The SEAMONSTER Sensor Web: Lessons and Opportunities after One Year
Abstract
The SouthEast Alaska MOnitoring Network for Science, Telecommunications, Education, and Research, or SEAMONSTER, is a NASA Earth Science Technology Office funded effort to deploy a sensor web in Southeast Alaska. One of the major benefits of this project is the potential for testbed applications for sensor web and sensor technologies is a harsh yet accessible environment. Another key aspect of SEAMONSTER is the project's illustration of the key differences between a sensor network and a sensor web. After the initial year of work on the project, we have instrumented the partially glaciated watershed of Lemon Creek, near Juneau, Alaska. The initial goal of this project is to develop a sensor web for monitoring the Lemon Glacier and its outlet stream, Lemon Creek. The sensor web is built upon a network of sensors with real time communication between nodes and semi-autonomous reconfigurability based on the information shared between nodes. The sensor web is designed to provide long term monitoring that is sensitive to local conditions to accurately record transient events with dynamic use of available resources (e.g. power, storage, communications bandwidth). Specifically, the sensor web described in this presentation allows us to develop our understanding of glacier hydrology and the influence of glacial runoff on the hydrology and hydrochemistry of Lemon Creek. We currently have 7 different stations monitoring 37 physical parameters. We are implementing communications via wireless 802.11b to transmit data from sensor web nodes back to the University of Alaska Southeast. The backbone of the sensor web is composed of Vexcel Microservers. These low-power servers are base stations with support for sub-networks, server support with respect to the rest of the network, and server behavior with respect to network-external contact. This presentation describes the methods we have used to build the SEAMONSTER sensor web, lessons learned after one year, future directions for the sensor web, and illustrate and solicit collaborations to utilize the testbed potentials of SEAMONSTER.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2007
- Bibcode:
- 2007AGUFMIN24A..03F
- Keywords:
-
- 0483 Riparian systems (0744;
- 1856);
- 0720 Glaciers;
- 0805 Elementary and secondary education;
- 0810 Post-secondary education;
- 0815 Informal education