Self-Organizing, Energy Efficient, Scalable and Cost-Effective Wireless Backbone to Monitor and Administer Large Remote DoD Acreage

San Diego Research Center (SDRC) proposes to continue to design, develop, and demonstrate SensorBoneTM system, a self-organizing, energy-efficient, scalable, cost-effective, rapidly deployable, and secure wireless backbone system that enables real-time remote environmental and events monitoring with up to thousands of heterogeneous sensors deployed over the vast areas of military lands and training facilities administrated by the DoD. The vast size of lands to be monitored, together with lack of reliable and cheap electricity, makes currently available wireless technologies inadequate and extremely inefficient and costly. During the Phase I study, SDRC has been designing and evaluating the SensorBone system architecture that addresses the fundamental challenges such as energy-efficient, long-range, and low-duty-cycle optimized radio design, scalable networking protocols, and cost-effective hardware platforms. Our novel design leverages the latest developments in the mobile ad hoc network (MANET), low-duty-cycle sensor network and extremely energy-efficient sensor radio technologies, and aims for the eventual hardware implementation and demonstration of the SensorBone system. The Phase II work will encompass the entire system design cycle of the SensorBone system, including design and evaluation of the system architecture, development of the hardware platform, development of the SensorBone radio, protocol stack implementation in both the network simulator and on the hardware platform, and development of the network deployment and management tools. The resulting SensorBone system prototype will be demonstrated using actual environmental sensors deployed in a field such as Ft. Benning.