Collecting Data for One Hundred Years

Sensor clusters (aka sensor networks) are interesting because of the role they play in distributed data collection. Conventionally, a sensor network designer had to worry about getting data from the sensors to a processing application. This paper argues that dedicated data collection networks are better suited to this data collection task. Like the sensor clusters they support, data collection networks are designed to run for years. Together, the sensor clusters and data collection network form a system that must overcome temporal obstacles that are not considered in today’s networking infrastructure. These temporal issues are now revealed only because sensor networks are being designed to run embedded in buildings, pavement, and other “permanent” structures. This paper focuses on the issues involved in building and maintaining a data collection network. The goal is for a sensor designer to simply activate a new sensor cluster and have data collection “just work”; data generated from this cluster should be automatically relayed and distributed to data processing applications. This paper presents the temporal issues facing data collection networks and design suggestions to overcome these problems. We present the initial design of a prototype data collection network that we are building.