I saw a nice post on dutchcowboys.nl (Dutch!) about smart dust. They talk about outdoor/outside options,while Roomware is sort of the same, but inside. It’s nothing more than a lot of wireless sensors sending and receiving data. For example: a mobile phone delivers the wireless communication and a person can be the sensor that gives the input to the phone and the upper network. Ok, not as small and high-tech as the researchers doing, but it’s a good start!

Check out the movie (Dutch spoken)

Another interesting question is “How do these systems communicate?” If you know something about wireless networks, you get problems when you create a large network using limited resources. This is the idea behind using smart dust. I just learned about gossip. Maybe you know about it. It’s just like real-life gossip. I hear or see something and I pass it on. After a while my message will get to a gateway where it will communicate with a computer interface. The nodes remember a set of messages, otherwise you would overflow the network with the same messages.

I was still thinking that message’s could get lost, but today a Dr. at the University of Amsterdam draw some statistics and that convinced me. It’s all about big numbers and your message will stay (somewhere) in the network.

A new of network thinking, more info, if you have a nice movie about gossip protocols, please post.

PS: next workshop I’ll bring some wireless sensor networks to show you guys around.