A Distributed System for MAD-COW Disease Monitoring and Tracking

Advances in hardware technology and wireless communication have enabled the deployment of largescalesensor networks, where thousands to millions of self-powered, small and low-cost sensor nodes aredistributed over a vast field to obtain sensing data. These sensor nodes are equipped with sensing,communicating, and data processing units, which allow sensor nodes to collect, exchange, and processdata of the environment. The processing units used in the current generation of sensor nodes are alreadypowerful enough to perform some complicated algorithms to process sensing data, and they are expectedto be more powerful in the future. Due to these attractive characteristics, wireless sensor networks areideal candidates for a wide range of civil applications and military operations. This paper provides an indepthstudy of applying wireless sensor networks to real-world mad-cow disease monitoring and beefdistribution safety system. An extensive survey of the state of the art to design a distributed system forpervasive computing is conducted. A set of techniques and mechanisms are compared and ranked in thepaper. Then the characteristics for designing this kind of pervasive system are listed; the systemarchitecture is presented; and an instance of the key mechanisms for monitoring the mad-cow disease andtracking beef distribution system is presented. This system supports real-time communication andmultitasking scheduling as well.