Raytheon BBN Technologies

Project Status

CitySense is a National Science Foundation-funded project to build a wireless sensor network that spans an entire city. This first-of-its-kind testbed enables wireless networking researchers to perform repeatable experiments in a real-world environment. Studies that were previously limited to simulation and the laboratory can be validated on this outdoor testbed.

CitySense leverages Raytheon BBN's expertise in network management to ensure that data from the meteorological and pollution sensors are available 24 x 7. The data is relayed via a wireless mesh network to a central server, connected to the internet, which archives and presents the data via the web. Each node monitors the health of its network connection and fails-over to a stable configuration if a fault is detected. Software updates to the wireless nodes are performed via a centralized web-interface that provides network managers instant feedback on the health of the testbed. See http://citysense.net

The current prototype consists of 25 sensor nodes deployed around Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the plan is to scale up the test-bed to 50 nodes or more over the coming months. We are working closely with domain experts in environmental monitoring and public health to drive the placement of the sensors.

Completed third year of NSF-funded collaboration with Harvard University 25 CitySense nodes are deployed on streetlights and buildings around Cambridge, MA Our database contains over 31 million measurements from our weather and pollutions sensors Access data at: http://citysense.bbn.com/DataQuery/ And http://citysense.bbn.com/DataQuery.php Educational outreach with area schools Sensors: Meteorological and CO2, soon noise level and particulates How: 2 radio multi-hop mesh network uses only a single wired gateway per cluster for low-cost deployment Goals: Deploy 25 more outdoor pollution sensors by Aug. 2010 Grow user community. Main web-site http://citysense.net To sign up for an account contact Josh Bers jbers@bbn.com