Smart Dust

Smart Dust

ABSTRACT
                                      
                             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 sensor functionality and communications capability. These millimeter-scale nodes are called “Smart Dust.” Although mimicking the mobility of dust is not a primary goal.
 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 ultra-low energy architecture for the mote core that will meet the needs of the military base monitoring scenario, look at general architecture 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.