Section: Contracts and Grants with Industry
European FP6 IST IP “Wirelessly Accessible Sensor Populations” (WASP) 2006-2009
Participants : Jean Carle [ contact ] , Gilles Grimaud, Michael Hauspie, Fadila Khadar, David Simplot-Ryl [ contact ] .
An important class of collaborating objects is represented by the myriad of wireless sensors, which will constitute the infrastructure for the ambient intelligence vision. The academic world actively investigates the technology for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Industry is reluctant to use these results coming from academic research. A major cause is the magnitude of the mismatch between research at the application level and the node and network level.
The WASP project aims at narrowing this mismatch by covering the whole range from basic hardware, sensors, processor, communication, over the packaging of the nodes, the organization of the nodes, towards the information distribution and a selection of applications. The emphasis in the project lays in the self-organization and the services, which link the application to the sensor network. Research into the nodes themselves is needed because a strong link lies between the required flexibility and the hardware design. Research into the applications is necessary because the properties of the required service will influence the configuration of both sensor network and application for optimum efficiency and functionality. All inherent design decisions cannot be handled in isolation as they depend on the hardware costs involved in making a sensor and the market size for sensors of a given type. Three business areas, road transport, elderly care, and herd control, are selected for their societal significance and large range of requirements, to validate the WASP results. The general goal of the project is the provision of a complete system view for building large populations of collaborating objects. The system incorporates networking protocols for wireless sensor nodes to hide the individual nodes from the application.
The tangible results of the project are:
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A consistent chain of energy-sensitive software components.
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Sets of cross optimized software stacks.
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Benchmarks and a set of measurements on energy- and code- efficiency.
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Rules for the design of configurable sensor nodes.
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A prototype implementation in one of the three chosen business areas.
List of participants: Philips Research Eindhoven, Philips Forschung Laboratorium, IMEC, CSEM, TU/e, Microsoft Aachen, Health Telematic Network, Fraunhofer IIS, Fokus, IGD, Wageningen UR, Imperial College London, STMicroelectronics, INRIA, Univ of Lille, Ecole Polytechnique Federale Lausanne, Cefriel, Centro Ricerce Fiat, Malaerdalen University, RWTH Aachen, SAP, Univ of Paderborn
