Impresario is a wireless sensor network, consisting of MicaZ motes and built over NDMesh-2. The motes measure information such as temperature, sound, acceleration, magnetic fields, light, and more. Each Crossbow Stargate device of the NDMesh-2 mesh network in the Engineering building of Notre Dame is paired with a mote (Stargate and mote communicate via Zigbee). The sink device for the sensor network is located in office 354 (indicated by the laptop icon in the image to the right) and sensor data is stored in an SQL database. Each mote measures and disseminates sensor data once per second via the Courier infrastructure.

This test bed serves as experimental playground for numerous sensing applications and systems issues in wireless sensor networking. Current efforts include multi-hop routing, reliable routing, real-time communication, sensor data mining, and sensor network programming.

Some of the motes are used to measure interesting scenarios such as thermal management of clusters or localization of persons carrying or wearing Zigbee equipped mobile devices. Motes communicate with each other and with Stargate devices via Zigbee radio. The Stargates communicate via Courier (using WiFi and Bluetooth) and Courier uses DSR (Dynamic Source Routing), Flooding, AODV (Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector), and GF (Geographic Forwarding) for routing. Future versions of Courier will rely on the CMR toolkit to provide configurable routing approaches.