CitySense

Matt Welsh and Josh Bers

We have been awarded an NSF grant to develop an urban-scale sensor
network testbed, called CitySense. The idea is to deploy 100+ nodes
consisting of embedded Linux PCs with 802.11a/b/g and fancy weather
sensors on light poles all over Cambridge, MA. The testbed is intended
to be an open platform, like PlanetLab, allowing multiple users to
program and monitor the network.

I am attaching the original project description from the proposal.
We don't have a formal web page yet but that should go online soon.

The award is very recent (8/1/06) so we are just now starting on the
prototyping effort. Our first milestone is to build a small-scale
testbed with 5-10 nodes and deploy it on the rooftops at Harvard and
BBN, to get experience with the hardware and software, before we grow
it out to larger numbers. It is a 4-year project in total so our main
deliverables will be to have the complete network up and running in
Year 3 or Year 4. The proposal has a more detailed timeline.

The genesis of these ideas and the proposal itself came about around
the same time that work on GENI was getting started, so it was a happy
coincidence that CitySense has so much overlap with the GENI
prototyping efforts. We certainly envision CitySense as a prototype of
the wireless sensor component of GENI. (I am involved on the GENI
Wireless Working Group as well) Because our nodes are fairly capable
we can imagine CitySense also offering an 'urban wireless' environment
for GENI, quite separate from its sensors. So we are excited to get
this system built up and start getting users on board.