Sensor web
AssigneeCalifornia Institute of Technology
InventorsKevin A. Delin, Shannon Jackson
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A Sensor Web formed of a number of different sensor pods. Each of the sensor pods include a clock which is synchronized with a master clock so that all of the sensor pods in the Web have a synchronized clock. The synchronization is carried out by first using a coarse synchronization which takes less power, and subsequently carrying out a fine synchronization to make a fine sync of all the pods on the Web. After the synchronization, the pods ping their neighbors to determine which pods are listening and responded, and then only listen during time slots corresponding to those pods which respond.
Claims16
A method, comprising:
- deploying a plurality of sensor pods having a specified hardware characteristic and forming a sensor web;
- establishing wireless communications between a sensor pod of the plurality of sensor pods and a first set of sensor pods of the plurality of sensor pods that are only within a communication range of the sensor pod, the first set of sensor pods then processing data from the wireless communications and then broadcasting post-processed data to a second set of sensor pods that are only within a separate communication range of the first set of sensor pods;
- activating spaced sensor pods of said plurality to carry out a specified operation at each of a plurality of spaced locations;
- and evolving the sensor web by adding, while the sensor web is in operation, more sophisticated sensor pods which have an additional hardware characteristic than said specified hardware characteristic;
- wherein the processing data comprises extending a range or sensitivity of a given sensor pod by applying spatio-temporal trending by measuring and tracking spatio-temporal gradients of sensor pods measurements.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.