Smart Dust

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Smart Dust

• 14 April 2003Josh Peteet

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Smart Dust
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Overview

• What is Smart Dust? Who is developing it? Why?
• Technical Challenges
• Applications
• Where is the development now?

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What is Smart Dust?

• microelectromechanical (MEMS) sensors
• contain sensors (light/vibrations), computing
  circuits, bi-directional wireless (distances up
  to 1,000 feet)
• local rules aggregated into a hierarchical
  network (i.e. find route to nearest gateway, or,
  more complicated rule taking into account power
  supply)

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Why develop Smart Dust?

• Cheap, small, self-contained sensor network
• Deployed unobtrusively and for long periods of
  time
• network takes care of some of the data processing
  and filtering, limiting communication, and the
  need for processing large amounts of data
  centrally

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Development

• 100 groups developing based on work done at
  Berkeley and Intel
• Software as well as Hardware Efforts ('Motes' use
  TinyOS (networking, localization, support for
  applications) and TinyDB (for aggregating network
  data to the next layer)
• Open source and collaboration

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Technical Challenges

• fusing MEMS (microelectromechanical) and
  electronics on one chip
• size
• cost - now about 50 - 100 per sensor, hopefully
  down to 1 in five years
• power supply
• memory is only hundreds KB

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Addressing these challenges

• SIZE paring down to a single semiconductor (2
  years)
• POWER scavenging energy - ambient vibration
  energy from an industrial machine (like some
  watches), or from light (5 years off)

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Some Applications

• out of range vibrations in industrial equipment
  to catch manufacturing defects
• hospital monitoring of patient movements /
  monitoring the elderly while allowing freedom of
  movement
• environmental monitoring
• traffic sensors in urban areas
• monitor power consumption of household appliances
• cosmetics company monitoring warehouse humidity
• measuring structural integrity of a building

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Recent component the micro-radio

• 50 times smaller than a cell phone
• 1,000 times less power consumption
• same frequency
• in conventional radios, transmitting half a watt
  can consume three watts
• that won't work if we want to deploy these micro
  sensors for years
• goal transmit a few hundred microwatts with just
  a miliwatt

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How?

• most radios take 3 electron volts at a time, use
  for one task. with a design that requires less
  power, every electron can be sent to several
  components
• never produce large signals, so small voltage is
  OK
• extra, remaining energy in the electrons goes to
  the oscillator and drives other parts of the
  radio instead of letting that energy dissipate.

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