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Per 4Q08 QSR:

[1a] Assembly of three x86 sensor nodes. (2mo) Note: No budget allocated for hardware development, which will be funded from other sources as needed. They are deployed on the CS Building, UMass MA2 Tower, and Mount Toby, and are network accessible. Also includes deployment of the RayMarine radars at the three locations. (December 1st). Completed.

Milestone 1a was more challenging than anticipated due to the departure of a key staff member (Brian Donovan) prior to the subcontract's start date. Brian's primary project focus had been construction, integration, and maintenance of three modified RayMarine radars, one of three ViSE sensors with a "rich" set of programmable actuators. As a result, other staff members learned both the software interface to the radar (e.g., through an Adlink Data Acquisition Card and USB-to-PIC) as well as the details of radar to the ViSE hardware platform (e.g., programmable PIC for radar control, data and control connections, power and battery connections). While the learning curve had not been planned for the 1st quarter, the results should ease the completion of future milestones since much of the radar control software will have to be modified to complete future milestones 1f and 1h in the fourth quarter of Spiral 1.

Milestone 1a also required reconstructing nodes from a previous project (the Off-the-Grid radar project) to accommodate the anticipated sharing and "deeply programmable" nature of GENI. The modifications to the hardware platform were primarily the addition of a more robust computing platform, two additional sensors called for by ViSE, and a cellular backplane for out-of-band Operations and Management connections. The computing platform includes a processor capable of running the Xen Virtual Machine Monitor, which we will use to sliver node resources by allocating resources to virtual machines created on-demand for user slices. The platform also includes a processor with a higher clock-speed than the previous one (1.86Ghz) and more memory (2GB) and storage (32GB Flash). ViSE adds both a weather station and a Pan-Tilt-Zoom video camera to the sensor nodes in addition to the RayMarine radar. Finally, our previous experiences managing partially inaccessible node deployments motivated our integration of a cellular backplane. We connected each main node to a Linux Gumstix Embedded node with a connection to a commerical cellular network using a serial GPRS modem. The Linux Gumstix includes both serial connections (for remote consoles) and wired Ethernet connections to the main node and is capable of powering the main node using Wake-On-Lan. At present, we are prototyping this backplane functionality on just the CS Building ViSE node, but have found it useful thus far.

In addition to deploying these nodes, we have also set up a testing environment in our lab with an identical node and sensors attached, including a deconstructed (and non-radiating) radar for testing. The testing environment will prove useful for future software development (Milestons 1f and 1g). Finally, we documented each component of the hardware platform for the GENI Substrate Catalog and forwarded it to John Jacobs at his request.

1b

[M2] Field deployment of three sensor nodes; native non-virtualized drivers; software testing. (January 1st). Completed. Received 123008:

We have field deployed the nodes constructed in milestone 1b, and installed a base image that includes the 3.2 version of Xen as well as the appropriate drivers for each sensing device and wireless/wired card. Since the driver for the PCI9812 Adlink Data Acquisition Card did not run under recent versions of XenLinux (2.6.18) we modified the source of the driver to support these; additionally, we obtained the most recent driver from Adlink under a new NDA and are currently testing its compatibility with Xen in the lab. Additionally, since the development of the base image is a tedious process we heavily documented it on the ViSE Trac Web Site (​http://vise.cs.umass.edu). The documentation should prove useful to both the project, by preventing unnecessary work in replicating configurations/images, and users, by providing a detailed description of the node's foundational software layer (similar, in principle, to the Substrate Catalog for documenting GENI hardware). Additionally, we also set up an initial Trac web site and SVN repository for ViSE related software. The initial import into the SVN repository includes the drivers and firmware for the radar and a framework for developing Xen-compatible device drivers for each sensing device. In addition to installing the base image we have codified and documented appropriate settings for the wireless network card to communicate over long distances via 802.11b.