Design Lessons from an Unattended Ground Sensor System Abstract: In a still-developing space such as distributed embedded systems, few things present better learning opportunities than pulling the thread through a complete vertically integrated application. This talk discusses some of the lessons learned during a 2 1/2 year development project within the SHM program at DARPA. The goal of this program was to demonstrate a fully autonomous, fully self-configuring, ad-hoc deployable, 100-node Unattended Ground Sensor (UGS) network with the capability to physically redistribute the sensor nodes to maintain coverage in response to node loss. This project justified years of rhetoric in the sensor network community: robustness, adaptivity, and distributed in-network processing paradigms were first-order requirements. There is a paper in preparation specifically about this system, but i don't think it is finished enough to be released. (I am currently checking with the author) However, I have identified some other relevant reading: *** The GALORE system (which has many components in common) Locating tiny sensors in time and space: A case study (also available as PDF) Lewis Girod, Vladimir Bychkovskiy, Jeremy Elson, and Deborah Estrin In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD 2002), Freiburg, Germany. September 16-18 2002. Invited paper. (There is also a poster from a Mobicom demo that describes GALORE here: ) *** More detail on TOF acoustic ranging: Robust range estimation using acoustic and multimodal sensing Lewis Girod and Deborah Estrin In Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2001), Maui, Hawaii, October 2001. *** Some detail on the network assembly algorithm Scaleable Self-Assembly for Ad Hoc Wireless Sensor Networks Katayoun Sohrabi, William Merrill, Jeremy Elson, Lewis Girod, Fredric Newberg, and William Kaiser, 2002 IEEE CAS Workshop on Wireless Communications and Networking, Pasadena, CA, Sept 2002. W. Merrill, L. Girod, J. Elson, K. Sohrabi, F. Newberg, and W. Kaiser, Proceedings of the IEEE CAS Workshop on Wireless Communications and Networking, Pasadena, CA, Sept. 6, 2002. *** Classic system design intuition -- not new but relevant to this work Hints for Computer System Design, B.W. Lampson ACM Operating Systems Rev. 15, 5 (Oct. 1983), pp 33-48.