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Distributed sensor networks

posted by Zed on April 16 2002 08:09

I mentioned picoradio last week. This article offers more detail.

...the applications his group develops for the TinyOS are on the order of 24 bytes long. That's even shorter than this sentence. So it doesn't take long to teach each node something new.

[...] Still, it's absurdly inefficient to program each node individually. Instead, Culler introduces the equivalent of a computer virus into the network. As the nodes communicate, they infect their kin with the new operating instructions.

I found this article especially striking having just read "Fast Times at Fairmont High" in The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge in which such a network plays an important role.

The potential surveillance applications for this could get kind of scary.

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