By

Sachita Nand Mishra Guided by

U07EC397 Prof. Golak Santra
outline
 What is smart dust ??
 Smart dust requirements
 MEMS technology in smart dust
 Building block of WSM
 How it works
 Communicating with smart dust
 Various applications
Road transport domain, military, factory automation
and chemical plant, agricultural sector, medicine …..
 Major challenges
 conclusion
What is smart dust??
 consist of large amount of millimeter scale electronic
device referred to individually as motes.
 Motes as tiny as dust particles and consist of wireless
transceiver.
 Thousands of motes collectively known as smart dust .
 spread throughout the atmosphere powerful means
of collecting and monitoring information.
 sensing , computing, wireless and autonomous power
supply within volume of few millimeters.
Contd…..
 Tiny dust size with extra ordinary capabilities.
 A wireless sensor network(WSN).
 Useful in monitoring real world phenomenon without
disturbing the original process.
 So small and light in weight that they can remain
suspended in the environment like an ordinary dust
particle.
 hard to detect the presence of smart dust.
 Possible to see using green laser pointer
Who developed smart dust for first
time

Conceived by Dr. Kris

pister at university of
California
in Berkeley,USA in 1988
Set out to build a
device with sensor
communication device
and small computer
integrated into single UC Berkeley researcher blowing a
package. Sample of glitter into air
 Contd…
 Prof. David culler and a team of researchers created
the Tiny OS operating system once installed on a
mote, this software is responsible for operating the
device , managing its power consumption and
facilitating communication with other motes.
 Smart dust requirements

o Power
o Computation
o Sensor.
 sensor is the interface between motes and the
environment
 can be temperature, pressure, humidity, light,
sound, acceleration,position, magnetic fields
o Communication.
A MEMS technology in smart dust
 Integration of mechanical elements, sensors, actuators
and electronics on a chip to produce a system of
miniature dimension.
 Advantage
 small structure can be achieved
 thousands or even millions of system elements can
be fabricated simultaneously
 This allows system to be highly complex and extremely
low cost
Building block of WSM
 Processing unit
 Sensing unit.
 Transceiver unit.
 power unit
 Additional
application
dependent
location finding
system, power
generator and
mobilizer.
How smart dust works?
 Run by micro controller.
 Determines the task performed by the mote.
 Controls power.
 Microcontroller consists of tiny sensors for recording various
type of data.
 Sensors are run by timers
 Timers works for specific period by powering up the sensors
to collect data.
 Data obtained are stored in its memory for interpretation or
send to base controlling station.
• The primary constraints of smart dust is volume, which in
turn puts a severe constrain on energy since we do not have
much room for batteries or large solar cells.
Communicating with a smart dust
 potential can only be attained when the sensor nodes
communicate with one another or with central base
station.
 Bidirectional communication between a central
transceiver and up to 1000 dust motes.
 The downlink and uplink at several kbps.
 TinyOS an open source operating system for wireless
embedded sensor network, whose library includes
network
Contd..

Protocol, distributed services, sensor drivers and

data acquisition tools, uses power cons. algo
 TinyDB - a query processing system extracting
information from a network of TinyOS sensors.

Adhoc Network in mote

 Each mote is a mobile node in a mobile adhoc
network
 Adhoc network means the device set the network
themselves and the network structure changes
through time.
Network setup arbitirily because motes autonomous
Network topology for WSM
Consists of at least N
slave motes and 1 master
motes
Pc mote collects and
gathers information and
compute the data to obtain
a required sensed signal.
Master mote synchronies
slave mote, gather
information sent by them
and compute on them to
Fig. communication among
produce particular motes
Contd.
Signal on pc.
 Slave mote---obtain particular data and transfer using
protocol stack when required by master mote
Applications of smart dust
 In transport domain
 Road sign recognition application
 smart dust broadcaster
 signals picked up
 driver aware of road sign ahead
poor visibility and bad weather
conditions
 Traffic light application
 Traffic light color and time remaining
on that color
Military application

 Monitoring activities in
inaccessible areas.
 Accompany soldiers.
 Enemy movement
 Alert to poisonous gas
and dangerous substance
in air
Fig. Smart dust in
battlefield
Factory Automation and chemical plant

 Motes installed at critical points to monitor condition

of essential equipment on a continuous basis, provide
critical data collection without human intervention.
 Computers will turnoff light and climatic control in
empty rooms.
 Air conditioners that cools servers automatically shut
off and turn on again the servers get too hot
 In chemical plant
corrosion detecting motes placed in pipes in plant,
accidental chemical release can be known
Agricultural sector
 Monitor air temperature across a vineyard, protect
crops from frost damage.
 Plant growth monitored.
 Monitor and capture soil pH and salinity levels.
 Monitor humidity and temperature to access freshness
of food in refrigerator.
Detecting fires in forest

 Drop a number of motes

in the forest
 In case of fire mote notices
temperature change in that
zone and through adhoc
network transmitted to
monitoring station of fire.
 Proper care can be taken to
extinguish fire when its
amount is small.
In medicine/biological research

 Monitor vital signs of elderly and

Circulatory Net
sick
 Placed throughout body monitor
health continuously
 Monitor tiny muscular
movements in patients
 Monitor movements and internal
process of insects
or small animals
microrobotics

 Add legs or wings

 Sense, think and
communicate

Crawling microrobot

Flying microrobot
Other applications include

 Habitat monitoring
 Environmental protection
 identification and monitoring pollution.
• can be use to pinpoint location of nonworking light,
out of thousands of street light
• As a virtual keyboard
 glue dust mote to each finger tips, accelerometer
senses orientation and motion of each finger and talks
to computer
Major challenges
 It is difficult to fit all these devices in a small smart
dust both size and energy wise.
 To incorporate all these functions while maintaining a
low power consumption.
 Maximizing operating life within limited volume of
energy storage.
 Complicated design and mechanism.
conclusion
 There are many ongoing researches on smart dust
mainly because of its limitless application, the main
purpose of this research is to make smart dust mote as
small as possible. it has theoretical application in
every field of science and industry. present achievable
size of smart dust in 5mm.costs have been dropping
rapidly with technological innovations with individual
mote at $50 each, with hopes of dropping $1 per mote
in near future.
References
 "Smart Dust: Communicating with a Cubic-
Millimeter Computer", Computer Magazine, Vol.
34, No. 1, pp 44-51, Jan. 2001
 Arief, B., Blythe, P., Fairchild, R., Selvarajah, K.,
and Tully, A. (2008). “Integrating Smartdust into
Intelligent Transportation System”, Presented at
10th Internationa Conference on Application of
Advanced Technologies in Transportation (AATT
2008), Athens, Greece, 27-31 May