The Future Of Wireless Sensor Networks

Frisky070802 writes "In the 12/03 Wired, Intel's Tiny Hope for the Future describes a fundamental transformation as Intel's Research director David Tennenhouse realized the importance of sensor networks. He saw a Berkeley project on 'motes,' little sensors that communicate on ad-hoc wireless networks. 'The company now foresees networks consisting of thousands of motes, located wherever there's a need for data collection, streaming real-time data to one another and to central servers. Intel imagines the day when every assembly line, soybean field, and nursing home on the planet will be peppered with motes, prodding factory foremen to replace faulty machines, farmers to water fields, and nurses to check on something unusual in room E214.' Intel was impressed enough with the technology to fund a whole 'lablet' to develop it. Intel sees a huge potential market in developing both the sensors and the computation to process the huge amounts of sensor information. If this rings any bells, note that the Intel lablets are also behind the Planetlab Internet emulator, previously discussed in Slashdot."

Comments

Re:originality?

[nodwick]

The concept isn't that original anymore, since it's been around for a while. The Berkeley research mentioned in the article, by the way, is most likely the Smart Dust project, which was completed in 2001 and spawned a whole slew of related research.

Having said that, it's not quite as cut-and-dried as you mention. The primary differences from conventional wireless networks like 802.11 are (1) miniaturization, (2) strict power constraints, (3) disposable nature (i.e. ultra-low cost components req'd), and (4) self-organizing. AFAIK it's still an area of active and open research.

Also at ETCon 2003

[Twid]

I saw Berkeley and Intel also present on this technology at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference in 2003. The presentation synopsis is here, although the presentation sadly is not:

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2003/view/e _sess/3797

They are doing amazing sci-fi type stuff with their Motes already, it was a pretty amazing presentation, touching on swarm behavior, conspiracy theories, technical deployment issues, and just plain good-old fun hackery. The wired article really should have mentioned that serious hobbyists can purchase a mote starter kit and other stuff here:

http://www.xbow.com/Products/Wireless_Sensor_Netwo rks.htm

Note that there is a classroom starter kit. I would think this sort of stuff would get high-schoolers really excited about science. A great stocking stuffer for your local high-school (although at $1,000 or more maybe a little out of my budget).

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of..... never mind. :)

FYI

[saikatguha266]

the Planetlab Internet emulator

Planet-Lab is not an emulator. It is a group of computers distributed across the globe that use the real internet. People write distributed apps and run them on different vantage points spread out on the net to measure real internet performance, test their app etc.

Dust Inc.

[cpeterso]

Some researchers from UC Berkeley's Smart Dust project have founded a startup in Berkeley called Dust, Inc.

motes

[veci]

Hi! I am working with these Berkeley motes in the last two years. They are getting better, but still rather resource constrained. There are two research prototypes: MICA and MICA2, both basically have:

ATMega128 7.3 MHz microcontroller
4 KB RAM, 128 KB PROGRAM EEPROM,
512 KB flash memory for measurements
433 MHz wireless radio, CC1000 transciver,
30 messages per second, 29 bytes in each message
radio range is about 100-300 feet
runs on two AA batteries for 3 days continuously
various pluggable sensor boards

The motes run the TinyOS, freely available from sourceforge

The Berkeley guys are working on the dust mote, 1 mm2 target size including the radio chip. The biggest limitation now is the battery power and the radio range. Even if they can get the size down to "dust", the antenna HAS TO BE 1/4 of the radio wave length. For the 433 MHz version this is around 8-10 inches! So these dust motes will have "tails". Eventually, these could painted on the wall, or dumped from the air for millitary applications. Lot's of unsolved problems. For sensor networks, how do you obtain large amount of data through a few base stations? Smart aggregation and routing protocols need to be employed, and the network must process the data by itself.

Just my 2c.

Don't forget the MIT uAMPS project!

[bboy_doodles]

Being a graduate student at MIT working on sensor networks, I have to mention our project. : )

http://www-mtl.mit.edu/research/icsystems/uamps/uA MPShome.html

The uAMPS project will involve designing integrated circuits that realize wireless sensor networks. There are students researching low power integrated circuits - both analog and digital. I'm doing the wireless stuff.

You have to be careful to separate the hype from reality regarding sensor networks, but there are definitely some cool applications. One thing that I think will definitely help things progress is the new 802.15.4 standard (Zigbee).

doodles