Smart Dust

Mohammad Rahimi
CSCI599-Spring2002

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 Back to future!
 Colonies of smart ultra small size network
 Interaction of advances in technology
 VLSI more condense silicon processing
 VLSI more silicon speed
 VLSI low power short range communication
 MEMS Micro-Electromechanical Systems
 Networking : Ad hoc wireless Network
 Distributed Processing : Operating system, Database

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Wow!

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 Applications
 It is a special class of sensor network
 Fine sensing granularity
 Applications :
 Forest fire warning
 Enemy troop monitoring
 Large scale Biology or Geology
 Smart office spaces
 Defense-related sensor networks
 Inventory Control

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Circulatory Net

Group of sensors inside the body

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 Key Features of these electronic
particles
 Power
 Survive for extended amount of time
 Computation
 Process Sensor Data and Communicate
 Sensors
 To Interface to the environment
 Communication
 To glue the pieces of information
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 What is really behind the race?
Computer Science!
 Ad hoc Networking
 Dynamic Reconfigurable network
 Scalability
 Data Fusion
 An efficient semantic to diffuse data in the network
 Interpretation of multimodal sensing
 Distributed Processing
 Network Oriented Operating Systems
 Data Aggregation
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 Come Back to Reality!
COTS Dust
 Commercial Off-The-Shelf Components Dust
 To enable us the research about the algorithms and
semantics

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 Architecture

Low Power Sensors

Communication Front End Computation Brain 1-Magnetometer
1-Acoustic 1-MCU 2- Light
2-RF 2-FPGA 3-temperature
3-Optical 4-pressure
5-Hmidity
6-Acceleration

Power
1-Bat
2-Sollar
3-Vibration
4-Acoustic Noise
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Architecture

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 Power
 Power: Lithium Battery
 Big Problem
 Low capacity per unit of mass and volume
 Needs support by sleep mechanism and low power
techniques
 Not really so much innovation after Volta!
 Solar
 Vibration
 Acoustic noise
 Thermal conversion
 Nuclear Reaction
 Fuel Cells
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 Computation
 Computation: ATMEL91M404000
 Micro Controller
 Core and variety of different functions
 Flash , SRAM , E2PROM
 GPIO , ADC , PWM ,Comparator

 Embedded serial Buses

 Ex: Microcontrollers Atmel , Microchip, Motorola

Microprocessors Intel Strong-Arms ,Motorola

 FPGA
 Not Traditional Style Of programming
 Hardware Descriptive Languages (VHDL, Verilog)
 Faster , Low Power , Reconfigurable
 Ex: Xilix,Atmel
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 Sensors
 Motion Sensing
 Magnetometer
 Study 3 Element of Earth Magnetic field (Compass)
 Accelerometer
 To measure Local vertical (tilt switch) or measure motion vectors
 Environmental Sensing(Weather Monitoring)
 Pressure
 Barometer
 Temperature
 Light
 Humidity
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 Communication
 Acoustic
 RF radio
 Optical
 Passive
 Active

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 Acoustic Communication
 Power Hungry
 High Background Noise
 Large Size (proportional to harmonics of sound)
 Fast Attenuation Curve
 Low communication baud rate
 Low power receiver
 Good for event driven wake up systems

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 RF Communication
 New low power techniques
 Not robust (No fancy Spread Spectrum)
 ISM Band
 For practical frequencies large ANT Size(~ λ)
 It may have a tail!!
 Only one RF front end
 MCU acts as base band controller
 CRC,Encoding(Manchester),DC Balance,Header

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 RF Communication

Train Sequence Flag Byte Number OF Byte DATA CRC

•No Addressing

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 Optical Communication
 Active
 High power laser source
 Transmission of modulated laser beam
 Passive
 MEMS Corner Cube Reflector
 Emit modulated ambient light
 Extremely low power

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 Optical Vs. RF
 Both mature technology
 Both Electromagnetic waves
 light is quiet short wavelength compared to RF
 Potential of smaller sizes
 light techniques are extremely directional
 Peer-Peer
 RF techniques can be more omni directional
 Directionality Brings the problem of alignment

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 Future Work
 Design of multi hop network
 Autonomous network configuration
 Data Fusion
 Network Decision making
 Large Scale Distributed Processing 

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 Links
 http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/co/5269/1.html
 http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pister/SmartDust/
 http://www.thestandard.com/article/0,1902,27573,00.html
 http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,44101,00.html
 http://www-bsac.eecs.berkeley.edu/~warneke/SmartDust/
 http://www.ce.berkeley.edu/~glaser/Current%20Civil%20Applications.ppt
 http://madmax.me.berkeley.edu/%7Eshadr/overview.html

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That is all folks!

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