Dependability Competition
Call for Competitors
Low-power wireless sensor networks are becoming an integral part of our daily lives and are envisioned to be soon employed in application domains imposing strict dependability requirements on network performance, such as Smart Production, Smart Cities, or Connected Cars.
One of the biggest challenges in order to achieve dependable communications in these settings is the increasing congestion of the freely available ISM bands. The presence of RF interference from surrounding devices operating at high power may indeed cause a substantial packet loss and a drastic increase in latency and energy consumption.
Over the last decade, a large number of communication protocols and RF mitigation techniques have been proposed by both academia and industry, but their performance in congested environments has rarely been benchmarked under the same settings. This competition aims to compare the performance of different WSN/IoT communication protocols in environments rich with radio interference.
Evaluation Scenario
The focus of this year will be on links operating on the 2.4 GHz ISM band. Contestants will be asked to deploy their software on a few off-the-shelf Maxfor MTM-5000 sensor nodes (TelosB replicas) and to dependably communicate despite the surrounding radio interference.
In particular, one of the sensor nodes (sensing node) will be placed in proximity of a light source and should monitor its brightness using the embedded light sensors. Any sudden variation in the lighting condition should be promptly communicated to a sink node that will trigger one of its I/O pins accordingly. The sink node is not in the communication range of the sensing node and additional forwarding nodes are available in the surroundings in order to reach the sink in a multi-hop fashion. The light source will be turned off and on according to a secret schedule. The delay with which each change in the lighting condition will be reported to the sink are going to be measured and considered in the evaluation metric.
RF interference will be generated in the competition area using sensor nodes running JamLab. This will ensure repeatability across multiple experiments (for more information, refer to this document). All sensor nodes will be USB powered and will be connected to a central testbed machine for efficient reprogramming. The number of nodes available and their exact position will not be revealed to the contestants and the ID of the nodes can be read from the on-board 1 MB external flash.
Eligibility
Both academia and industry submissions are encouraged. All communication protocols used in low-power wireless sensor networks are welcome, including protocols using channel hopping and forward error correction techniques, and there is no restriction on the operating system used to program the sensor nodes. Competitors will be asked to provide a compatible binary file that will be uploaded on the sensor nodes and to let the sink communicate the status of the light source using the expansion pins or common serial tools. To ensure compatibility with the testbed setup, additional information and code examples will be provided at a later stage.
Evaluation and Prize
The solutions will be judged based on the reliability of transmissions (number of changes in the lighting condition correctly reported to the sink), on the end-to-end latency in communicating each change in the lighting condition to the sink node, and on the energy-efficiency of the solution. The energy consumption of sensor nodes will be continuously measured using additional hardware. Further information on the metric used for the evaluation will be provided on a later stage.
Depending on the nature and number of submissions, multiple categories may be defined (i.e., single channel vs. channel hopping). The final set of categories will be announced after the notification to the contestants.
Cash awards will be given to the winners in each category, and the top-classified contestants in each category will be invited to present their approach in a dedicated competition session at the conference.
Submission Instructions
Formatting requirements. Contestants must submit an abstract describing their approach in detail by the contest registration deadline. Submissions must be written in English and can have a maximum length of 2 pages.
Pages must have 8.5" x 11" (letter) two-column format, using 10-point type on 11-point leading, with a maximum text block of 7" wide x 9" deep with an intercolumn spacing of .25". The page limits include figures, tables, and references. Authors may use the LaTeX templates provided here.
Abstracts should prominently include the name of the authors as well as their affiliation and contact information. The abstracts will be pre-selected and the accepted ones will appear in the ACM Digital Library, unless authors explicitly mark the abstract as confidential.
Submission system. To register for the competition, please email your abstract to cboano(at)tugraz.at with the following subject line: "EWSN 2016 Competition - Submission".
[NEW!] Due to numerous requests, we have extended the submission deadline of about a week in order to avoid conflicts with the main conference track.
Extended Contest Registration and Abstract Deadline: October 7, 2015, 11:59 pm EST (no further extension will be granted).
Notification of acceptance: October 21, 2015
The competition will take place if a minimum number of teams respond to this preliminary call for competition.
Important Dates
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