Teaching wireless sensor networks by incorporating reorganization algorithms into the labs

• Authors: T. Andrew Yang;Dinesh Reddy Gudibandi
• Venue: Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges
• Year: 2008

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have emerged in recent years as a topic attracting significant interest from both academia and industry. By completing a WSN lab, students can learn useful concepts and skills, including network setup, protocols, data collection/processing, sensor programming, developing and configuring WSN, etc. To effectively teach wireless sensor networks, having students engaging in hands-on projects is as important as teaching them the theories. Our goal is to build upon the source codes of an existing WSN method and design a set of simulation and emulation labs, each incorporating a case study involving tasks such as reorganization, secure routing, object tracking, Denial of Service attacks and counter-measures, etc. Instead of creating a WSN from the scratch, students learn about WSN via tailoring a method to incorporate interesting features into the existing source codes. In this paper, we propose to use WSN reorganization as a case study and incorporate it into designing WSN simulation labs. Starting with a given set of WSN papers, source codes, and reorganizaiton algorithms, students are asked to incorporate some of the algorithms into the existing WSN method. Such projects enable the student to gain in-depth understanding of how a WSN operates, and how the source codes of an existing WSN method may be modified to enable reorganization of sensor nodes. A sample lab incorporating WSN reorganization is presented as a demonstration of this approach. Interested instructors may tailor the lab to accommodate other case studies for their classes. Interested instructors may tailor the lab to accommodate other case studies for their classes.