The pen project

pen is an experiment into low powered, low range ubiquitous wireless networking. We imagine pen as offering a first-level communications channel, available to even the simplest sensing and telemetry devices, within the Active Office.

pen concurs with many of the ideas of ubiquitous computing. We expect the environment to be littered with a multitude of different types of computing devices - static, mobile and embedded, used for sensing, communications and control. An office which is aware of, and adaptive to, changes within it requires a collaboration and communication between these different devices. The primary requirement for this to be possible is a network.

pen makes it possible for us to experiment with different aspects of what the requirements of such a network will be. These range from systems design - low powered, low rate radio telemetry, through to protocols for ad-hoc networking and higher level resource description mechanisms.

The first implementation of a pen architecture operates at 418MHz where we have transceivers providing us with 40kHz of bandwidth. We have developed media access and networking protocols above this, and conducted experiments putting the system to use in various embedded control and telemetry applications.

More Information:

From here, take a look at some pictures of our prototype hardware, and some some details of people in the group.

Publications

The Design and Implementation of a Low Power Ad Hoc Protocol Stack

Gray Girling, Jennifer Li Kam Wa, Paul Osborn, Radina Stefanova
Presented at IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, September 2000, Chicago
www-lce.eng.cam.ac.uk/publications/files/tr.2000.13.pdf

The PEN Low Power Protocol Stack

Gray Girling, Jennifer Li Kam Wa, Paul Osborn, Radina Stefanova
Presented at the 9th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks, October 2000, Las Vegas
www-lce.eng.cam.ac.uk/publications/files/tr.2000.12.pdf

Piconet - Embedded Mobile Networking

Frazer Bennett, David Clarke, Joseph B. Evans, Andy Hopper, Alan Jones, David Leask
Published in IEEE Personal Communications, Vol. 4, No. 5, October 1997, pp 8-15
www-lce.eng.cam.ac.uk/publications/files/tr.97.9.ps.Z
www-lce.eng.cam.ac.uk/publications/files/tr.97.9.pdf

The R2 Low-Power Messaging and Rendezvous Layer

J.N.Weatherall
Presented at SIGOPS European Workshop, September 2000
www-lce.eng.cam.ac.uk/publications/files/tr.2000.11.pdf

Predator: A Distributed Location Service and Example Applications

James Weatherall, Andy Hopper
To appear in the proceedings of Cooperative Buildings 1999, Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science. ©Springer-Verlag
www-lce.eng.cam.ac.uk/publications/files/tr.1999.5.ps.gz
www-lce.eng.cam.ac.uk/publications/files/tr.1999.5.pdf

The Cocaine Auction Protocol: On The Power of Anonymous Broadcast

Frank Stajano, Ross Anderson
To appear in A. Pfitzmann, Proceedings of Information Hiding Workshop 1999, Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science. ©Springer-Verlag
www-lce.eng.cam.ac.uk/publications/files/tr.1999.4.pdf
www-lce.eng.cam.ac.uk/publications/files/tr.1999.4.ps.gz

The Resurrecting Duckling: Security Issues for Ad-hoc Wireless Networks

Frank Stajano, Ross Anderson
To appear in B. Christianson, B. Crispo and M. Roe (Eds.) Security Protocols. 7th International Workshop Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, 1999. ©Springer-Verlag.
A revised version (tr.1999.2b) appears in the proceedings of the 3rd AT&T Software Symposium (20th October 1999, Middletown, NJ, USA).
www-lce.eng.cam.ac.uk/publications/files/tr.1999.2.pdf
www-lce.eng.cam.ac.uk/publications/files/tr.1999.2.ps.Z
www-lce.eng.cam.ac.uk/publications/files/tr.1999.2b.pdf
www-lce.eng.cam.ac.uk/publications/files/tr.1999.2b.ps.Z

The Resurrecting Duckling -- What Next?

Frank Stajano
Presented at the 8th International Workshop on Security protocols, Cambridge, UK, April 2000,
www-lce.eng.cam.ac.uk/publications/files/tr.2000.4.pdf
www-lce.eng.cam.ac.uk/publications/files/tr.2000.4.ps.gz

The Grenade Timer: Fortifying the Watchdog Timer Against Malicious Mobile Code

Frank Stajano, Ross Anderson
Presented at the 7th International Workshop on Mobile Multimedia Communications (MoMuC 2000), Waseda, Tokyo, Japan, 23-26 October 2000.
www-lce.eng.cam.ac.uk/publications/files/tr.2000.8.pdf