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Mission Statement
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Technical Approach
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Related Opportunity
The
principal investigators are participants in the California Institute for
Telecommunications and Information Technology, or Cal-(IT)2, which is
a consortium (http://www.calit2.net)
of university and corporate institutions. Headquartered at University
of California, San Diego, this group is seeking to accelerate the development
and implementation of wireless communication for education, research,
and commercial applications. Larry Smarr, who is also on the NASA Advisory
Board, leads this program. Research results and demonstrations from this
ARC project will be distributed and advertised through Cal-(IT)2.
Related to this, NSF has established several major research programs using the San Diego State University Field Stations at its Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve (SMER). The two major projects are the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network, or HPWREN (http://hpwren.ucsd.edu) and the Real-time Observatories, Applications and Data management network, or ROADnet (http://roadnet.ucsd.edu). Scientists from around the world are accessing environmental data being collected at SMER in near real-time, over the Internet. These wireless communication research activities at the SMER will provide another opportunity for two-way dissemination of demonstration announcements, technical information, and research results. Real-time communication with other ecological reserves such as Mission Trails Regional Park, Tijuana Estuary, Sky Oaks, and several others are also in progress using the wireless infrastructure being installed in the region, using both 802.11b, 802.11a, and other commercial bandwidths. The unlicensed bands are also being widely used for scientific research and can link bubbles of 802.11b to the optical Internet from sites around Southern California (e.g., HPWREN efforts).
The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is emerging as one of the leading organizations in the U.S. for not only establishing and managing habitat and other land reserves, but for implementing geo-spatial technologies for monitoring lands that they manage. In particular, the Orange County office of TNC, headed by Trish Smith, has implemented a monitoring program for the Nature Reserve of Orange County near Laguna Beach, CA. Baseline digital image mosaic and vegetation products are being developed by commercial contractors using ADAR multispectral imagery. The Orange County TNC will participate in the ARC project by providing guidance and by being the most likely operational user of the wireless and Web-based technologies, for which prototypes will be developed as part of this project.
Several other groups that will be interested in participating in these experiments include the Naval Space Systems Center (SSC-SD) which is part of SPAWAR and several of their supporters such as DARPA. Their interest in imagery sent to the field is essentially the same as that for Park Rangers. The San Diego Telecom Council, a group of about 400 telecommunications companies in San Diego (http://www.telecom1.org) is a major supporter of projects like Cal-(IT)2 and can provide technical help from a wealth of suppliers and deployers of almost every available wireless product. Their Sensor Networks group in particular, as well as several wireless special interest groups will be involved to help with this project. Other groups like the San Diego Supercomputer Center (http://www.sdsc.edu) have imaging groups like that headed by Mike Bailey (http://www.sdsc.edu/~mjb) who are interested in participating in the image processing and serving of the data. Cal-(IT)2 partners such as SGI with their wireless Visual Area Network are also interested in participating at the very high end. Software groups like ESRI, GeoFusion, and others have also expressed a major interest in working with SDSU on this project.