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.

INTRODUCTION:

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 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.


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