[117673] in Cypherpunks
Smart Dust article ref in today's Slashdot.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Stewart)
Wed Sep 8 17:49:00 1999
Message-Id: <3.0.5.32.19990908135729.009b2cf0@idiom.com>
Date: Wed, 08 Sep 1999 13:57:29 -0700
To: cypherpunks@algebra.com
From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
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Reply-To: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
"The german Telepolis magazine from Heise put up a small
article about Kris Pister and Randy Katz creating small laser-driven
wireless communicating swarm-computing nano-devices called
MEMS. This is right out of a Neal Stevenson novel, The Diamond Age.
============================
http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/co/5269/1.html
Smart Dust
James Flint 07.09.1999
The particles of dust that could be watching you
The world's going all sci-fi on us again. Last month it was cloning and
biotech, now it's
super-surveillance technology. If you thought RSA and PGP had made all of
us safe from prying
eyes and ears, think again: those motes that just drifted in the window and
floated down through
the shards of sunlight cutting through your office - in a year or two those
might be particles of
Smart Dust, and they could be watching you.
Like something out of a Neil Stephenson novel, Smart Dust is the brainchild
of Associate
Professor Kris Pister and Professor Randy H. Katz, who are currently
working out of the University
of California, Berkeley. It relies on the convergence of three
technologies: digital circuitry,
laser-driven wireless communications, and something called MEMS (Micro
ElectroMechanical
Systems) to pack enough equipment into a space no more than one or two
cubic millimeters in size.
Intelligent motes
Already, Pister's team has managed to cram a
semiconductor laser diode and MEMS beam-steering
mirror for active optical transmission,
a MEMS corner-cube retroreflector for passive optical
transmission, an optical receiver, signal-processing and
control circuitry and a power source based
on thick-film batteries and solar cells into a mote
that's only five millimeters long, a length they are
confident that they can more than halve.
With clever power management techniques, each mote
should be able to stay active for several days.
The challenge is to ensure that motes distributed in a space
can communicate with each other and
with a base station called a base-station transceiver (BTS)
equipped with a compact imaging
sensor. This could be mounted in close proximity to the motes,
say in a wall-mounted camera, or
perhaps in a remote controlled aircraft or a pair of binoculars.
Using a passive light transmitter that
reflects back modulated light bouncing off it from an
external source - which has the advantage of
keeping energy requirements to the minimum -
a mote can send data at a rate of 1 kilobit a second
over distances of up to 150m. But communication distances
of over 20kms have also been
successfully tested, although bit rates drop off sharply.
It is not inconceivable that motes could be
fitted with minaturised microphones or tempest attack technology -
a tempest attack being an
attempt to detect the distinct electromagnetic signal a computer
gives out each time a key is
pressed, apparently a regular feature of FBI surveillance nowadays -
and used as almost undetectable spying devices.
Motes could be delivered to their destination by a fancy technology
like a miniature rocket or a
natural one as innocuous as a sycamore leaf.
Numerous civilian and military applications
Pister envisons 'numerous civilian and military applications
for Smart Dust. Smart Dust may be
deployed over a region to record data for meteorological,
geophysical or planetary research. It may
be employed to perform measurements in environments
where wired sensors are unusable or lead
to measurement errors... In biological research,
Smart Dust may be used to monitor the movements
and internal processes of insects or other small animals.
Considering the military arena, Smart Dust
may be deployed for stealthy monitoring of a hostile environment,
e.g. for for verification of treaty
compliance. [With] acoustic vibration or magnetic field sensors
[it] could detect the passage of
vehicles ... [it] could be used for perimeter survelliance,
or to detect the presence of chemical or
biological agents on the battlefield.'
Pister also thinks it's got a major role to play in the
wireless sensor networks that he predicts will
dominate the "post-PC era", soon to be upon us no doubt.
The guy who wired the White House
Good sales pitch, huh? But to achieve any of this Smart Dust
needs more than just minaturisation.
It also needs networking software powerful enough to enable
ensemble behaviour, preferably with emergent or 'swarm' characteristics.
That's where Pister's partner, Randy Katz, comes in. With an
impressive CV in major industry and military computing innovation
already behind him, Katz's most
recent research has focused on wireless communications,
mobile computing applications and collaboration technology.
He designed the network architecture for the Berkeley InfoPad Project
and in 1995 he was awarded a DARPA contract to develop a
wireless overlay internetworking architecture, making it possible to
integrate in-building and wide-area wireless data networks.
He is currently working with several companies, including
Daimler Benz, Ericsson (data over
cellular), Fuji Xerox, Hughes (direct broadcast satellite),
Hybrid Networks (wireless cable), and
Metricom (multi-hop packet radio),
to deploy this overlay technology in a Bay Area testbed. In
1996, he received additional DARPA funding to develop
room-sized collaboration technology. He
has won three best paper awards for his work in mobile computing
and collaboration technologies.
And get this: back 1993 he was the guy who wired the White House
and set up the first email
accounts for Clinton and Gore at Whitehouse.gov.
I'd advise investing in Smart Dust right now.
And buy a new vaccuum cleaner. It's going to be big.
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
