Transmission power control and sensor node reprogramming for smartphone-WSN interaction

Abstract

Recent advances in hardware and software had led the smartphones to become an attractive candidate as mobile gateways and data-users for wireless sensor networks that have the capability to monitor the physical phenomena in various dimensions. Together, wireless sensing systems and smartphones enable services that allow users to gather and process fine-grained sensor data for improving the quality and user-experience of various applications. In this work, we outline the remaining challenges before such a system architecture is made real, and propose schemes to address two of the general yet critical challenges. Specifically, we propose an empirical link stability scoring algorithm to improve the energy efficiency of active-probing-based transmission-power-control schemes, and a method to efficiently exchange sensor nodes' execution binaries using Android and iOS installation packages. These schemes can be used in a system of smart-devices interconnecting with wireless sensors to implement a practical and low-power system for personalised sensing applications.