Congestion avoidance and control
SIGCOMM '88 Symposium proceedings on Communications architectures and protocols
Detection of abrupt changes: theory and application
Detection of abrupt changes: theory and application
Proceedings of the 7th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking
An environmental energy harvesting framework for sensor networks
Proceedings of the 2003 international symposium on Low power electronics and design
Utilizing Solar Power in Wireless Sensor Networks
LCN '03 Proceedings of the 28th Annual IEEE International Conference on Local Computer Networks
Versatile low power media access for wireless sensor networks
SenSys '04 Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems
Energy Scavenging for Mobile and Wireless Electronics
IEEE Pervasive Computing
Design considerations for solar energy harvesting wireless embedded systems
IPSN '05 Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Information processing in sensor networks
Perpetual environmentally powered sensor networks
IPSN '05 Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Information processing in sensor networks
PIPENETa wireless sensor network for pipeline monitoring
Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Information processing in sensor networks
Power management in energy harvesting sensor networks
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS) - Special Section LCTES'05
Human Body Energy Harvesting Thermogenerator for Sensing Applications
SENSORCOMM '07 Proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Sensor Technologies and Applications
NAWMS: nonintrusive autonomous water monitoring system
Proceedings of the 6th ACM conference on Embedded network sensor systems
Experimental results with two wireless power transfer systems
RWS'09 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Radio and wireless symposium
SWATS: Wireless sensor networks for steamflood and waterflood pipeline monitoring
IEEE Network: The Magazine of Global Internetworking
Experiences from a decade of TinyOS development
OSDI'12 Proceedings of the 10th USENIX conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation
DoubleDip: leveraging thermoelectric harvesting for low power monitoring of sporadic water use
Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Embedded Network Sensor Systems
Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems
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Sensornets promise to extend automated monitoring and control into industrial processes. In spite of great progress made in sensornet design, installation and operational costs can impede their widespread adoption---current practices of infrequent, manual observation are often seen as sufficient and more cost effective than automation, even for key business processes. In this paper we present two new approaches to reduce these costs, and we apply those approaches to rapidly detect blockages in steam pipelines of a production oilfield. First, we eliminate the high cost of bringing power to the field by generating electricity from heat, exploiting the high temperature of the very pipelines we monitor. We demonstrate that for temperature differences of 80 °C or more, we are able to sustain sensornet operation without grid electricity or batteries. Second, we show that non-invasive sensing can reduce the cost of sensing by avoiding sensors that pierce the pipeline and have high installation cost with interruption to production. Our system instead uses surface temperature to infer full or partial blockages in steam pipelines and full blockages in hot water pipelines. Finally, we evaluate our "steam-powered sensing" system to monitor potential blockages in steam pipeline chokes at a production oilfield. We also show the generality of our algorithm by applying it to detect water pipeline blockages in our lab. To our knowledge, this paper describes the first field-tested deployment of an industrial sensornet that employs non-solar energy harvesting.