Reporting Down Under

CNAS (Collaborative Network for Atmospheric Sensing) is an agent-based, power-aware sensor network for ground-level atmospheric monitoring. To conserve battery power, CNAS sensor agents must have their Wi-Fi radios turned off most of the time, as even listening consumes significant power. This complicates agent interaction and system responsiveness, because an agent cannot simply turn on its radio when it needs to send a message. CNAS agents also must have their radios turned on when others are sending messages to them and to support multi-hop message forwarding. In this paper, the authors briefly review the sensor-agent hardware and blackboard-system software used in CNAS, as well as how CNAS agents collaborate with only periodic radio availability.