I am presently working on my Master's thesis under the guidance of my advisor, Dr. Nasipuri to design and implement a load balanced and energy aware routing algorithm for large scale wireless sensor networks, typically a mesh network. A setup of wireless motes running Crossbow's XMesh protocol is in place at the TVA Paradise substation in Kentucky, Tennessee.
Crossbow Technology's micaz wireless motes (fig 1) which are equipped with Atmel's ATMega128L processor running at 8Mhz, 2.4GHz Chipcon cc2420 radio, 128KB program memory, 512KB measurement flash and 4KB EEPROM is used as a platform to monitor electrical equipments along with MTS300/310 which is an integrated sensor board that features built in sensors for temperature, light, acoustic signals and also a dual axis accelerometer (MTS310) in addition to a magnetometer (MTS310).
The main objective of this project was preemptive diagnosis of possible failures in transformers, circuit breakers and compressors and monitoring its health at all times. This saves a lot of human effort and the sensors attached to the body of these heavy electrical equipments send periodic data captured by its on-board sensors to a centrally located base station.
Crossbow Technology's XMesh protocol is used for routing this collected data to the base station. The motes are programmed using a specially designed operating system for wireless sensors i.e. the TinyOS. Programming is done using nesC language which is similar to C.
More information can be found from the Crossbow website here: InTech- A real mesh
I had given a presentation on the same in my advanced embedded systems class. Here is the link to it : Presentation on WSN's for substation monitoring
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