ITR: ZebraNet: Position-aware Power-aware Wireless Computing for Wildlife Tracking

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As computer systems become increasingly ubiquitous, computer systems research and design has movedfrom being a highly performance-centric process to being one that juggles many design goals and metrics.Mobile and embedded computing systems must, in addition to providing sufficient performance, be rugged,reliable, power-efficient, and lightweight. Because of the extreme and multidimensional design constraints they face, they must also be attentive to the specific needs of application domains, so they can be designed to satisfy these needs while still meeting power budgets and weight limits.The Princeton ZebraNet Project is an inter-disciplinary effort with thrusts in both Biology and ComputerSystems. On the computer systems side, ZebraNet is studying power-aware, position-awarecomputing/communication systems. Namely, the ZebraNet project works to develop, evaluate, implement,and test systems that integrate computing, wireless communication, and non-volatile storage along withglobal positioning systems (GPS) and other sensors. On the biology side, the technology enables novelstudies of animal migrations and inter-species interactions. From a computing standpoint, key researchbreakthroughs are required in protocol and system design in order to make the system power-efficient andreliable. From a biology standpoint, the system enables fundamentally new types of biologicalobservations that allow us to: (i) understand long-range migrations in large mammals, (ii) observe inter-species interactions between carnivores (predators) and ungulates (prey), and (iii) track the behavior of extremely endangered species.As a computer systems research problem, ZebraNet is compelling because the needs of the biologicalresearchers are stringent enough to require real breakthroughs in wireless protocols and in low-powercomputer systems design and computer systems power management. These breakthroughs can beleveraged into other (non-wildlife-oriented) fields of research; essentially ZebraNet is a power-awarewireless ad hoc sensor network, but with more serious bandwidth and computational needs than most priorsensor networks research problems. As a biology research problem, ZebraNet allows researchers to poseand to answer important long-standing questions about long-range migration, inter-species interactions, and nocturnal behavior.Major research activities span a broad range, including: Modeling long-range animal migrations Observing inter-species predator-prey interactions Analyzing the impact of human development on animal behavior Developing power-aware systems for position-aware computing Incorporating error resilience and domain-specific performance optimizations into lightweight wireless protocols Managing logged sensor data to minimize the number of required uploads from tracking nodesZebraNet is engaging in a mix of theoretical research, prototyping, and field experimentation. The projectis not solely about systems-building, but rather mixes theory with practical hands-on evaluations of theZebraNet designs. Research is conducted both at Princeton University and at the Mpala Research Centre.Mpala is a biology field station in central Kenya that Princeton University administers along with theKenya Wildlife Service, the National Museums of Kenya, the Mpala Wildlife Foundation, and theSmithsonian Institution.Overall, ZebraNet represents a truly interdisciplinary effort bringing together research strengths fromdisparate fields over a challenging problem. The potential contribution of the project includes significantadvances in computing technology as well as in our understanding of wildlife migrations. The three mainresearchers bring strengths in wildlife biology, power-aware computer systems, and wireless technology.The interplay between these disciplines fosters creative to the research problems in both arenas.