Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networking is my primary area of research. I have done some work regarding the coexistence of IEEE 802.15.4 with IEEE 802.11 in the 2.4GHz ISM band.

In the Distributed Systems Lab, we have the Ember development kit which comprises of 12 sensor nodes. The sensor nodes use the Atmel 128L microcontroller along with the famous CC2420 IEEE 802.15.4 radio. I have ported the Contiki Operating System for Wireless Sensor Networks to these nodes. Contiki is much more flexible and hackable than the proprietary software that comes with the Ember development kit. For more information about Contiki you can go to the website at http://www.sics.se/contiki/

Wifi/IEEE 802.11

I have spent sometime working on the ath5k drivers for the Atheros 5xxx family of chipsets. Ath5k is currently under development. These drivers further the hacking opportunity provided by the Madwifi drivers. As opposed to Madwifi, Ath5k makes direct hardware calls and is completely open source software.

Ath5k drivers make it easy to understand the gory details of IEEE 802.11 hardware and device drivers. By studying the drivers you can get an idea about what can be changed and thus developed solutions which exploit the flexibility provided by the device drivers.