Lynx: a self-organizing wireless sensor network with commodity palmtop computers

Abstract

While the embedded class processors found in commodity palmtop computers continue to become increasingly capable, various wireless connectivity functions on them provide new opportunities in designing more flexible yet smarter wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and utilizing the computation power in a way we could never imagine before. Designing Lynx, a selforganizing wireless sensor network (SOWSN), is our further step taken in exploiting the potential of palmtop computers. Fundamental functionalities such as automatic neighbor relation detection, link state maintenance, sensor integration, and multihop routing, together make a real world distributively managed WSN system implementation work quite well. And by combining with Ocelot, our mobile distributed computing engine, sensor nodes are now capable of collecting, recording, processing and sending data without any central server support. Significant energy saving is achieved by the Lynx and Ocelot combined system, compare to traditional power-hungry computer platforms such as BOINC when doing same tasks.