SensorScope: Experiences with a Wireless Building Monitoring Sensor Network

This paper reports on our experience with the implementation, deployment, and operation of SensorScope, an indoor environmental monitoring network. Nodes run on standard TinyOS components and use B-MAC for the MAC layer implementation. The main component on the server side is a Java application that stores sensor data in a database and can send broadcast commands to the motes. SensorScope has now been running continuously for 6 months. The paper presents an analysis of three 2 week periods and compares them in terms of parameter settings, and their impact on data delivery and routing tree depth stability. From the data gathered, we show that network performance is greatly improved by using MAC layer retransmissions, that SensorScope is running in a none congested regime, and we find an expected mote lifetime of 61 days. The phenomena discussed in this paper are well known. The contribution of this paper is an insight to a long running sensor network that is more realistic than a testbed with a wired back-channel, but more controllable than a long-term, remote experiment.