The research community is searching for a new environments
in which to generate innovative ideas and prove their
effectiveness. A new paradigm beyond desktop computing
is capturing the imaginations of systems designs: the socalled
“post-PC” era. Wireless sensor networks is one area
that promises to yield important applications and demands
new approaches to traditional networking problems.
We have described Smart Dust, an integrated approach to
networks of millimeter-scale sensing/communicating nodes.
Smart Dust can transmit passively using novel optical
reflector technology. This provides an inexpensive way to
probe a sensor or acknowledge that information was
received. Active optical transmission is also possible, but
consumes more power. It will be used when passive techniques
cannot be used, such as when the line-of-sight path
between the dust mote and BTS is blocked.
Smart dust provides a very challenging platform in which to
investigate applications that can harness the emergent
behavior of ensembles of simple nodes. Dealing with partial
disconnections while establishing communications via
dynamic routing over rapidly changing unidirectional links
poses critical research challenges for the mobile networking
community.