A Platform for Scalable Aggregate Computations in Cyber-Physical Systems

We focus on large-scale and dense deeply embedded systems
where, due to the large amount of information generated
by all nodes, even simple aggregate computations such
as the minimum value (MIN) of the sensor readings become
notoriously expensive to obtain. 

While recent research has exploited
a dominance-based protocol for computing aggregate
quantities in wired systems. In the wireless domain
though, there are still a number of challenges to overcome
so that such approaches become competitive. Our main contribution
is a novel hardware/software architecture
that proves to be efficient (low overhead, and low
energy consumption) for supporting aggregate computations
in wireless systems. We performed a comprehensive evaluation of the platform using real hardware implementations.

We advocate that our platform efficiently enables aggregate computations that exploit dominance Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols. This approach enables upcoming large-scale and dense deeply embedded systems, where the physical dynamics is tightly coupled with computation.

===Platform Schematics===
[imageright|Addon-On and Daughter Boards|{UP}main-rxsync.png]

Achieving dominance in the wireless domain is challenging and, to address these challenges, 
a prototype platform was developed in the form of an
add-on board that can be plugged into common WSN platforms
such as theMica family (Mica,Mica2 andMicaZ) and
the CMU-FireFly [14]. This design allows us to use other resources
(hardware and software) that exist in those common
platforms.


The schematics for the platform are available as pdf files or eagle cad schematics files (sch):

* Main Add-on Board <nowiki>[</nowiki>[{UP}addon_main%20v4.pdf|pdf]<nowiki>]</nowiki> <nowiki>[</nowiki>[{UP}addon_main%20v4.sch.zip|sch]<nowiki>]</nowiki>;
* Daughter Board <nowiki>[</nowiki>[{UP}addon_daughter%20v4.pdf|pdf]<nowiki>]</nowiki> <nowiki>[</nowiki>[{UP}addon_daughter%20v4.sch.zip|sch]<nowiki>]</nowiki>.

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[image|Add-on Board Stacked on Common Sensor Platforms|{UP}micaz-firefly.png]