Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

iCube Wireless and Sensor Networking Laboratory

Overview

The iCube Wireless and Sensor Networking Laboratory (located in Coover 3125) was established in August 2004 at Iowa State University's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering to pursue fundamental research on wireless sensor networks and their applications. The lab has a sensor network testbed built on the Crossbow Mote wireless sensor platform. It provides us with the flexibility to create powerful wireless automated data collection and monitoring systems which can further be used in many applications. The wireless sensor devices in the lab have also been used in various academic courses, including as EE 423: Communication Systems Laboratory and CprE 546X: Wireless and Sensor Networks.

Equipment

Currently, the lab has more than 100 Crossbow MICA2 wireless sensor sets and 25 Crossbow MICAz wireless sensor sets. Each set includes a programming and serial interface board, a FM multi-channel MICA2 or MICAz processing/radio board, and a sensor board, which is equipped with a 2-axis accelerometer, a 2-axis magnetometer, a light sensor, a temperature sensor, an acoustic sensor and a sounder. The lab also has 20 sets of Tmote Sky sensor devices, which have richer resources (in terms of computation power, memory and storage) than MICA motes.

CotsBots are inexpensive and modular mobile sensor devices built entirely from commercial off-the-shelf components. CotsBots were created by Bergbeiter and Pister at University of California, Berkeley (UCB) by integrating MICA2 wireless sensor devices onto the top of the Kyosho Mini-Z RC car platform through a motor board. Currently, the lab has 25 motor boards.

Compared with the UCB CotsBots, Acroname Garcia Robots (with embedded Stargate processor boards) are much more powerful in terms of computational capability. Stargate is a high-performance processing platform designed for sensor, signal processing, control, and wireless sensor networking applications. Stargate is based on Intel’s XScale processor that can be found in today’s most powerful handheld computers including the Compaq IPAQ and the Dell Axim. The Stargate processor board is preloaded with a Linux distribution and basic drivers and is compatible with the Crossbow’s MICA2 family of wireless sensor devices. We have 4 Acroname Garcia Robots and 10 Stargate boards in the lab.

Faculty Members

  • Daji Qiao
  • Srikanta Tirthapura
  • Yong Guan
  • Arun Somani
  • Wensheng Zhang (Dept. of Computer Science)

Current Research Topics

  • Distributed Algorithms for Sensor-Aided Directories to Mobile Objects(Srikanta Tirthapura and Daji Qiao)
  • Application of wireless sensor networks in power transmission linesurveillance (Arun Somani)
  • Application of wireless sensor networks in power electric system assetmanagement (Daji Qiao)
  • Wireless sensor network resource harvesting (Wensheng Zhang and DajiQiao)
  • Secure sensor data management (Wensheng Zhang and Daji Qiao)
  • Wireless sensor network security (Yong Guan)