The telematics project introduces the students to the topic of wireless embedded systems. Depending on the term's current focus Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and/or Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) resp. their hardware are to be programmed and used.

Wireless networks face more problems than their wired counterparts due the properties of theshared medium, mobility of network nodes, and new application scenarios. Novel approaches are needed to handle these challenges.

Topics and tasks will be introduced, explained, and assigned in the fist session.

Online literature

• Course introduction slides
• First steps slides
• You will find lots of documentation about ScatterWeb at http://scatterweb.mi.fu-berlin.de
• ANSI C Reference Card (pdf)
• The C Book at http://publications.gbdirect.co.uk/c_book/ (recommended)
• Everything you need to know about pointers in C at http://boredzo.org/pointers/
• How Memory Management Works at http://www.zathras.de/ang...
• C FAQ at http://c-faq.com/
• C Elements of Style at http://www.oualline.com/style/index.html
• Writing Bug Free Code at http://www.duckware.com/bugfreec/index.html
• Numerical Recipes in C, Second Edition (1992) at http://www.nrbook.com/a/bookcpdf.php

Literature

• Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie. The C Programming Language, 2nd Edition. Prentice Hall PTR. March 22, 1988. ISBN: 0-13-110362-8.
• Peter Prinz und Ulla Kirch-Prinz. C kurz und gut. O'Reilly, January 2002. ISBN:3-89721-238-2
• Lutz Bierl. Das große MSP430 Praxisbuch. Franzis. February 2004. ISBN: 3-7723-4299-X

Location: K60

ECTS-credits: 10

KVV page

Attendance at the organizational meeting (08.10.08, 14:00-16:00) is mandatory! If you could not register for this course, attend the meeting nevertheless. We might still have vacancy.

This course is a project seminar and no pro-seminar!!!

What will you do and learn in this course?

1. WSN: You will program small sensor boards, consisting of a microcontroller, attached sensors and communication devices (radio modules, bluetooth). Our so called ScatterWeb nodes use a custom minimal operation system that can be easily modified.
2. WMN: Using Linux based mesh routers various problems are to be solved spanning from routing, over address assignment, to service placement. While the OS is more powerful than the one mentioned above you will learn that it is more difficult to modify a complex real world system. Each of the routers is equipped with at least three IEEE 802.11b/g wireless cards and uses an AMD Geode CPU.
3. You will learn how to set up, configure, and monitor these devices to build a big, powerful, yet flexible distributed network. We will introduce you into up to date scientific research. Experiments and the evaluation of the measured data as well as scientific writing will be explained. We expect you to hand in a (short) report on your topic.

A total work time of 150h as well as active participation and teamwork are required to pass the course. Besides lab hours you therefore have to do part of your work at home or in the PC pools.

Schedule

• 08.10.2008
  • First Meeting
  • Course introduction (Slides)
  • Requirements for successful participation
• 15.08.2008
  • Team forming
  • First steps (Slides)
• 22.08.2008 - 17.12.2008
  • Supervised lab hours
• 17.12.2008
  • First deadline
  • First technical report
• 07.01.2009 - 11.02.2009
  • Supervised lab hours
• 11.02.2009
  • Second deadline
  • Second technical report

Additional dates will be announced!

Prerequisites

Vordiplom or BSc (no BSc students!!!)

• Lecture Telematics
• Lecture Mobile Communications
• Protocols and protocolstacks
• Basics OS related knowledge
• Programming in C
• Doxygen
• Subversion
• LaTeX

Exam/Course Requirements

No exam, but you have to attend at all Wednesdays and submit two technical reports of six pages written/typesetted with LaTeX. The paper has to be written in english. Your (documented) source code has also be handed in on schedule. You have to meet all deadlines!

A minimum of 150 work hours per person is required. This means additional work has to be done besides the lab hours.

Assignments/Tasks

available after the organizational meeting

Working outside the lab

• The MSPGCC toolchain is needed to compile the source code. Please have a look at the official website. Windows binaries should be provided as an installer.

• Linux users should refer to this guide to compile the binaries on their own.

• Debian i686 packages are available here.

• You can use any text editor or IDE (e.g. Eclipse, Visual Studio, KDevelop, ...).

• To access the repository a Subversion client is needed (e.g. svn, kdesvn, Tortoise SVN, ...).

Windows users should know that Cygwin is needed for MSPGCC. Common problems reside in multiple incompatible cygwin1.dll files and the usage of a make version older than 3.81. Delete all but the most recent cygwin1.dll.