Optical Localization Techniques for Micro-Sensor Network Devices

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has been envisioned to revolutionize the way humans perceive and interact with the surrounding environment. The sensor nodes form a network and collaborate (to compensate for the extremely scarce resources available to each of them: computational power, memory size, communication capabilities) to accomplish the mission. Through collaboration, redundancy and fault tolerance, the WSN is then able to achieve unprecedented sensing capabilities. The exploitation of wireless sensor networks very often requires knowledge of the location of each device within the network. In this proposal, Boston Applied Technologies, Inc. (BATi) proposes to develop an optical wireless ad hoc localization technique for wireless sensor network. This free space optical link offers a viable alternative to RF sensor network localization and communications where wireless high performance and high security links are necessary. High data rate, small antenna size, narrow beam divergence, and a narrow field of view are characteristics of free space optical link that offer a number of potential advantages for system design.