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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."
This is a really cool idea.
I hope large amounts of radiation/activity in whatever spectrum these networks will use for cross-node and network-to-server communication won't adversely affect things around it. My gut tells me it probably, unfortunately will.
RD
This could be really useful for monitoring kids at the sleep lab where I do some work. It's hard enough just getting a myriad (EEG, EOG, ECG, O2, CO2, etc.) of sensors stuck on a kid, the fact that you then end up with huge mass of wires causes all sorts of problems, making it hard for the kid to get to sleep, plus there's the tendancy to pull on the leads, totally destroying the signal (often several times a night).
Isn't this like what http://www.woz.com/ is working on, only with a bigger dream (less likely to happen soon)?
By Vernor Vinge is a very good book that uses that concept a lot.
It discuss, amongts other topics, the consequences of total information awarness brought by a technology similar to this (but better, because its sci-fi, not sci-fact).
You can't take the sky from me...
I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering how far off we are from Pham's locators from Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. Having a mobile sensor network floating in the air that you can use for surveillance may seem Orwellian at first blush, but that isn't the case if we all have access to such technology.
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I just started reading about bluetooth and 802.15. 802.15 calls it WPAN -- wireless personal area networks. From my brief scan of the spec, I think it does go into strange networking configurations.
Looks like another dream world to me, even less real than IPv6 is.
Some amount of misinformation, as usual ;-) A few corrections:
;-)
- The Berkeley lablet was *not* created because of excitement over sensor networks. The Berkeley (and the other) lablets were created as part of a new approach to industrial research labs, in close collaboration with universities. Sensor networks was the first project undertaken at the Berkeley lablet (and, given that it was mentioned, PlanetLab was the second).
- The UC Berkeley project in question is (currently) the NEST project (http://webs.cs.berkeley.edu), funded by DARPA. This project was inspired by the Smart Dust project, but its emphasis has mostly been on the software (operating systems, languages, networking, applications, etc) rather than the hardware.
David Gay - not speaking for Intel
The company I interned for this summer had some of this going on: we had tags we would place on residents for certain purposes (ones that would detect urine in an adult diaper, would alert nurse if a resident pissed themself, and wouldn't sit in thier own piss till a nurse came to check, cut down on urinary tract infections, as well as ones that would detect if a person with alzimers wandered too far from their room, that sort of thing). While not in an ad hoc network style, these would at least alert the nearest CNA that something was ary. And if the alert went unchecked, it would go up the chain of command, possibly to the point where the head nurse or director of the home would be notified, and someones ass would be in trouble. Was an interesting application, though i wasnt lucky enough to have worked on them. I got to work on the CRM software. woo and stuff.
"Something's wrong with you...and I hope we never do meet again." - Deftones When Girls Telephone Boys
Of a B-52 Bomber raining motion sensors down on a city. I doubt they would have much tactical use in a non-urban enviroment due to it being so spread out, but in cities being able to tell what's moving on every street corner would kick ass.
I beg to differ. A group at Oak Ridge National Labs has been working on this kind of thing for several years now. They were also trying to work on low cost, very low power consumption, self organizing. Their intent was to have the sensors operating in an industrial enviroment and they've done a lot of work optimizing the RF section for minimal susceptibility to interference.
The big draw for industrial users is that adding wiring is expensive and that they hope the sensors will cost about the same as a few inches of wiring (with all of the associated costs).
Similar work has been done for several years in respect to the self healing mine fields - having a bunch of mobile mines that will fill in the gap left when a mine disappears. This also requires low power consumption and self organization.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Let see, thousands of tiny mote sensors spread throughout your living environment. Does the convenience factor outweigh the privacy factor? I can see law enforcement and marketing corps loving this whole idea. Some future attorney general might try to make embedding these into most consumer products and fabric a requirement.
Law enforcement could use these motes for cheap surveillance and community monitoring. Just think of it - some of the motes would be equipped with mics and DSPs and could be easily enabled by the consumer and/or law enforcement. Other motes would register heat/cool (for A/C & heat control) and could also track people and animals. Heck, specialized motes could be built to detect illegal drug use (pot/crack fumes). Detectives wouldn't even have to get next to your house seeing how you bought that slick wireless router (you had to since owning a wired router would brand you a terrorist with something to hide).
Madison Ave marketing would also love motes. Advertisers could use motes to determine the best time to call you (when you are home) and the best time customize your commercials (when you watch tv). How about a great rate on home insurance - only it will be terminated the moment the sensors pickup impending doom (water leak, structural damage, etc). With consumer electronics going wireless advertisers could have a field day tracking what you buy and how you act to determine what they should market to you.
Then think about the convenience - the A/C-heater could adjust the temp for the room you are in, the whole house, or some pattern possibly based on your behavior. Lights that turn on only for the rooms that are occupied, and to the level the person in that room wants. How about motes that detect that you haven't moved in 24 hours and alerts rescue/coroner. Hey, motes that listen for and act upon your command - "computer - music - light jazz - New Orleans bar after 2am" (motes play recording of bartender telling you the bar is closing and to get the hell out - only not that politely). Motes could tell you your oldest son is smoking in his room, daughter has lit some candles, teenage son is 'enjoying himself', the baby could use changing, and the wife is cheating on you (that wasn't your stain on the bed sheets). All that and more...
The motes could make your life great - in exchange for some privacy. What the heck, you have nothing to worry about as long as you are a law abiding, patriotic (to the current admin, not to the Constitution), well-adjusted citizen...
This stuff uses an open source OS, TinyOS which is written in and includes the language nesC, "an extension to the C programming language designed to embody the structuring concepts and execution model of TinyOS. TinyOS is an event-driven operating system designed for sensor network nodes that have very limited resources (e.g., 8K bytes of program memory, 512 bytes of RAM)."
Over the last couple of days I downloaded and installed TinyOS 1.1.0 for windows (146Mb!) which includes nesC, an emulator, a tutorial and cygwin. To my slight surprise it all auto-installed and worked perfectly and can even generate cute graphical self-documentation.
NesC is interesting for at least a couple of reasons - compile-time detection of race conditions, and bi-directional interfaces which specify both the commands which must be implemented by an interface "providers" (ie "servers") and the events (or callbacks) which must be implemented by the interface's "users" (ie "clients").
I'd say that bi-directional interfaces are a significent step in the evolution of object-oriented design, which are being echoed (at a higher level, and in a different technical culture) in the choreography languages of Web Services.
If you enjoy the challenge of learning a new language which is small, different, timely and purposeful, I'd recommend TinyOS and nesC.
In his "Peace on Earth" (1987), Stanislaw Lem provides a view into nanotechnology possibilities and consequences, in his usual brilliant satiric style. It even contains an embedded essay - "The Upside-Down Evolution", which predicts a micro- and nano- directions in the evolution of warfare.
But his first insight of power of self-regulated networks of micro-robots is provided in his novel "The Invincible", written as early as in 1964.
Too bad that Lem is known in the USA mainly by Hollywood's bastardisation of "Solaris"...
There are many potential applications for wireless sensor networks. A major one is industrial monitoring and control. The cost of monitoring and controling many industrial processes is not determined by the cost of either the sensor or the readout device, but by the cost of the armored cable needed to send the signal from the process to the control point. In certain industries, like the automotive industry, these cables must be regularly torn out as the factory re-tools for the next new model. Wireless sensors, with their inherent low cost, low power, multihop routing capability, can greatly reduce factory capital expense in such cases.
Around the home, there are many places where one wants low data rate communication. Wireless light switches are one example; they can be placed where the user wants them, rather than the home builder, or even just carried around. Wireless thermostats can give the HVAC system a much better idea of which rooms are hot and which are cold; there can be more of them than the wired version since there are no wiring costs. One can imagine a wireless key fob, like the Remote Keyless Entry (RKE) device in cars, that the homeowner could use to lock the house at night before retiring; the single button press could lock the doors and windows, lower the heat to the "sleeping" temperature, etc., and give the user feedback that all is well.
There are additional applications in the intelligent agriculture, automotive, health care, and military markets, plus many others. The list is endless and, like discussing PCs in 1980, I probably haven't hit the killer ap, because someone in his garage hasn't invented it yet.