Researchers in Cambridge, Mass., working under a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation, will create a wireless network to monitor weather and pollution across the city. Eventually, it may also be used for public Internet access.Researchers in Cambridge, Mass., working under a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation, will create a wireless network to monitor weather and pollution across the city. Eventually, it may also be used for public Internet access.
Over the next four years, researchers from HarvardUniversity, working with BBN Technology, will deploy the CitySense network, installing 100 sensors on streetlamps to form a wireless mesh around the city.
According to a story from the IDG News Service, each node will be powered by city electricity and will include “an embedded PC, an 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi interface and a collection of weather sensors.”
Data collected by the sensors will be used for real-time environmental monitoring, to correlate micro-climates with population health, and track the spread of bio-chemical agents that may be released into the air.
This is just the sort of high-end research application we’ve come to expect out of this group. BBN (for those of us who are old enough to remember) was one of the key players in the development of the original Internet, back in the 1960s when it was still a research project known as ARPAnet (Advanced Research Projects Agency).
Click here to read about the CitySense network.
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