Foresights
Smart dust
What is it?
The origins of smart dust can be traced to the work of Kris Pister at the University of California Berkeley (UCB) who proposed a project to deliver sensing, computing and networking in a single millimeter-sized package – a single smart dust mote.
Pister’s ideas immediately attracted the attention (and funding) of the military who recognized the potential in scattering smart dust on the battlefield, providing means of monitoring and tracking forces, detecting chemical agents and providing clandestine surveillance.
Each smart dust mote comprises a microcontroller, two-way communication (radio frequency or optical), buffer memory, power source and a micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) that is a miniaturized sensor for analyzing temperature, pressure, vibration and chemical composition.
The real value in smart dust comes from its ability to form ad hoc networks ‘on the fly’ and be highly adaptive to changing network structure. Intermediate motes help distant motes relay their data peer-to-peer fashion back to the gateway or ‘mother unit’ which aggregates them for processing or onward transmission over a WAN.
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