LOW POWER WIRELESS SENSING THROUGH MICA MOTES

CH.N.V.G.SURYA PRAKASH , III-ECE, MIC COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY, KANCHIKACHERLA . chakkasurya.chakka@gmail.com

Y.LAKSHMI DEEPTHI, III- ECE, MIC COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY, KANCHIKACHERLA . deepthi.anokhi@gmail.com

Devineni Venkata Ramana & Dr. Hima Sekhar

MIC COLLEGE OF TECHNOLOGY KANCHIKACHERLA

LOW POWER WIRELESS SENSING THROUGH MICA MOTES

ABSTRACT:
Advances in embedded systems have led to the development of small, low-power sensor nodes (often called motes or smart dust) that consist of a simple microcontroller, a small amount of memory, a low-power radio, and various sensors that are capable of collecting, processing, and transmitting sensor data over distances of 100m or more. Mica is the latest invention in the field of wireless sensor networks and it has the advantages of ultra low power consumption, as compared to the conventional wireless devices existing in the todays market. The mica mote can accommodate up to eight sensors that can perform the work of gathering, processing and transmitting various types of information to the required place through a multi hop network formed by a number of such mica motes, and thus keeping the power consumed by a single chip very less, compared to other wireless sensors, so a mica mote can work up to five years on two standard AA batteries. A new type of operating system, called as the TINY OS was developed to fit into the small memory space and thus keeping the size of the chip small. So this can be considered as a versatile technology that launches the latest techniques of VLSI, EMBEDDED SYSTEMS, and OPERATING SYSTEMS onto a single platform. These can be combined with the GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEMS to keep an eye on the environmental changes occurring and thus preventing forest fires etc. The other applications for these involve temperature measurement, measurement of vibrations during earthquakes, detection of vehicles that can emit radio signals, for military purposes.

INTRODUCTION TO MICA TECHNOLOGY:

Advances in embedded systems have led to the development of small, low-power sensor nodes (often called motes or smart dust) that consist of a simple micro controller, a small amount of memory, a low-power radio, and various sensors that are capable of collecting, processing, and transmitting sensor data over small distances. One such mote is the MICA, which has eight sensors to gather and process various types of information. The MICA mote platform was developed at UC Berkeley in collaboration with Intel Research. It includes an 8-bit Atmel ATMEGA 103L micro controller, 4K static RAM, a 128K nonvolatile flash memory, and a 40 Kbps radio operating at 916.5 MHz and runs the TINY OS. The node is powered by 2 standard AA batteries.

MICA VS CONVENTIONAL WIRELESS SYSTEMS:

Current wireless systems only scratch the surface of possibilities emerging from the integration of low-power communication, sensing, energy storage, and computation. Generally, when people consider wireless devices they think of such items as cell phones or personal digital assistants, items with high costs

and energy requirements that target specific, highly standardized applications and rely on a powerful infrastructure. A new direction in wireless system design however is extending wireless connectivity to small, low-cost embedded devices for a wide range of applications. An explanation of the current wireless architectures and their shortcomings for deeply embedded devices illustrates the advantages of the Mica network architecture. Deeply embedded wireless networks differ in several key respects from traditional wireless scenarios. First, power consumption must be drastically reduced. A deeply embedded, battery-operated device might need to operate for years on a pair of AA batteries or a lithium coin cell. Power consumption must average in the micro amps range, requiring powering down most of the device much of the timea cell phone would do well to last a couple of weeks on two AA batteries. This hundredfold power consumption reduction mandates drastic changes to system architecture. Secondly, many deeply embedded systems cannot rely on a pre-deployed, powerful infrastructure for support. Cell phone protocols, for example, exploit high-powered base stations to reduce power consumption in mobile nodes. In a peer-to-peer multi hop network, typically, only the last hop will communicate with a base stationmost of the nodes would be located outside of the stations direct communication range. An advantage of a peer-to-peer architecture is that it only requires small communication distances for each transmission. Finally, whereas most wireless devices carry out a single, highly standardized function, deeply embedded networks must be suited to a wide variety of applications. This requires a more general-purpose system design, but also allows employing radical, highly efficient algorithms.

DEVICE

POWER TO COMMUNICATE

LIFE WITH 2 AA BATTERIES 2 WEEKS 5-6 YEARS 8 DAYS 1 MONTH

CELL PHONE MICA WIRELESS ETHERNET BLUE TOOTH DEVICES

750-1000 mw <1 mw 2000mw 115mw

The table shows the difference between the conventional wireless systems and the mica nodes, used for the deeply embedded systems in terms of power consumed and life of the device, when operated on two AA batteries (mica is operated on two AA batteries).

APPLICATIONS OF MICA TECHNOLOGY:

A mica node consists of eight sensors, which have built in magnetometers, barometers, accelerometers etc to gather and process various types of information, so a mica node can have applications

involving inventory asset tracking, roadside traffic pattern and open parking spot detection, individual plant monitoring for precision agriculture, habitat monitoring in nature preserves, and advanced building security and automation. The military could blanket fields with sensors to detect troop movement. Sensors might enable civil engineers to gauge the structural integrity of buildings and bridges after earthquakes or fires. Integrating hundreds of thousands of sensing and control points could provide new insights into the state of the world. The Mica wireless platform serves as a foundation for the emerging possibilities. The Mica platform measures 1.252.25 inches, runs the Tiny OS operating sys-tem and is suited for self-configuring multi hop wireless networks. With sensing, communication, and I/O capabilities, Mica can simultaneously act as a data router, sensor interface, and control point. Nearly a hundred research groups currently use Mica nodes to explore networking techniques, data analysis, distributed algorithms, networked services, programming, and novel applications. Mica is created with off-the-shelf hardware, but the architecture and its capabilities represent what could be implemented in just a few square millimeters of custom silicon.

LOW POWER CONSUMPTION OF MICA:

The basic question that arises after seeing the table above is: how mica nodes are able to send the information by consuming such a less power? The answer to the question is given by the concepts of peerto-peer communication and TINY OS. Exploiting local communication and application- specific protocols can drastically reduce size, cost, and power use in wireless devices. These devices wont need to communicate with the nearest high-power control tower, but only with their local peers. Peer-to-peer networking techniques provide a flexible mesh like interconnect that shuttles data between thousands of tiny embedded devices. A handful of the devices might act as bridges between a local embedded communication mesh and a traditional data network. Figure 2 depicts a precision agriculture deployment an active area of application research. Researchers are developing new algorithms for data aggregation, ad hoc routing, and distributed signal processing for low-power peer-to-peer wireless networks. As researchers envision smaller and lower-cost devices, the range of application scenarios grows dramatically. The second concept is that of the TINY OS, which stands for tiny operating system, this operating system is different from other operating systems in terms of the memory required to run it. If the mica operates continuously, then the power taken by it will be almost same as that of a cell phone, so to consume less power, the mica must send and receive the information which is useful and discard other information which is not useful, by making the device off. So to do this, the mica must itself work like a computer and to do so, it must have an operating system, which is the TINY OS. We need at least 100MB of memory to run a operating system, which is similar to that of windows, but such a huge memory requirement would increase the size of the chip, so a special operating system was developed at the

university of California called the TINY OS, which would run on very less memory (4MB), thus keeping the size of the chip and the power consumed as small, when compared to conventional wireless systems.

THE MICA ARCHITECTURE:

Mica platform was designed to aid system level exploration, providing a rich inter-connection of protocol primitives that designers can flexibly assemble into application- specific protocols. The designs power and time-efficient primitives significantly improve key system capabilities including low-power device startup, time synchronization, power-aware routing, and localization. Mica combines communication, computation, power management, and sensing into a small experimental platform. The current form factor (1.25 2.25 inch) is similar in size to a pair of AA batteries, although we have com-pressed a variant of the design to about the size of a 2.5-centimeter coin (0.5 cm thick). The standby current for Micas components is a few micro amps, enabling applications that last for several years on a single set of batteries. Mica improves experimental flexibility by including an expansion bus that connects to a wide array of sensor boards. Our current batch of sensor boards includes support for monitoring thermal temperature, barometric pressure, magnetic fields, light, passive infrared frequency, acceleration, vibration, and acoustics.

Mica architecture block diagram.

THE OPERATING SYSTEM:

The Mica hardware platform uses the Tiny OS multithreading execution model developed at the University of California. Tiny OS is an event-based operating system in which individual components act together to form a complete application and to implement all system functions. This component-based structure lets an application designer select from a catalog of system components to meet applicationspecific goals. The Tiny OS execution model provides fine-grained allocation of processing resources across multiple components. This lets high-level application code and low-level protocol code coexist on a single CPU. Each component acts like a finite state machine that uses commands and events to transition

from one state to the next. There is no blocking or waiting in Tiny OS. This forces components, after finishing a calculation, to release the CPU for use by other components. Tiny OS performs high-level, longrunning application processing in special execution contexts, called tasks. When executed, a task runs to completion and other tasks cannot preempt it. However, low-level system events can preempt tasks, allowing Tiny OS to temporarily reallocate the CPU to low-level system processing. Tiny OS shields the application-level processing from the under-lying concurrent scheduling, yet exposes low-level system components to meet their real-time requirements. In contrast, most wireless devices use dedicated protocol processors to handle low-level processing. This partitioned approach requires enough power in the application and system-level processors to handle the peak demand; though system demand for these two processors might never occur simultaneously. The pooled processing approach used in Tiny OS allows dynamically allocating a single CPU to a given task, so peak demand is close to aver-age processing.

APPLICATION EVALUATION:
The ultimate goal of the mica node is enabling novel applications that shape the role of deeply embedded networks. Not only do the application requirements differ drastically from those of traditional wireless scenarios, they differ dramatically from one another. In our exploration of these new scenarios, two distinct classes of applications have emerged. The first is categorized by a low duty-cycle, low datarate, long latency, static topology and a long expected lifetime. For these networks, lifetime is the main evaluation criterion. A second class of applications is that of highly dynamic sense-and-control networks with higher data rates, latency limits, and highly mobile nodes. The common low duty cycle scenarios include heating, ventilation, and air conditioning monitoring of large buildings or climatic monitoring of outdoor habitats. So it is evident that mica can be used for a wide range of applications.

THE FUTURE:
Mica has not entered the Indian market but many companies like the Intel is thinking to introduce them to the Asian market by the end of this year. Mica has been successfully tested at the laboratory of university of California and even in the outdoors of the University for counting the number of vehicles passing through in that way. The size of mica platform can further be reduced if the AA batteries are replaced by some other means of power supply, based on this concept, power was given through solar energy, magnetic fields around the electric wires etc and a very small chip was developed which measures a mere 5 square millimeters, called as the SPEC node.

Spec node

The spec nodes are not yet tested and there are some doubts about the reliability of spec nodes, so still mica nodes occupy the top spot in the wireless sensors family.

ADVANTAGES OF MICA:
There are many advantages to mica when compared to the conventional wireless sensors which include: Low power consumption. Small in size. Cheap sensors. Long life, even with AA batteries. Wide range of applications. Provide instant information. So, with these many advantages, the mica nodes will gain worldwide acceptance.

DISADVANTAGES OF MICA:
The disadvantages of these motes are that, these could be misused by the military for keeping an eye on the defense activities of other countries without their permission and the other disadvantage is that these motes are very small in size and can get moved away from their position because of strong winds etc.

CONCLUSION:
The scientists behind the invention of the mica motes think that the mica can revolutionize the wireless sensor field as their main advantages include low power consumption and low cost which are very important for any new invention to get global acceptance. These motes will become a part of our daily life as their applications range from monitoring air conditioning to the measurement of vibrations occurred during an earthquake, these can also play an important role in the agriculture field as they can be used for checking the environmental conditions etc. Thus we can conclude that the mica motes are going to have a great future and it is sure that we are going to find them in use in our daily life in the near future to come.

BIBILIOGRAPHY:
EENADU Newspaper MICA: wireless platform for deeply embedded networks: by Jason.E.hill www.xbow.com: official manufacturer of mica platforms. Wireless sensor networks: by Daniel nieton and James Russo. Generic sensor platforms: hay wood ho. www.tinyos.net. www.howstuffworks.com. www.electronicsforu.com.