Wireless Sensor Platform for Sporting Applications

Abstract

With Wireless Sensors widely used in various domains like home automation, industrial monitoring there is a market urge to deploy the wireless sensors in sporting applications. By deploying wireless sensors in sports, various dimensions of use-case scenarios become obvious which include monitoring sports players to help assess their fitness levels during training sessions and during play, enhance game strategy and provide TV broadcasters with lucrative statistics for the audience. As a first step to realize these use-cases, a platform to create such applications is needed to rapidly prototype devices as a proof of concept. However, to monitor professional sports players and to help make scientific analysis, a deluge of information is needed with less error margin. In this thesis, a wireless sensor platform is designed and developed, customized for creating prototypes of nodes for the sports players. Multiple gateways can be used along the boundary of the play-field to cover the entire playfield and with the mobile sensor nodes making hand-off between the gateways based on their proximity. A time-sharing mechanism is used by the nodes to gain access to the channel and is centralized at the gateway. The gateway provides authentication to which sensor node can transmit data in a round-robin manner. Experimental results show that the packet losses are around 1% with varying cases explaining that only one node communicate with the gateway at any point of time. One of the major drawbacks of such time-slotted protocols is the latency due to the failed nodes and in this protocol a mechanism is devised to mitigate this latency. The net data-rate is also enhanced by transmitting multiple packets in a time-compacted slot without linearly increasing the slot-width.