“It was perhaps the first time in the world that an actual deployment was done. Earlier, professors and scholars in many universities abroad had conducted some research and written papers, but no one had actually deployed or implemented the ideas that were developed in the labs. Our project took the idea into the field and successfully implemented it,” stated Dr. Maneesha V. Ramesh, Director, Center for Wireless Networks and Applications.
“This will be an experimental wireless sensor network deployed partly indoors and partly outdoors,” stated Mr. Rayudu, Research Associate, who is leading the development of the virtual lab.
“The lab will provide students practical experience in designing, deploying, and implementing wireless sensor networks in both indoor and outdoor conditions. Remote users will have a permanent test-bed to develop and test concepts,” he added. The lab will allow remote users to write their own programs, load and test their programs for learning the impact and trade-off between different designs.
The lab, currently being funded by the Ministry of Human Resources Development, was created in February 2012. Three experiments of the lab have already been uploaded on the virtual lab website – Introduction to Wireless Sensor Networks, nesC Programming, and Send and Receive.
Experiments are developed keeping in mind the needs of undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as research scholars.
“The different concepts we plan to work on are power consumption, transmission range, energy optimization and data collection,” emphasized Dr. Maneesha Ramesh.
In order to get the feel of a real lab, students will test actual sensors and wireless sensor networks on a remote triggered basis. This will most likely be the country’s first remote-triggered virtual lab in computer science. The interfaces for recording data and performing calculations on the collected data will be provided, giving a real-world feeling for the lab.
The virtual lab will include an intuitive web-based interface where registered users can upload executables, associate those executables with motes to create a job, and schedule the job to be run on this lab. The lab will include animations, how-to videos, spreadsheets and calculations, and other tools necessary for data collection and data plotting, among others.
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