Distributed Systems with Wireless Sensor Networks

Conventional distributed system courses follow a syllabus in which a list of topics is discussed independently and at different levels of abstractions. We propose to use a wireless sensor network environment to pin all topics down to concrete applications and to maintain issues such as fault tolerance and coordination continuously present. We describe a syllabus with eight conceptual modules, each of them associated to a hands-on experience with wireless sensor networks, which may be assigned either as homework or as a hands-on class, depending on the number of classroom hours that are available.