Smart Dust ABSTRACT

Technical seminar

The smart dust concept has been around for almost a decade now, but its application in transport domain has only been recently investigated. This is a very valuable area of research, as smart dust being generally perceived as the lowcost, ubiquitous sensor of the future can play an important role in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Our involvement in several transport-related UK and EU funded projects (such as ASTRA [1], EMMA [5], and TRACKSS [7]) gave us the opportunity to carry out feasibility experiments and to develop demonstrations of smart dust applications in transport domain. We have also investigated how smart dust can be used in collaboration with other (more traditional) transport sensors for developing better Co-operative Transport Systems (CTS). This position paper outlines what we have learnt from using smart dust in transport domain, and provides an illustration on the important role that the smart dust technology can play in future ITS. With improvements in integration, packaging, circuit design, and process technology, autonomous sensor nodes like these will continue to shrink in size and power consumption while growing in capability to incorporate the requisite sensing, communication, and computing hardware, along with a power supply, in a volume no more than a cubic millimeter, while still achieving impressive performance in terms of the sensor functionality of and dust communications is not a capability. primary These goal. millimeter-scale nodes are called Smart Dust. Although mimicking mobility

The smart dust (mote) can be partitioned into four subsystems: sensors and analog signal conditioning, power system, transceiver front end, and the core. The core is essentially all the digital circuits in the system, including the receiver back end, sensor processing circuits, computation circuits, and memory. one requirement of the core is that it have a degree of on-the-fly reconfigurability determined by the changing needs of the mission. In this paper we define an ultralow energy architecture for the mote core that will meet the needs of the military base monitoring scenario, look at general architecture

Smart Dust

Technical seminar

concerns to provide guidance in mapping other applications into a mote architecture, and perform a brief theoretical comparison of three of the possible mote transmission techniques. Micrometer-sized one-dimensional photonic crystals of porous Si that spontaneously assemble, orient, and sense their local environment are prepared. The photonic crystals are generated by electrochemically etching two discrete porous multilayered dielectric mirrors into Si, one on top of the other. The first mirror is chemically modified by hydrosilylation with dodecene before the etching of the second mirror, which is prepared with an optical reflectivity spectrum that is distinct from the first. The entire film is removed from the substrate, and the second mirror is then selectively modified by mild thermal oxidation. The films are subsequently fractured into small particles by sonication. The chemically asymmetric particles spontaneously align at an organic liquidwater interface, with the hydrophobic side oriented toward the organic phase and the hydrophilic side toward the water. Sensing is accomplished when liquid at the interface infuses into the porous mirrors, inducing predictable shifts in the optical spectra of both mirrors. So-called Smart Dust is envisioned to combine sensing, computing, and wireless communication capabilities in an autonomous, dust-grain-sizeddevice. Dense networks of Smart Dust should then be able to unobtrusively monitor real-world processes with unprecedented quality and scale. In this paper, we present and evaluate a prototype implementation of a system for tracking the location of real-world phenomena (using a toy car as an example) with Smart Dust. The system includes novel techniques for node localization, time synchronization, and for message ordering specifically tailored for large networks of tiny Smart Dust devices. We also point out why more traditional approaches developed for early macro prototypes of Smart Dust (such as the Berkeley Motes) are not well suited for systems based on true Smart Dust.

Smart Dust INTRODUCTION

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Technical seminar

Smart Dust is commonly used as a synonym for tiny devices that combine sensing, computing, wireless communication capabilities, and autonomous power supply within a volume of only few cubic millimeters at low cost. The small size and low per-device cost allows an unobtrusive deployment of large and dense Smart Dust populations in the physical environment, thus enabling detailed in-situ monitoring of realworld phenomena, while only marginally disturbing the observed physical processes. Smart Dust is envisioned to be used in a wide variety of application domains, including environmental protection (identification and monitoring of pollutions), habitat monitoring (observing the behavior of animals in their natural habitats), and military systems (monitoring activities in inaccessible areas). Due to its tiny size, Smart Dust is expected to enable a number of novel applications. For example, it is anticipated that Smart Dust nodes can be moved by winds or can even remain suspended in air, thus supporting better monitoring of weather conditions, air quality, and many other phenomena. Also, it is hard to detect the bare presence of Smart Dust and it is even harder to get rid of it once deployed, which might be helpful for many sensitive application areas. Current research (cf. [1] for an overview) is mainly focusing on socalled COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) Dust, early macro prototypes of Smart Dust. COTS Dust nodes such as the Motes [24] developed at UC Berkeley are built from commercially available hardware components and still have a volume of several cubic centimeters. Unfortunately, these devices cannot be simply scaled down to the cubic millimeter size of true Smart Dust. First Smart Dust prototypes [21] demonstrate that the tremendous

Smart Dust

Technical seminar

volume reduction (factor 1000 and more) may require radical changes in the employed technologies (e.g., use of optical instead of radio communication) compared to COTS Dust. These technological changes have important implications for algorithms, protocols, systems, and infrastructure. Our goal is to examine these implications and develop solutions for the resulting problems. To identify and illustrate these issues, we have developed an object tracking system that makes use of Smart Dust. This system allows tracking the location of targets with Smart Dust, using a remotecontrolled toy car as a sample target. Since Smart Dust hardware is currently in a very early prototyping stadium, our implementation still uses COTS Dust. However, our algorithms and protocols are designed to be directly portable to true Smart Dust, once the hardware becomes available. In the following sections we first outline the characteristics of Smart Dust, before presenting the details of our object tracking system. Particularly, this includes novel techniques for synchronizing time among the nodes of the network, for localizing Smart Dust nodes in physical space, and for ordering event notifications according to their time of occurrence. This will be followed by the presentation of some measurements and a discussion.

Smart Dust are millimeter scale sensing and communication platforms. Distributed sensor network systems can consist of hundreds to thousands of dust motes and one or more interrogating transceivers. Each dust mote consists of a power supply, a sensor or sensors, analog and digital circuitry, and a system for receiving and transmitting data. Depending on the power source, solar cells, thick film batteries, or commercially available batteries, the dust mote can vary in size from 1 mm3 to as large as a sugar cube. There are both military and commercial applications for the dust motes. The military 4

Smart Dust

Technical seminar

could use dust motes containing acoustic, vibration, and magnetic field sensors distributed across many square miles of territory to monitor the passage of vehicles. The sensors could be delivered to the area by unmanned air vehicles (UAV), artillery, or distributed like seeds from moving vehicles. They could be interrogated by manned air vehicles (MAV) or soldiers with modified binoculars. In the future, chemical and biological sensors could be incorporated into the dust motes to detect the use of chemical or biological agents in combat. Both the military and industry could use dust motes to monitor the performance of critical parts of aircraft, vehicles, and manufacturing equipment. This could dramatically reduce the cost of maintenance.

WHAT IS SMART DUST

Autonomous sensing and communication in a cubic millimeter Berkeleys Smart Dust project, led by Professors Pister and Kahn, explores the limits on size and power consumption in autonomous sensor nodes. Size reduction is paramount, to make the nodes as inexpensive and easy-to-deploy as possible. The research team is confident that they can incorporate the requisite sensing, communication, and computing hardware, along with a power supply, in a volume no more than a few cubic millimeters, while still achieving impressive performance in terms of sensor functionality and communications capability. These millimeter-scale nodes are called Smart Dust. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that future prototypes of Smart Dust could be small enough to remain suspended in air, buoyed by air currents, sensing and communicating for hours or days on end. 'Smart dust' sensor-laden networked computer nodes that are just cubic millimetres in volume. The smart dust project envisions a complete sensor network node, including power supply, processor, sensor and communications mechanisms, in a single cubic millimetre. .Smart dust motes could run for years , given that a cubic millimetre battery can store 1J and could be backed up with a solar cell or vibrational energy source The goal of the Smart Dust project is to build a millimeter-scale sensing and communication platform for a massively distributed sensor network. This device will be around the size of a grain of sand and will contain sensors, computational ability, bidirectional wireless communications, and a power supply. Smart dust consists of series of circuit and micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) designs to cast those functions into custom silicon. Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) consist of extremely tiny mechanical elements, often integrated together with electronic circuitry.
Smart dust is a network of micro-electro-mechanical devices (also known as motes), which are typically composed of a processing unit, some memory, and a radio chip, which allows them to communicate wirelessly

Smart Dust

Technical seminar

with other smart dust devices within range. This wireless capability makes it possible for smart dust devices to form a Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork (MANET) a collection of mobile computing devices which cooperate to form a dynamic network without using fixed infrastructure. These devices can also be equipped with additional sensors such as those for detecting light, temperature, barometric pressure and acceleration hence enhancing their features and making their application areas virtually limitless. There are various smart dust devices available on the market; we use off-the-shelf MICA family motes from Crossbow Technologies, in particular the MPR2400 MICAz motes [4]. These MICAz motes are equipped with a Zigbee radio chip [10], which enables them to communicate with other MICAz motes or other Zigbee-ready devices within range (approximately 70 meters). Figure 1 shows the main components of the MPR2400 MICAz mote.

Figure 1: MPR2400 MICAz mote

One of the main questions that we had to address before using these motes in ITS applications is whether the Zigbee radio can be used for communication between motes placed in vehicles moving at high speed (over 100 km/h) and static motes on the road side. To answer this question, we carried out several experiments, the details of which can be found in [1] and [6]. In the end, we established that this can indeed be achieved, and we estimated the communication range to be around 50 metres. Based on these encouraging results, we designed and developed several ITS applications involving smart dust, in collaboration with other sensing technologies used in the TRACKSS project [7].

HOW HYPER THREADING WORKS

Smart dust is based on microelectromechanical systems, or MEMs. These tiny computer chips can measure temperatures, vibrations or surface pressures. Smart sensors relay signals back to a command computer, which then compiles the data to give feedback to plant managers. Or the results could trigger an automatic response, such as turning down a building's temperature or reducing the flow of oil. Such wireless tracking sensors are cheap. They cost just tens of dollars each, not the tens of thousands for comparable wired systems that often involve digging trenches and building outdoor conduits, Pister says. Pister coined the term "smart dust" as a researcher at the 6

Smart Dust

Technical seminar

University of California, Berkeley, in the '90s. He sees a vital smart dust market rising in the coming decade. Industrial automation and factory uses are already taking off, Pister says. Another hot area, he says, is monitoring energy use in buildings. Dust Networks isn't alone. One rival is privately held Crossbow Technology of San Jose, Calif. Global sales of smart dust are expected to top $1 billion in 2012, says ARC Advisory Group, up from $344 million this year. Sales of smart dust systems are starting to snowball among industrial clients, says Peter Zornio, chief strategic officer for the Emerson Process Management unit of Emerson Electric. Zornio says smart dust networks are "the No. 1 growth thrust" for his $6.7 billion unit, which is Emerson's largest division. He foresees $500 million in annual revenue from smart dust for his firm within five years, compared with "immaterial" sales today. Manufacturing plants are adding wireless smart dust nodes in places where it's too costly to install wired sensors, Zornio says. "This trend won't replace something else that we're selling, it will just grow the market with new sales," he said. "That's why we're super excited about it." Smart dust systems are catching on with large process manufacturers such as refineries, chemical plants, breweries and packaged food makers, says ARC Advisory analyst Harry Forbes. But he expects it will take five to 10 years for most industrial sensors to use wireless connections, not the standard wired ones. That advance will let users monitor systems where wires are now too costly or cumbersome. "People see all kinds of potential value in trying new applications, but in many cases the wireless sensor technology is not quite mature enough yet," Forbes said. Most smart dust sensors today are roughly the size of sugar cubes, not dust. But in some cases they can be made much smaller, Pister says. "In the mid-1990s, the thinking was that someday we would make this technology as small as a speck of dust," he said. "So far, we've gotten it down to a grain of rice."

Purpose
http://www.tinyos.net/papers/tos.pdf http://resenv.media.mit.edu/classes/MAS965/readings/pister01.pdf http://www.seminarprojects.com/Thread-smart-dust-technology-seminar-report http://www.intel-iris.net/papers/G+03.pdf http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/bridging/ubicomp/Arief_paper.pdf http://www.vs.inf.ethz.ch/publ/papers/tracking.pdf http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/bridging/ubicomp/Arief_paper.pdf

Smart Dust APPLICATIONS

Technical seminar

Hyper-Threading Technology can actually produce a performance loss if the load at the logical processors is not balanced. Two logical processors share resources at the execution core and as a result no single processor is able to use all the resources that would normally be available to a single processor that did not implement HyperThreading. If one thread of an application were working and the other thread were waiting (spinning), the operating thread would still have less than 100 percent of the resources. An effective load balance for a Hyper-Threading system is imperative to reduce the chances that only one thread will be active. With two logical processors sharing execution resources, the effective size of the cache with which each can operate is approximately half the actual cache size. Applications written for multithreading should therefore expect to have only half the cache available for each thread. When considering code size optimization, for example, excessive loop unrolling should be avoided. Although cache sharing may be an issue for some applications, it does provide better cache locality for other applications. For example, an application might use one logical processor to fetch data into the shared caches to reduce latency for the other logical processor. The Intel Xeon processor family delivers the highest server system performance of any IA-32 Intel architecture processor introduced to date. Initial benchmark tests show up to a 65% performance increase on high-end server applications when compared to the previous-generation Pentium III Xeon processor on 4-way server platforms. A significant portion of those gains can be attributed to Hyper-Threading Technology.

Smart Dust CONCLUSION

Technical seminar

This paper has outlined some preliminary research, along with several applications that have been developed in order to demonstrate the feasibility of using smart dust devices (motes) in ITS. Initial results suggest that both the motes and the conceptual MANET can support both I2V and V2I communications. This illustrates that efficient and discrete ITS applications involving vehicle and infrastructure can be designed and developed using these motes. As the unit cost of motes will continue to go down, it will become financially feasible to deploy them in large numbers. This, coupled with other emerging technologies, highlights the opportunity to move towards a much more connected world for the traveller, where vehicles, the infrastructure and the traveller itself are much more connected together. Based on the encouraging results obtained from our applications, we have highlighted smart dusts potentials in transport domain, and if supported and developed in the correct way, this will eventually offer a steep change in how we manage, sense and operate our transport networks of the future and this is a significant contribution that smart dust can make to the ITS domain. We have presented a complete proof-of-concept system for tracking the location of real-world phenomena with Smart Dust, using a remote-controlled toy car as a sample target. We presented approaches for target location estimation, node localization, time synchronization, and message ordering that match the requirements of Smart Dust. Since target location estimation is solely based on detecting the proximity of the target by individual Smart Dust nodes, the presented tracking system should be applicable to a wide range of possible target types. As one of the next steps we want to base car detection on the cars acoustic signature, and plan to evaluate the system using a larger number of sensor nodes. The ultimate goal is to reimplement the system using true Smart Dust.

Smart Dust

Technical seminar

BIBLOGRAPHY
A. Agarwal, B.H. Lim, D. Kranz and J. Kubiatowicz, APRIL: A processor Architecture for Multiprocessing, in Proceedings of the 17th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architectures, pages 104-114, May 1990. R. Alverson, D. Callahan, D. Cummings, B. Koblenz, A. Porter, and B. Smith, The TERA Computer System, in International Conference on Supercomputing, Pages 1 - 6, June 1990. L. A. Barroso et. al., Piranha: A Scalable Architecture Based on Single-Chip Multiprocessing, in Proceedings of the 27th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture, Pages 282 - 293, June 2000. M. Fillo, S. Keckler, W. Dally, N. Carter, A. Chang, Y. Gurevich, and W. Lee, The M-Machine Multicomputer, in 28th Annual International Symposium on Microarchitecture, Nov. 1995.

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