| Significant progress has been made in the field of Wireless Sensor Networks in the decade that passed since its inception. This thesis presents several advances intended to make these networks a suitable instrument for environmental monitoring. The thesis first describes Koala, a low-power data-retrieval system that can achieve duty cycles below 1% by using bulk transfers, and Low Power Probing, a novel mechanism to efficiently wake up a network. The second contribution is Serendipity, another data-retrieval system, which takes advantage of the random rendezvous inherent in the Low Power Probing mechanism to achieve a very low duty cycle for low data rate networks. The third part explores the problem of and presents a solution for the interference between WSNs using IEEE 802.15.4 radios and the ubiquitous WiFi networks in the 2.4 GHz spectrum bandwidth. The last contribution of this thesis is Latte, a restricted version of the JavaScript language, that not only can be compiled to C and dynamically loaded on a sensing node, but can also be simulated and debugged in a JavaScript-enabled browser. |
