CitySense: A Vision for an Urban-Scale Wireless Sensor Testbed

March 27, 2008
Matt Welsh | Harvard University

In this talk, I will describe CitySense, a NSF-funded collaboration between Harvard University and BBN Technologies to build a city-wide wireless sensor testbed that will be open to the research community. CitySense will consist of 100 Linux-based embedded PCs outfitted with dual 802.11a/b/g radios and various sensors, mounted on streetlights and buildings across a city (our current target is Cambridge, MA). CitySense takes its cue from citywide urban mesh networking projects, but will differ substantially in that nodes will be directly programmable by end users. The goal of CitySense is explicitly not to provide public Internet access, but rather to serve as a new kind of experimental apparatus for urban-scale distributed systems and networking research efforts. We are working with researchers in environmental monitoring, public health, urban planning, and other fields to leverage CitySense for novel scientific studies.

In this talk, I will motivate the need for CitySense and its potential to support a host of new research and application developments. I will also outline the various research challenges involved in building, deploying, and managing such a testbed.

Speaker Details

Matt Welsh is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, where he has been since 2003. His research interests involve operating system, network, and language support for complex distributed systems. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from U.C. Berkeley and his B.S. from Cornell University. He is also the co-founder of AID Networks, an early-stage company developing wireless sensor platforms for emergency medicine.