Bharghavan, A. Demers, S. Shenker and L. Zhang. "MACAW: A Media Access Protocol for Wireless LANs." SIGCOMM 1994. [PDF]
  • W. Ye, J. Heidemann, and D. Estrin. "An Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks." INFOCOM 2000. [PDF]
  • 5/11 Media Access II
  • No class meeting
  • J. Polastre, J. Hui, P. Levis, J. Zhao, D. Culler, S. Shenker, and I. Stoica. "A Unifying Link Layer Abstraction for Wireless Networks." SenSys 2005. [PDF]
  • 5/16 Projects Project Presentation
    No reading due.
    5/18 Simulation
  • V. Shnayder, M. Hempstead, B. Chen, G. Allen, and M. Welsh. "Simulating the power consumption of large-scale sensor network applications". SenSys 2004. [PDF]
  • L. Girod, T. Stathopoulos, N. Ramanathan, J. Elson, D. Estrin, E. Osterweil, and T. Schoellhammer. "A system for simulation, emulation, and deployment of heterogeneous sensor networks." SenSys 2004. [PDF]
  • 5/23 Network Architecture
  • R. Govindan, E. Kohler, D. Estrin, F. Bian, K. Chintalapudi, O. Gnawali, S. Rangwala, R. Gummadi, and T. Stathopoulos. "Tenet: An Architecture for Tiered Embedded Networks." CENS Technical Report 56, 2005. [PDF]
  • D. Culler, P. Dutta, C. T. Eee, R. Fonseca, J. Hui, P. Levis, J. Polastre, S. Shenker, I. Stoica, G. Tolle, and J. Zhao. "Towards a Sensor Network Architecture: Lowering the Waistline." HotOS 2005. [PDF]
  • 5/25 Storage
  • S. Ratnasamy, B. Karp, L. Yin, F. Yu, D. Estrin, R. Govindan and S. Shenker. "GHT: a geographic hash table for data-centric storage." WSNA 2002. [PDF]
  • 5/30 No class meeting
  • No writeups required.
  • D. Moore, J. Leonard, D. Rus, and S. J. Teller. "Robust distributed network localization with noisy range measurements." SenSys 2004. [PDF]
  • 6/1 Time Synchronization
  • J. Elson, L. Girod, D. Estrin. "Fine-Grained Network Time Synchronization using Reference Broadcast." OSDI 2002. [PDF]
  • 6/6 Open Problems
    No reading.
    Final Week Poster