Margaret Martonosi

The ZebraNet Wildlife Tracker

Dept. of Electrical Engineering
and
Dept. of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Princeton University

January 2-24, 2004: ZebraNet heads to Kenya for its first test deployment! We will be at the Mpala Research Centre and deploying nodes on zebras at the Sweetwaters Reserve. Mpala is a biology field station in central Kenya that Princeton University administers along with the Kenya Wildlife Service, the National Museums of Kenya, the Mpala Wildlife Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Funded by a research grant from the National Science Foundation through their Information Technology Research (ITR) initiative, ZebraNet is a project to explore wireless protocols and position-aware computation from a power-efficient perspective.

The Princeton ZebraNet Project is an inter-disciplinary effort with thrusts in both Biology and Computer Systems. On the computer systems side, ZebraNet is studying power-aware, position-aware computing/communication systems. Namely, the goals are to develop, evaluate, implement, and test systems that integrate computing, wireless communication, and non-volatile storage along with global positioning systems (GPS) and other sensors. On the biology side, the goal is to use systems to perform novel studies of animal migrations and inter-species interactions.

As a computer systems research problem, ZebraNet is compelling because the needs of the biological researchers are stringent enough to require real breakthroughs in wireless protocols and in low-power computer systems design and computer systems power management. These breakthroughs can be leveraged into other (non-wildlife-oriented) fields of research; essentially ZebraNet is a power-aware wireless ad hoc sensor network, but with more serious bandwidth and computational needs than most prior sensor networks research problems. As a biology research problem, ZebraNet allows researchers to pose and to answer important long-standing questions about long-range migration, inter-species interactions, and nocturnal behavior.

ZebraNet article in the Princeton Weekly Bulletin in November, 2002.
ZebraNet interview as part of the Dec 5 edition of BBC Radio4's "Leading Edge" program

August, 2003: ZebraNet II Hardware design is a winner at the ISLPED Student Design Contest.
June, 2003: Impala Middleware System. PPoPP 03. (pdf)
Oct, 2002: ZebraNet overview paper at ASPLOS:
Spring, 2002: Very non-technical ZebraNet Talk (pdf) (given to ELE391 "The Wireless Revolution")