Flexible Low Cost Wireless Sensor Networks
- Duration: March 2006 – Aug 2006
- Instructor: Lin Zhang (linzhang [at] tsinghua [dot] edu [dot] cn)
FLOWS is the abbreviation of Flexible LOw cost Wireless Sensor systems. As its name indicates, FLOWS enjoys the characters of low cost and flexibility. There is a ultra low-power MCU on the board, and an embeded OS is running on it. In this way, MAC and routing protocols and applications can be programmed as needed to fill diversities of scenarios. The radio front-end is another outstanding property of FLOWS. It can switch it working frequency among 433M/866M/913M bands according to the software programmable registers in the MCU. Within each band, there are multiple channels applicable, and this makes it possible for us to implement multi-channel MAC protocols or even frequency hopping protocols by simply software coding in the MCU.
The project is on-going supported in part by China 863 project and several industrial contracts. Several industrial products based on FLOWS node have been released. On major project we contracted lately is the infrastructure security monitoring for the China National Stadium for Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Two types of wireless sensor nodes, namely, temperature sensors and tension sensors, are deployed permanently on the roof of the stadium, nick named as "the Bird Nest".