Realising high-rate sensing in wireless embedded systems

A number of wireless sensor network (WSN) applications require the handling of high-fidelity data (such as audio or images), and/or are very bursty in their networking and processing activity (i.e. there are long periods of inactivity interrupted by short periods where lots of data is processed and/or communicated). Sensor node platforms which can support such bursty or high-fidelity sensor data are within our reach. However, we need to understand how to implement such demanding systems, and what the implications are for current and future hardware capabilities (battery life, computational power, and communication bandwidth). This paper provides an abstract of three ongoing research efforts exploring high-rate sensing; these were presented in an invited talk at INSS 2008.