Applications and Design of Heterogeneous and/or Broadband Sensor Networks

With the advances in sensor technologies and its wide application scope, it is likely that sensor networks will consist of heterogeneous classes of nodes, including multimodal sensors, bigger highpower nodes, and smaller lowend nodes. The lowend nodes will use lowenergy wireless interface, forming unreliable wireless links. On the other hand, the highpower nodes can be equipped with broadband and more reliable links. This paper explores the resulting new paradigm, called Heterogeneous and/or Broadband Sensor Networks (HBSN), where the multimodal sensing capability and broadband connections have enabled numerous novel applications. We describe two of these new applications and investigate the special design considerations for supporting each of them. We propose a hierarchical architecture to facilitate the cooperation/interaction between sensor nodes and to optimize HBSN for energy efficiency. Preliminary performance evaluation results are presented.