GeoSensor/Dust Networks

This week, a couple of articles mentioned then now technologically feasible and economically viable solutions to develop and deploy sensor devices with multi-purpose on-board sensing and wireless communication capabilities. There is no doubt that tiny powerful devices will be soon cheap enough to be put everywhere, therefor approaching UC Berkeley Kris Pister’s nanotech vision of “smart dust” containing sensors smaller than the eye could see joined into networks larger than the mind could comprehend.

First Declan Butle (2006) 2020 computing: Everything, everywhere, Nature, 440, 402-405 (part of the Future of Computing), mentions a so-called “sensor web” made of interconnected ‘motes’, ‘nodes’ or ‘pods’ that would generate meaningful digital representations of the world. Examples of experiments using this new interface to the tangible and palpable world include glacier surveillance to soil biodiversity control. The main shift in the way data are collected is that information becomes increasingly spatiotemporal instead of just spatial, as sensor feeds capture the evolution over time of the properties they monitor.

However current challenges include device and data homogeneity and standards

The existence of such large networks points to some major challenges down the line, says Estrin. Sensor webs will frequently be just single layers in a stack of data-collecting systems. These will extract information at different temporal and spatial scales, from satellite remote-sensing data down to in situ measurements.

Managing these stacks will require massive amounts of machine-to-machine communication, so a major challenge is to develop new standards and operating systems that will allow the various networks to understand each other. Sensors and networks of sensors will need to be able to communicate what their data are about, how they captured and calibrated them, who is allowed to see them, and how they should be presented differently to users with different needs. The lack of standards is not an insoluble problem for sensor webs, says Shankar “but it is slowing the field down by several years”.

Second, Emergence of GeoSensor Networks by Anthony Stefanidis mentions that the emergence of affordable geosensor networks introduces a novel data collection scheme, with continuous feeds of data from distributed sensors, covering a broader area of interest. In sensor networks the objective is to get many such devices to collaborate and monitor specific phenomena. Each device then becomes a node of the network.

Finally, Sprinkling RFID sensor tags from the Sky mentions that the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) started developing system that allows for detailed information gathering about a disaster area by sprinkling RFID sensor tags from the sky (possibly using helicopters.)

Relation to my thesis: Sensor networks are leaving the labs and entering the real-world. The examples in these articles features data collected in the wild with the generated data centrally crunched and analyzed in a lab. It would be interesting to know how humans cohabits with the ever-growing layers of sensor networks and how these networks could be accessed by everybody (and not only be scientists or network deployers). In other words, how to put the human in the center of attention (that being one of the goal of ubicomp). These articles mention the need of interconnecting devices in order for a real meaning of the data to emerge, but fail to mention the connectivity challenges (will they soon be really solved?). Moreover they overlook the impacts on the environment.