WISENET · Wireless sensors for environmental networks

Final Activity Report Summary - WISENET (Wireless Sensors for Environmental NETworks)

Distributed sensing and computing, in association with dense wireless networks collecting and disseminating environmental data, is getting more and more ubiquitous, due to their enormous impact on issues like public health, social life, environment protection, etc. Accurate and reliable localisation is one of the most important and still missing features in the wireless sensors scenario. The WISENET Project focused on a new technique capable to 3D localise multiple sensor nodes with sub-centimeter accuracy in a range of several meters. A set of beacons emits a sequence of acoustic pulses in the space region containing the sensor nodes. When impinged by the acoustic wave front, each sensor node, independently from each other, sends a radio frequency (RF) or infrared (IR) coded acknowledge signal to a radio base. The radio base, knowing the positions of the acoustic beacons and the time of arrival of the acknowledge signals, computes the positions of each sensor node with a robust non-linear algorithm, identifying and discarding possible false signals due to echoes and environmental noise. The originality relies on the fact that the proposed technique is based on sensor nodes equipped with a very simple hardware, concerning the localisation and acknowledge signal sections, thus enabling a very low-cost mass production. Computer simulation of noisy environments at first and experimental demonstrative setups later, gave very good results with several remote sensors within regions of several squared meters. WISENET, other than to provide a great knowledge exchange between the Host Institution and the expert Fellows, yielded a significant advancement in the field of remote sensor localisation with a demonstrator of the proposed new localisation technique. It is capable to manage accurate localisation and real time tracking of multiple sensors, and opening a wide range of applications in the field of man-machine interaction, medical patient monitoring and motor rehabilitation, domotics, robotics, sport and military training, etc.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union