LUSTER

Introduction

LUSTER (Light Under Shrub Thicket for Environmental and Ecological Research) system is to investigate the use of wireless sensor networks for monitoring the effects of sunlight on shrub thicket. These are important for study by ecologists because shrub thickets tend to overwhelm grasslands in many areas of Earth. LUSTER helps scientists understand this process and evaluate its consequences to the global habitat of all fauna and people on Earth (see Ecological motivation).

LUSTER System

We build the hardwares and software system in Luster project. Custom hardwares are designed to combine sensing and energy harvesting, removable storage. Luster software system uses a hierarchical architecture that includes distributed reliable storage, delay-tolerant networking, and deployment time validation techniques. The whole system provides reliable and real-time data service to ecologists, and have a tremendous advantage over existing instrumentation used in shrub thicket studies. An overview of the system is available, as are details with pictures and descriptions of the components.

Deployment experience

LUSTER has been implemented and evaluated in laboratory conditions, a test deployment in a forested area. Also we deployed Luster with environmental scientists on Hog Island off the Eastern Shore of Virginia twice in summer, 2007. 19 Micaz nodes with 133 sensors and 5 storage nodes were deployed in Shrub Thickets, and light readings are uploaded to the remote server through WiFi Link and Internet. Many Experiences and Lessons are learned during deployment, and will benefit other environmental WSN projects.

This project is in collaboration with Virginia Coastal Reserve LTER research at Environmental Sciences Departments of University of Virginia (UVA) and Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU).