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Telematik Projekt: Wireless Embedded Systems

Lecturer: Blywis
Location: K60
Time: Wednesday, 14:00-18:00
ECTS-credits: 10

KVV page

Attendance at the first lab session (15.04.09, 14:00-18:00) is mandatory! Your registration is void if you miss this event. If you could not register for this course, attend the meeting nevertheless. We might still have vacancy.

Please note, that there will be no meeting on the 08.04.09 as stated in the KVV!

About this course

The telematics project introduces the students to the topic of wireless embedded systems. Depending on the term's current focus wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and/or wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are to be programmed, set up, and evaluated.

Wireless networks face more problems than their wired counterparts due the properties of the shared medium, mobility of nodes, and new application scenarios. Novel approaches are required to solve these challenges.

Topics and tasks will be introduced, explained, and assigned in the first session.

What will you do in this course?

1. WSN: You will program small sensor boards, consisting of a microcontroller, attached sensors, and a transceiver (868 MHz ISM band, bluetooth, etc). Our so called ScatterWeb nodes use a custom minimal operating system that can be modified with ease.
2. WMN: Using Linux based mesh routers various problems are to be solved. These include but are not limited to routing, address assignment, and service placement issues. While the OS is more powerful than ScatterWeb, you will learn that it is difficult to modify a complex real world system. Our mesh routers are equipped with three IEEE 802.11b/g wireless cards, use an AMD Geode CPU, and have 256 MB of RAM.
3. You will learn how to set up, configure, and monitor these devices to build large, powerful, yet flexible distributed networks. We will deal with up to date scientific topics. Sound experimentation, the evaluation of measured data as well as scientific writing will be discussed. We expect each student (or group) to hand in (short) technical reports about your work.

A total work time of 150h as well as active participation and teamwork are required to pass the course. Besides the lab hours you therefore have to do part of your work at home or in the PC pools. To solve the tasks using your own hardware you should have a PC or laptop with Windows or Linux (preferred) installed. You are also expected to be prepared for the lab hours and have read all documentation.

The course is a so called project seminar. You can get a a seminar or a lab course "Schein".

Schedule (14 weeks)

• 15.04.2009, Course Introduction
  • First Meeting
  • Introduction to the course
  • First steps
• 22.04.2009 - 15.07.2009
  • Supervised lab hours, team meetings and milestone presentations
• 29.04.2009 (re-scheduled)
  • Short oral exam about routing protocols (see mandatory reading in course introduction slides)
• 15.07.2009
  • Deadline for technical report

Additional appointments will be announced on demand!

Prerequisites

Vordiplom or BSc (no BSc students!!!)

• Programming in C
• Basics of operating systems
• Courses Telematics and/or Mobile Communications
• Basic software management skills
• Basic LaTeX skills
• Basic Subversion skills

Exam/Course Requirements

No exam, but you have to attend the course on all Wednesdays and present your work at the end of the semester (using the official presentation template). Your reports must be handed in on time and fulfill the general requirements.

A minimum of 150 work hours per person is required. This means additional work has to be done besides the lab hours.

Assignments

There are no typical weekly assignments as every team has to work to solve several task over the whole semester.

At the 15th of April we will do some first steps together in class. This should give you an introduction to the ScatterWeb² firmware and what feature are available. If this term's focus is on WMNs there will be an introduction to our DES-Mesh testbed.

Online literature

• Scatterweb Website
• Course Introduction Slides
• Task
• First Steps Slides

Working outside the lab

• WSN
  • The MSPGCC toolchain is needed to compile the ScatterWeb source code. Please have a look at the official website. Windows binaries should be provided as installer.

  • Linux users should refer to this guide to compile the binaries on their own. (It worked for me)

  • Debian packages are available here.

  • Windows users should note that Cygwin might be needed. Usual problems reside in multiple incompatible cygwin1.dll files and usage of make of a version lower than 3.81.

• WMN
  • The AMD Geode is i386 compatible thus you probably can use your default gcc installation.
  • It is strongly advised that you use a Debian (unstable) installation for development.
• General

  • You need an account from the Computer Science faculty

  • You can use any text editor or IDE (e.g. Eclipse, Visual Studio, KDevelop, ...).

  • To access the repository a Subversion client is needed (e.g. svn, kdesvn, Tortoise SVN, ...).

Literature

• Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie. The C Programming Language, 2nd Edition. Prentice Hall PTR. March 22, 1988. ISBN: 0-13-110362-8.
• Peter Prinz und Ulla Kirch-Prinz. C kurz und gut. O'Reilly, January 2002. ISBN: 3-89721-238-2

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