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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 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).
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.
That's the beauty of an off-beat R&D lab. They're given free rein to develop just about anything without regard to need OR profit.
AT&T and IBM both funded labs like these for years. They were responsible for developing such novel and diverse things as transistors and scanning tunnelling microscopes. The goal is, of course, that they will develop a product that fills a real need, which in turn will create a demand for their product appeasing their shareholders.
I think it's absolutely terrific that some industries are able to risk investing in the totally unknown. It was truly a shame when Bell Labs dropped their unfettered research. It was also disappointing to see IBM drop research for all but computer-related work. But even so, their Zurich labs have recently come up with some novel storage mechanisms leveraging their decade-old scanning tunnelling work.
Regardless of whether these labs prove to be duds or if one of them creates the transistor of the 21st century, the money is being well spent. Exploring the unknown is always of value.
John
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:
e _sess/3797
o rks.htm
:)
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2003/view/
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_Netw
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.
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
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
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.
Not true. According to my professor who's working on sensor networks, the military has already tried them out in Iraq. Iraq is well-suited for such things because it is mostly deserts.
Sensor networks would have a lot of difficulties in an urban setting because of buildings. Buildings present challenges to localization of the sensor network. Two sensors can be right next to each other but still can't communicate because a wall is in the way. Furthermore, GPS is hard to receive in an urban setting. Thus, the network must first localize relative to each other then hope that a few of the nodes can recieve GPS to serve as "beacons" to localize the rest of the network.
In other words, sensor networks are more likely to succeed in an non-urban environment first than an urban environment.
Localization is a major problem for these networks because of the lack of processing power and lower transmission radius. However, localization will inevitably involve graph theory and graphs are not the easiest thing to solve. Thus, you can see the trade-offs as the nodes get smaller and smaller and have less resources available.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Being a graduate student at MIT working on sensor networks, I have to mention our project. : )
A MPShome.html
http://www-mtl.mit.edu/research/icsystems/uamps/u
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