Springbrook: Challenges in developing a long-term, rainforest wireless sensor network

We describe the design, development and learnings from the first phase of a rainforest ecological sensor network at Springbrook - part of a World Heritage precinct in South East Queensland. This first phase is part of a major initiative to develop the capability to provide reliable, long-term monitoring of rainforest ecosystems. We focus in particular on our analysis around energy and communication challenges which need to be solved to allow for reliable, long-term deployments in these types of environments

The smart skies project

This paper describes the Smart Skies project, an ambitious and world-leading research endeavor exploring the development of key enabling technologies, which support the efficient utilization of airspace by manned and unmanned airspace users. This paper provides a programmatic description of the research and development of: an automated separation management system, a mobile aircraft tracking system, and aircraft-based sense-and-act technologies. A summary of the results from a series of real-world flight testing campaigns is also presented

Radio diversity for reliable communication in WSNs

Deployment of wireless sensors in real world environments is often a frustrating experience. The quality of radio links is highly coupled to unpredictable physical environments, leading to intermittent connectivity and frequent outages. Because link qualities are not predictable prior to deployment, current deterministic solutions to unreliable links, such as increasing network density or transmission power, do not adequately address this issue. We propose a new dual radio network architecture to improve communication reliability in wireless sensor networks. Specifically, we show that radio transceivers operating at dual widely spaced radio frequencies and through spatially separated antennas offer robust communication, high link diversity, and better interference mitigation. We show through experiments that radio diversity can significantly improve end-to-end delivery rates, network stability, and transmission costs at only a slight increase in energy cost over a single radio