An Empirical Analysis of TinyOS RF Networking (and Beyond...)

Context, particularly location, is an important source of information for human-computer interaction. In our project, we examine hardware, networking, and systems issues for a location sensing infrastructure. We present a thorough empirical analysis of the TinyOS RF motes. This analysis is leveraged to build a model of the RF signal strength. We have built a prototype system that employs a Kalman filter to determine distance between pairs of devices. Using a mass-spring system, we aggregate the distance measurements of all the networked devices. The location information is displayed with a visual user interface.