EcoDAQ: A Densely Distributed, High Bandwidth Wireless Data Acquisition System

Current wireless sensor networks achieve dense deployment by low duty cycling. Unfortunately, this represents a great mismatch with many real-world applications that require non-trivial data rates. To solve these issues above, we propose EcoDAQ, a new densely distributed wireless data acquisition system with a relatively high data rate. We implement a MAC layer protocol that minimizes complexity and memory footprint on the sensor node while guaranteeing collision freedom, without using multiple frequency channels. As a result, this work is not only highly scalable to at least 50 active nodes per squared meter, but at the same time the low complexity minimizes the cost of these ultra-compact sensor devices. The full demo would show a system deployment with a minimum of 50 active sensors on a poster board of 1 m² area. The monitoring station keeps gathering up to 500 accelerometer data samples per second from all of these 50 sensor nodes and displays them simultaneously on a fifty-screen tiled display system. A portable version that emulates the tiled screens in a reduced size will be shown at the conference.