Friday, June 27, 2003
It's not just a 'network' anymore...
Imagine sprinkling tiny sensors on road and fields for surveillance, putting them in buildings and bridges to monitor structural health, and installing them in industrial facilities to manage energy, inventory and manufacturing processes. That's the idea behind the emerging technology of wireless sensor networks. ...radio chips with embedded processors that can organize themselves into networks to manage real-world data from sensors
This is an incredibly money and time saving device for industry and manufacturing. [Imagine a thermal duct tape with sensors imbedded which can tell not only the temperature of the contents of the duct/pipe around which the tape is wrapped; but can also discern their physical location and external influences occurring in their particular environment.] The real step forward here is the connectivity of the individual devices. The communication is two-way so that data can be relayed back to a central control center and commands can go out to the individual units to change parameters or conditions. The next step? How many microcontroller chips are there in the average house? TV, VCR, Microwave, all remote controls ... The newer the auto, the more microcontrollers there are in it. ["during [2001,] 7.5 billion embedded microcontrollers were sold. "] Add in light switches, heating/cooling systems, stereo, kitchen gadgets, and whatever else you can think of. If each one of those were to be connected to each other one in an ongoing conversation controllable by, say, me, I could easily set up my house to meet my every need. It would note what room I'm in, how many guests are here, and what we are doing and respond with the conditions I had pre-set. It's "Metcalfe’s Law—that is, a network's value increases with the number of things connected to it. " Very Kewl. As with everything, there are outfalls to be aware of. (See the Pencil Principle)
Silicon has gotten cheap, wiring has not. So if you build networks that make their connections via silicon radios rather than wire, they’re going to get cheaper, which means they can [and will] get more pervasive. You can’t do that if it’s a wired network.
Say you put a microcontroller node in every street light so it can tell Central Control when it's on or off, or when its bulb burns out. (or, depending on your neighborhood, when it's shot out...) Cheaper than paying some poor schlub to drivie all over town looking at street lights night and day. [Yawn] Now, say you put a node in every city bus. It passes a light post, communicates its position and Central Control signals the LED at the next bus stop that #39 will be along within 3 minutes. Way Kewl. Now let's slip a node into the bottom of Johnny's book bag. The system will know if he got on the right bus and got to school or if he got in a car with a scum-bucket and is in danger. This is where we have a decision to make. Balance keeping an electronic eye on little Johnny - or 15 year old Johnny - against the responsibility a person is forced to build in himself by an environment where he has the freedom to screw up. It is great if Johnny or Janey are kept from harm by this system. But we must be aware of, and articulate exactly what we will be giving up by implementing a wireless sensor system that involves keeping track of humans. _____________________________ I recommend the whole article. Robert Poor, former guitar tech for Garcia and current CTO of Ember, the first company building these wireless systems for commercial appplications, gives an interesting hint to the discussion of the potential creation of 'intelligence' by such networks as they evolve into multi-hundred thousand piece systems, and beyond. Super-kewl. Further reading: overview of the current field and a list of companies involved.
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