We want to deploy a sensor network in a home to automate the operation of various home entertainment and household devices. The key responsibility of the home application will be

• Whenever a person enters to the home the sensor network will determine the stable position of the person and send the position/location information to the central server (usually a PC)
• Depending on the location of the person and time at that moment also depending on the preferences of the person at that moment some devices such as TV, Computer, PDA will be turned on/off or switched to a different channel
• The sensor network will constantly monitor the movement of the home members and determine their stable position to operate devices at his current location

The key components of the application are

• A sensor network
• Different home appliances
• A server
• Members of the home carrying sensors or RFIDs

A wireless sensor network will be built over the home. Sensors will be placed at different locations and heights of the home so that presence and location of a person in the home can be easily detected. The topology of the network will be a grid mesh or a suitable topology to cover the total region of the home. To facilitate object tracking each sensor will be programmed with its physical location as well as the physical locations of its neighboring sensors. There is another alternate approach where some sensors are explicitly programmed about their positions other sensors learn from these sensors about their positions. The later approach provides some flexibility to deploy the sensors though it needs some initial time so that each sensor knows about their position accurately.

There will be some servers for the application. Depending on the dimension and application we might need one central or multiple interconnected distributed servers. All the sensors will collect data and send data to the servers directly or via other sensors. The members of the family will be equipped with some sort of sensors or RFIDs so that the persons are recognized by the sensors deployed over the home. The functions of the sensors will be specifically identify the position and identification of the family members. Sensors carried by the home members will bear the identification of the particular member. The sensor data will be analyzed by the servers and depending on the location of the persons a device will be turned on, off, or changed to different status. The decision will also be depended on the day of the week, time of the day and the preferences of the persons at that location, at that time. This sort of service might help aging people to lead a better life and control over their movement. Our purpose in the thesis is:

• Build a sensor network in the home to provide such supports
• Develop and implement an algorithm to exactly determine the location and identity of the home members
• Control and operate different home devices depending on the location, identification and preference of the home members

Issues to focus in the application

• Deployment and Topology
  • {A deployment strategy so that minimum number of sensors are needed also all area of the home can be identified}
  • {\textbf{Deployment Re-configurability - what are the right knobs to expose once we deploy the sensors???}}
  • {We need to minimize the deployment steps required. It is needed to experiment do we need to program each sensor to provide it an id and location? Or We want to use landmark sensors where we explicitly program in the location, and have the nearby sensors learn their locations.}
  • {Adaptive route discovery to reduce power consumption}
• Radio Range: The maximum region that our hardware platform and algorithm can address
• Power
  • {what would be a good mix of computing/communicating ratio to maximize sensor life. What are the tradeoffs here?}
• Fault tolerant issues
  • {Do we need a health monitoring agent? (local or global)}
  • {If sensors fail, are there any neighboring sensor to take over its place?}
• Data Rate
  • {How much data can the network provide?}
• Time Stamp
  • can real time stamp be possible? - Network time protocol???