Saturday, April 05, 2003

SELF-ORGANIZING SENSOR NETWORKS: Now this is really interesting. While Groove has cracked the code on group swarming at the application layer, there are only a few self-forming data communications networks on the horizon. The Department of Defense has done some fascinating work with Raytheon and their Enhanced Position Location Reporting System (EPLRS), which uses radios that communicate with each other to form battlefield networks. Rafe Needleman, in a February 13 Business 2.0 article, writes about the Mote, a product manufactured by Dust, Inc. Needleman writes, "Dust Inc. designs small computers it calls motes, and uses them as platforms to collect data with a variety of sensors. Currently, a single mote is a little bigger than a 9-volt battery, but the computers are getting smaller. Some motes have vibration or sound sensors, others detect magnetic fields or light, and still others wrap around electrical cables to gauge the amount of current being drawn. The motes use very low-power CPUs and a super-small open-source operating system called TinyOS, developed at the University of California at Berkeley. The operating life of a battery-powered mote can be several years. The motes have radios in them to communicate their sensor readings. This is where things get really interesting. The low-power radios attached to these low-power computers don't have enough range to continuously broadcast back to a central base station. Instead, they wake up once in a while, at predetermined times, and blast their data to a nearby mote, which then collects and retransmits that data to another nearby mote, and so on, until finally the data reaches a central collection node or recording computer." Groove was built to use the internet as a platform and leverage the pervasiveness of it's reach. Every week we see use cases where Groove is being used on just-in-time data communications infrastructures that never touch the actual Internet (with a big "I"). In fact, these nets resemble swarming applications. Like Groove shared spaces, these JIT networks are formed, used to pulse, and then broken down. The emergence of JIT sensor mesh networks adds a fascinating new twist to the idea of JIT infrastructure. 4:09:58 PM