Distributed Sensing of Fluid Dynamic Phenomena with the XDense Sensor Grid Network

Dense is a proposed wired mesh grid sensor network system tailored for scenarios that benefit from thousands of sensors per square meter. Dense has scalable network topology and protocols, customizable to application specifics, that enables complex feature extraction in real time from observed phenomena by exploiting communication and distributed processing capabilities of such network topologies. Dense has been designed with closed-loop CPS applications like active flow control of aircraft wing surfaces in mind. It uses a plug-n-play architecture that allows dimensioning of application specific networks. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of Dense in a fluid dynamic application scenario. With experiments on feature detection and real time scenarios, we demonstrate the potential of the architecture and discuss practical implementation issues.